filipezf

Long before this Matt video, I've done just that. A generator of devilish no-image jigsaw puzzles :-) which I indeed wanted to do a little Show HN someday. I made a small python script call a SAT solver to create a MxN puzzle with only 1 solution but only a few jig shapes, so maaany 'almost solutions'. Then I laser cut a plastic board and made it real, and gave one copy to a friend. At least a nice use of SAT solvers that is more efficient than Matts brute force approach.

Tm. I checked that it seems to be non-toxic, and don't corrode as much as the siblings. The issue is that its melting and boiling point are very near.

I have a cute somewhat related story. I wanted to make really unique rings, so I decided to make them from some random metal from the forgotten realms of the periodic table.

I asked for a site that sells many rings of many different metals, with no luck. THIS metal, it turns out, is really difficult to cast. After many months with the idea shelved, one day my girlfriend found some chinese company that managed to do them. US$ 2k rings, and ugly as hell... but at least unique!

The girlfriend soon left me, but, well at least I still had the rings... until a few weeks ago when I noticed that I lost them too. C'est la vie :-)

As a sibling comment put, the Scott Aaronson post has lots of interesting questions about this. Do the aliens who are watching us being simulated inside matrix think we are actually conscious? What if they freeze the program for 100 years, or run the computation encrypted, or if the 'computer' is just a human inside a room shuffling papers? Is the computer simulation of a water drop wet ?

I found this article [0] very insightful, where they basically propose that consciousness is relative to whom you ask. We inside the simulation may attribute consciousness to each other. The aliens running it may not. What is relevant is the degree of isomorphism between our simulated brain processes and their real ones. So things will advance from all these back-and-forth nebulous arguments only when neuroscience becomes able to explain mechanistically why people claim to be conscious.

[0] A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

I've been working on computatioinal modelling consciousness and came to similar conclusions: there is a continuum between patterns of matter that have consciousness (humans and other animals, maybe a biological enough computer, etc) which leads to all sorts of crazy stuff being possible. Evolved human ethics and feelings of care are incompatible with these amorphous extended possibilities. It can lead to some ultimate copernican revlolution that ends human exceptionalism, to outlaw consciousness tinkering (for how long?), or to put our heads into sand.

I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.

There was this numerical calculus class at Uni where the teacher forbid us to use the calculator. So I just programmed the integral on it, got the partial steps, and just wrote random numbers to fill the the substeps. Got full grade :D The other case everybody got to pass the class, but after vacation we found the stack of exams completely untouched under a desk. The teacher had a side business to run...

I've thought a lot about exactly these limits to AI. The reliability problem will be solved sooner or later. Same for tacit skills that somebody trains into AI (manage people, do laundry). But if your job is specifically about being human ("nostalgic jobs", judge, athlete, surrogate mother...), or some niche tightly guarded ability (how to breed some special spice, how many oil barrels ship thru Suez Channel), you are safe - until some unforseeable rearrangement of the economy, at least.

That's funny, because I'm a PAID subscriber to The Economist, and on opening the page, there is a big ad banner on the top and other on the right, filling more than half the space. (I don't bother using adblockers,though). Newspapers have always shown ads even for paying consumers. As the very article ends with: "Users who pay to block ads in some areas are still likely to find them popping up in new ones."

I was thinking on buying/building one robot like this to experiment. Can one fit more than one manipulator on it (so it could more easily do things like hang out clothes, or hold a glass of water and add ice)? More generally, how does the AI model would adapt to diverse robot morphologies?

I have for some time planning to do a 'Wikipedia for AI' (even bought a domain), where people could contribute all sorts of these skills ( not only 3d video, but also manual skills, or anything). Given the current climate of 'AI will save/doom us', and that users would in some sense be training their own replacements, I don't know how much love such site would have, though.

Why not allow the players to 'create' new cards on the fly and the LLM balance it automatically? So that one would feel like an 'real' wizard. Curiousy I was thinking on how to actually implement something like that tonight.

I did a little python script some time ago to solve just problems like this. It is meant to be more educative than fast, though, and doesn't handle non-right angles (like pytaghorean triangles). It turns out that eliminating duplicates is a little tricky: https://github.com/filipezf/BrickEnumeration/blob/main/brick...