gooseus

I think Dickens and Elliot are somewhat right and Orwell even demonstrates it in Animal Farm... there was a "public-spirited pig" bending the revolution toward fairness and decency, but it only took one other pig with a monopoly on physical force to overthrow him in an instant. Without "good people", human nature will corrupt any system.

It's the structure of the political and legal systems that really determine how well and fairly those resources are distributed. If you have a political system without checks and balances writing laws, and/or a legal system that does not apply the law equally to all its citizens, then you're going to have a bad time, no matter the economic system you use.

While GWB overthrowing an authoritarian government in Iraq on a lie is really bad, it does not rise to the level of overthrowing a liberal democracy in America on a lie. Yes, both were lies, but Bush barely had to lie at all to get the Congress to go along with it and one could make the case that he believed the lie himself. Not so with Trump, as the indictment makes clear.

If you read the Mueller Report it's also clear the the "Russiagate" wasn't a hoax and this argument that the "Democrats had their chance to hit Trump" as if the fact that the impeachments clearly failed on a partisan basis and Barr misrepresented the findings in the Mueller Report, which were damning and would have been worth an indictment if not for the fact of Trump being the sitting President at the time.

If you hate the American system and think the current liberal democracy deserves to be destroyed (for whatever reason) then you can just say so without pretending that Trump isn't a uniquely malignant liar beyond precedent.

Read the latest indictment[1] and then find me another politician who has lied at anything approaching the scale and seriousness of Trump and his co-conspirators.

At this point, in light of all of this evidence comprehensively laid out in relatively plain English, supporting or minimize what Trump has done (and attempted to do) is an admission of extreme ignorance, or malice.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/8a7503af-fde7-4061-...

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: Prefer hybrid, but available for full remote

Willing to relocate: Unlikely

Technologies:

- Languages: Typescript (Javascript), Nim, PHP, Python, R

- Frameworks: Angular, React, NestJS, ExpressJS

- Services: MongoDB, Postgres, Redis, Neo4J, Docker, k8, Kafka, Camunda, OPA

- Platforms: AWS, GCP, Salesforce, Office 365

Resume: https://goose.us/resume/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-marincas/

I'm a generalist with 20 years of professional experience covering more technologies than would make sense to list above, working most recently in a solution architect role. I'm actively seeking full-time employment in the NYC area, though I'm open to fully remote opportunities as well.

I work well with product and business stakeholders as a Solution Architect to define their problem with enough requirements and constraints to narrow the possible solution space to a set of best viable options. I also work well with implementation teams as a Senior Engineer to help properly implement a chosen solution, while still doing a fair bit of implementation myself.

I have many personal/academic interests that augment my professional experience pretty well, such as studying AI/ML in a Systems Science graduate program working on an explainable ML approach similar to log-linear models called "reconstructability analysis". I'd love to hear from any AI/ML companies that are looking to tackle the problem of AI explainability.

Anyone interested in speaking can reach me over LinkedIn or schedule a meeting via the Calendly link on my Resume page. Email and phone can be provided on request.

Title isn't accurate, this seems to be a link to all of Mark Watson's older books: including books on Lisp, Haskell, Java, and personal stories.

Looks like this PR from a couple months ago was him moving a bunch of older books from his personal website into this repo: https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software...

"Pokemon FireRed completed without visuals or audio."

That's the first sentence of the video description, seems more accurate and neutral.

I say that "knowing" is very much a group activity, in fact, it's the only way one can even approach certainly that what one "knows" isn't just a hallucination or a dream.

We can only "know" by verifying that what we experience is consistent with the experience of others, this is the essence of repeatable scientific experimentation and peer-review in science... which is the group effort of improving the extent and accuracy of what we know, as a group.

You can argue for solipsism if that's what you want, but you ought to know you'll only be arguing with yourself.

I agree to some extent, though I think the trade-off of sending lots of messages into space is lower than sending "seeds of life".

A message has encoded information that can communicate something we're trying to express to another life form, but what is that? How will they respond and what will that response be?

Much of the point of sending a message to other life is to find other life that can respond to us... but if we can't manage to make ourselves sustainable then a response may reach us too late for it to matter, I pessimistically think this is a very likely scenario.

Sending out millions/billions of seeds, and targeting worlds where we believe we'd arrive at an early-ish period of planetary development, we could potentially jump-start the evolution of life on multiple worlds. Perhaps these worlds develop their own intelligent life, or maybe it becomes a world filled with non-intelligent biodiversity with billions of new species with millions of new physical and chemical innovations that a future intelligent race (maybe even humans, assuming my pessimism is misplaced) could learn from.

Long post and having only skimmed it for now, I think I mostly agree... though I don't think I could ever call myself a nihilist.

The last section captures what I've tried to say in my own (not currently online) writing on the subject of life, existence, and purpose/meaning.

> As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved.

This is where I end up in a lot of my own musings on the subject. Another point I typically make is that we KNOW that the immense diversity and complexity that exists on Earth will end in the future, unless some intelligence is able to spread life outside of Earth.

Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth.

We could be parallelizing the process of life across worlds and creating potential for other interesting life to evolve to solve the unique problems of other parts of the universe. By spreading life from Earth, we also increase the likelihood that future intelligence could find evidence of our (and each others) existence, which would be _very_ interesting (for them), and could help them get through the difficulties we face now.

I'm not sure how you resolve the opening of "we're just here to fart around / dance" nihilism with what you mention at the end about how Earth, life, and humans being the most complex and interesting thing going in the universe, but I like the style/format, and I'm definitely going to give this a longer read later. Thanks for sharing!

My guess would be PR and myth-building for Elon, et al

I think you can enjoy some potato chips and some short videos, but I have my doubts about how many you can consume in a row while maintaining enjoyment.

My experience is that the enjoyment one feels with the first few bites quickly transforms from seeking the pleasure of continuing, into avoiding the pain of stopping.

Reasonable people can disagree and my phrasing was probably a bit over-seasoned, but neither side has a rigorous proof regarding AI or human intelligence.

If nobody understands how an LLM is able to achieve it's current level of intelligence, how is anyone so sure that this intelligence is definitely going to increase exponentially until it's better than a human?

There are real existential threats that we know are definitely going to happen one day (meteor, supervolcano, etc), and I believe that treating AGI like it is the same class of "not if; but when" is categorically wrong, furthermore, I think that many of the people leading the effort to frame it this way are doing so out of self-interest, rather than public concern.

"What if" is all these "existential risk" conversations ever are.

Where is your evidence that we're approaching human level AGI, let alone SuperIntelligence? Because ChatGPT can (sometimes) approximate sophisticated conversation and deep knowledge?

How about some evidence that ChatGPT isn't even close? Just clone and run OpenAI's own evals repo https://github.com/openai/evals on the GPT-4 API.

It performs terribly on novel logic puzzles and exercises that a clever child could learn to do in an afternoon (there are some good chess evals, and I submitted one asking it to simulate a Forth machine).

Not if the "secret sauce" is actually a natural limit to what levels of intelligence can be reached with the current architectures we're exploring.

It could be theoretically possible to build an AGI smarter than a human, but is it really plausible if it turns out to need a data center the size of the Hadron Collider and the energy of a small country to maintain itself?

It could be that it turns out the only architecture we can find that is equal to the task (and feasibly produced) is the human brain, and instead the hard part of making super-intelligence is bootstrapping that human brain and training it to be more intel?

Maybe the best way to solve the "alignment problem", and other issues of creating super-intelligence, is to solve the problem of how best to raise and educate intelligent and well-adjusted humans?

We'll get these cool things either way, no need to bundle them with the supernatural mumbo-jumbo, imo.

My take is that every advancement in these highly complex and expensive fields is dependent on our ability to maintain global social, political, and economic stability.

This insistence on the importance of Super-Intelligence and AGI as the path to Paradise or Hell is one of the many brain-worms going around that have this "Revelation" structure that makes pragmatic discussions very difficult, and in turn actually makes it harder to maintain social, political, and economic stability.

Fun student project, but let's say you do spend millions of dollars on R&D to get this into production and released into the wild to target lantern flies eggs.

* What percentage of eggs in a given area is it expected find and destroy? If it's anything less than ~100% then you are guaranteeing that within a few generations (years) you will be dealing with a population of lantern flies naturally selected for traits that thwart this robot predators hunting strategies.

* Taking the cost of R&D, production, deployment, and operation of the first generation, how much economic damage was mitigated before this generation of robot becomes ineffective and needs to be "evolved" to deal with this newer generation of lantern flies?

Imo, human beings can't compete in the game of Life with these kinds of strategies and we'd be better off selectively breeding and/or genetically engineering existing predators to preferentially target lantern flies and their egg sacks, instead of building fully autonomous robot predators from scratch.

You haven't been able to look at anything but the /explore endpoint for weeks without an account, and the "content" on there has been total garbage.

I was relieved when they started asking for an account this week because now I'll finally be able to break my habit of navigating to Twitter to "see what's happening" only to find a bunch of sports memes, pop music drama, or right-wing trolls pretending like Hunter Biden is the most nefarious person on the planet.

Imo, Elon is lying and he locked everything down for PR so he would make a headline and frame it like his site's content is _so valuable_ that he just had to take drastic measures to stop AI from training on it.

Very cool. Does need to be updated since the deepest discovered shipwreck is no longer the USS Johnston[1] as of 2022.

> The wreck of Samuel B. Roberts lies at a depth of 6,895 meters (22,621 ft; 4.284 mi), making her the deepest known shipwreck and the deepest shipwreck ever identified by a crewed submersible. It exceeds the previous record of 6,469 meters (21,224 ft; 4.020 mi), set in March 2021 when Vescovo's team found and identified the wreck of the destroyer USS Johnston, which was sunk in the same battle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Samuel_B._Roberts_(DE-413)...

As others have noted, geothermal vents could provide a place for life to get started, as it is thought to have occurred here.

One thing that I think is important to consider is that what is really needed is an energy gradient which can be leveraged to do the work of creating all the different kinds of compounds one would need to produce something we'd call "alive".

I think the other article from quanta about "assembly theory"[1] is a good one to consider in this context. What would be the "Assembly Contingent" of a world like Europa or these other moons?

My guess would be that there might be enough material and energy potential to allow pathways to bacteria analogues (not that these def exist, but they're possible), but not nearly enough to support the variation and specialization required to reach multi-cellular life.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-theory-for-the-assembly...

I feel compelled to write this though it's only tangentially relevant to the article and is an adaptation of Taleb's story of stock-picking monkeys[1] from either Fooled by Randomness or The Black Swan:

Say you have an email list of 100000 investors, you ask ChatGPT to produce 100000 predictions and send these out to each investor.

Assuming ChatGPT is as good as a coin flip, 50000 investors receive good predictions. The next week you have ChatGPT produce 50000 predictions and send them out to those winners, you now have 25000 who have gotten two good predictions.

Rinse and repeat four more times and congratulations, you now have a client list of over 1500 people who have received six weeks of good predictions and are ready for you to manage all of their wealth using these insanely accurate AI predictions.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/a...

Does it though? If I'm hurtling toward a slow death at the hands of a deadly infection, that doesn't necessarily imply that my immune system isn't actively fighting off deadly infections every day... instead it can imply that my ability to prevent these infections from disrupting my health is degrading rapidly.

I'd say that LLMs are a different way of organizing the world's information through a kind of lossy compression into enormous probability distributions that can approximate the original information with enough fidelity to be useful for a lot of low-stakes applications.

I've gotten good results from asking ChatGPT to give me Xstate representations of machines that I describe, very cool to copy-paste* into the visualizer as a starting point.

* Only issue is that with so much active development since the training cut-off it usually outputs deprecated structure / patterns.

OpenAI has been collecting a ton of evals here https://github.com/openai/evals with many of them including some comments about how well GPT-4 does vs GPT-3.5.

You could clone that repo, adapt the oaieval script to run against different APIs, then run the evals against both and compare the results.

Yes, history remembers well the efforts of those people, and their results.

And if you define who counts as "workers" and who the "owners" are just so, you can also add "fascist" to the list of people who advocate for a similar system (national socialists).

It's almost as if rhetoric that promises "workers" a way to take back the fruits of their labor from evil "owners" is a really great way for populist demagogues (on either side) to whip up a Revolution that installs a new groups of oligarchs as a central Party apparatus that effectively owns everything... on behalf of the Workers, of course.

If anything terrifies me about our current moment in AI, it's this impulse to dehumanize actual living people as a way of defending AI from entirely valid criticism.

Sure, people suck and lots of them are immoral and stupid... but they're still human beings who could have been otherwise (counterfactual thinking and all that) given a different "training set" (upbringing).

Unless you're implying that some percentage of human beings are incapable (like ChatGPT) of acquiring a morality or rational scientific understanding, no matter their training?

My "relatively" qualifier does a lot of work... relative to projects like rebuilding transmissions or doing hobby robotics, I think adding a few bluetooth/wifi enabled sensors and a bit of logic to toggle a light is pretty simple.

And yeah, that's what I mean by doing your own design engineering... are you actually going to solve for that "once in a year" case? Or do you just use a switch to toggle to "normal mode" for when you want to take that long bath?

I don't have any kind of platonic ideal for what a "smart bathroom" might be, I just like thinking through the design/engineering possibilities.

I thought the same thing, but if we're talking about building our own smart home, I assume the solution for that would be relatively simple?

For instance, add a pressure sensor under the bathmat (or seat) in front of the toilet so that the turn-off timer doesn't run while it senses pressure. Alternatively, maybe infrared heat sensor or CO2 sensor to detect presence of living mammals in the room. But both of these approaches can be messed up by your cat/dog spending all day/night laying on the bathroom mat keeping the lights on.

The cool thing about building your own smart home is you can design system to do anything on any kind of assumption. The bad part is you're turning your home into an test of your engineering design prowess, and most part-time novices aren't going to be super happy with how they score... especially if their score ends up being an input to their home valuation.

Unfortunately it doesn't matter, the market has decided that a company led by a person like this is worth many multiples of a similar company led by a regular person who would never consider doing something like this.

Yes, I'm still on the waitlist, but am looking forward to gaining access.

It has been a rare day in the last couple months where I haven't found some useful way of applying it.

Just last night I was showing a friend who works in AutoCAD how he can ask ChatGPT to help him automate calculations in his drawing (get perimeter/area of a polyline). ChatGPT started spitting out AutoLISP and answering questions questions about how to get it running on his system and his mind was blown.

We didn't verify that the code would run, but my buddy hadn't even considered the possibility since he doesn't code. But now he has a starting point to hack on, and with a combination of more ChatGPT prompts and Google searches, I'm confident he'll be well on his way.

Considering what I pay to have a decent meal or good time in NYC, $20/mo is a bargain for unrestricted access to such a tool. I'm also hoping ChatGPT+ users will get early access to things like the official API.