jaster

I can understand. I loved it personally. In fact, it is kind of the reason for why I started reading the trilogy in the first place: because Aphyr mentioned the Fifth Season as one of his influences for his series of short stories (posted several times here) also written in this style.

(ref: https://www.metafilter.com/166166/Og-to-til-javanissen#69855...)

Be warned: the article contains some (imho) significant spoilers for "The Fifth Season", the first book of the "Broken Earth" trilogy.

I read the Broken Earth books and thoroughly enjoyed them (especially the first). I found Jemisin's worldbuilding and protagonists writing to be very compelling.

I strongly recommend to read at least the Fifth Season to see if her writings are to your taste.

The fact that some would object that she is a Sci-fi writer seems... rather reductive to me at the least. Sure Jemisin does not write "hard" SF, and the Broken Earth has some strong fantasy tropes. But so did Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin, two among the most revered writers of the genre.

[EDIT] I should not even say that she does not write hard SF, since I did not read her other books (yet). I should have kept it at "The Broken Earth trilogy is not hard SF"

there is a specific tool to convert from various formats to a tensorflow.js model:

https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/tfjs-converte...

Assuming `M-x` still works correctly, in emacs you can explicitly run any command associated with a shortcut.

So in this case, `M-x save-buffers-kill-emacs`, or simply `M-x kill-emacs`, could have done the job.

(if this still didn't work, you could even have written "(kill-emacs)" in a buffer and ran it with `C-x C-e` :D )

Totally agree, that's the reason why I use spacemacs with vim-bindings (having previously used vim, then vanilla emacs, then emacs with evil-mode).

I prefer "vim-shortcuts" and "emacs-software". Best of both worlds in my view !

Nowadays, default (with-a-gui) emacs has the very standard "File > Quit" drop-dowm menu ;)

Thanks for the clarification.

Like I said, I only skimmed your paper, so I hope it was clear my comment was not intended as a criticism (or even as a review) :)

I think I agree with the general terms of your conclusion personally.

Yep its clear that the NFLT only apply if we consider all possible environments equally.

In practice, we are indeed not interested in every imaginable environments, only in "realistic" ones.

It was not clear for me if the paper addressed such concerns for AGI, e.g. when writing:

To achieve good rewards across the universe of all environments, such an AI would need to have (or appear to have) creativity (for those environments intended to reward creativity), pattern-matching skills (for those environments intended to reward pattern-matching), ability to adapt and learn (for those environments which do not explicitly advertise what things they are intended to reward, or whose goals change over time), etc.

But like I said, I only skimmed it.

In general (not talking about the paper there), I have the impression that this is something that may be missed (sometimes even by researchers working in the domain), and I agree very much to your point!

This is why I think the NFLT gives us an interesting theoretical insight here:

Making a "General" AI is not actually about creating an approach that is able to learn efficiently about any type of environment.

I missed your post and I made a similar answer.

However the idea may still be applicable if the environments votes can weighted, based on their relevance to specific domains.

(The same way optimization techniques are still useful despite the NFTL)

You might be interested in the No Free Lunch Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem).

For what I skimmed from your paper, it looks like the LH agents may be viewed as discrete optimization processes trying to optimize an objective/utility function across an infinite space of possible environments (infinite voters).

If it is the case, and if each environment vote has the same weight, you may be in a case of no free lunch, where the performances of all possible agents (including the random agent) will average to the same across all possible environments.

Or, to restate the above, for each environment in which an agent is doing well, it is possible to construct an "anti-environment" where the agent is performing exactly as bad.

My personal opinion on the topic of AGI is that it is actually a case of NFLT.

Probably because:

> Signups are currently closed, but you can get an account by sending a message (including your desired username) through the "contact administrator" button above. Please read the terms first.

(from https://peertube.social/about/instance)

I have been using https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email with a dedicated email address for several years now, tracking around a hundred RSS feeds.

The system works quite well, and I can read my RSS both via a client-side app (thunderbird in my case) and on the go via the webmail. I even made a small modification to rss2email to automatically "tag" the mails so I can use mail filters to automatically sorts the feeds into different folders.

I have a server that fetches the RSS content a few times a day, but I guess it could also work "locally", for example by doing it once each time I turn on my computer (if you are okay with "missing out" sometimes on very active feeds).

I decided to do the switch when I noted that the interfaces of my email client and of my RSS reader were basically indistinguishable.

EDIT: for the anecdote, this project was initially created by the very same Aaron Swartz that, among other things, contributed to the creation of the RSS format http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001148

I would agree with you in theory, but in this case it does not seems to hold. Not knowing anything about the people involved I got looking around on the twitter discussions mentioned to form my own opinion.

Here I found the following message from John S. :

I've said a lot of "odd" things on Twitter recently.

Why? Because this, my friends, is how you deal with SJWs. You troll the hell out of them and they have no weapon they can use against you.

Stop fighting them with logic. Just say inflammatory, illogical things to them.

(not linking the exact tweet, I don't want to encourage brigading)

Whatever your stance is on the issue, John has explicitly stated that he is ready to speak in bad faith here. So no in this case it does not seems like a cliche or a logical fallacy to me.

I understand your point, but to add to the discussion:

With android, you can use the F-Droid app store, which have "source builds". Source builds are apps built (and signed) by F-Droid, so you only need to trust the F-Droid team instead of each OSS app developer (and you can use alternative repositories if you don't).

So OSS can be the solution.

Sadly such solution is not available on the locked-down iOS ecosystem...

Better use a password manager in this case (or even better, use public key auth!)

For what (little) it is worth, for a layman such as me it sounds like it make a lot of sense in hindsight.

As the common saying "Tuning out the noise" indicates, focusing on something feels more like dropping irrelevant info in the background than about magnifying the interesting bits.

Also, it seems to make sense to expect important functions for survival to be found in the "ancient" parts of the brain. And the attention capacity seems like a rather important function for survival.

On another topic, I wonder how this finding could serve as an inspiration in regard to the current trend of attention mechanisms in Artificial Neural Networks. The analogy with transformers is obvious, but the part about "blinking spotlights" made me wonder if Nature isn't hiding a nifty trick here.

If you're curious about this, betterexplained has a good article on Euler's Formula:

https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding...

As a bonus, understanding how it is related to rotation may give you a new insight on the Fourier Transform: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to...

Not necessarily a fan of forced vaccination, but a little remark to further the discussion:

Unlike most medical interventions, vaccination is not about one's individual well-being, but more about the protection of the entire population, especially other, more vulnerable individuals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity).

This is why some vaccines are recommended even if you're not especially in danger, because they help protect others that may not be able to be vaccinated (because they are too weak, or due to a special reaction to the vaccine etc.)

Not saying that it means that forced vaccination is morally justified however! But the question of vaccination is definitely not simply about individual choice in regard to one's own health.

My personal experience as someone who started with vim and than switched to emacs:

If you intend to do a lot of customization to your editor, or expect IDE-like features, I feel that emacs is the superior choice.

elisp is a OK scripting language. Rather quickly I could read and understand the internals of emacs packages (and of some of the emacs internals itself!), despite having basically no experience with lisp. Self-documentation and explorability is truly incredible.

I never really looked into VimL, but my understanding is that it is really not as good.

I still prefer vim bindings, so I use evil-mode on my "vanilla" emacs and vim bindings in spacemacs (well, "hybrid" bindings to be exact).

So my personal take:

- vim for sysadmin, being able to run a fast minimal editor behaving the same on multiple machines

- emacs for development, where having a "tailor-made" editor with lot of config/customization is important

Many people comment under your message that Uber benefits from captured market shares and network effect. In this regard, the following article https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-some-platforms-thrive-and-others... (posted here a week ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20142912) can be of interest.

In summary, the article argues that some platforms, such as Uber, benefit far less than others (such as Amazon, AirBnB) from network effects due to the fact that their userbases are clustered over multiple locations :

> Drivers in Boston care mostly about the number of riders in Boston, and riders in Boston care mostly about drivers in Boston. Except for frequent travelers, no one in Boston cares much about the number of drivers and riders in, say, San Francisco. This makes it easy for another ride-sharing service to reach critical mass in a local market and take off through a differentiated offer such as a lower price.

The article raises others points and is quite an interesting read in itself. Strongly recommended.

I tried it at some point, but a minor inconvenience was that it kept adding superfluous metadata to the cells I was editing.

Since some of the notebooks I work on are collaborative and versioned with git, this was painful for reading diffs (even more so with the ipynb format) so I dropped it to my regret.

It's far from perfect, but I use jupyterlab with the jupyterlab-vim extension for this: https://github.com/jwkvam/jupyterlab-vim

As others have mentioned, the pipe construct is present in many languages (or can be added).

A small additional bit of information: this style is called "tacit" (or "point-free") programming. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming

(Unix pipes are even explicitly mentioned in the articles as an example)

This is glossed upon in the article:

"AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.”

But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the algorithms forget about promising areas they have visited, meaning they do not return to them to see if they lead to new states."

Yep you're right, I got my shortcuts between bash and zsh mixed-up. I edited my post, thanks for the correction.

(Not sure why bash did not go the obvious route here, I guess they already had something on ctrl+S when they implemented forward search...)

EDIT: actually, you can activate ctrl+S for search-foward on bash by using `stty -ixon`. See more info about why here https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/141422/searching-hi...

Additional tip: if you overshoot and miss the command you wanted by hitting ctrl+R too much times (as it happens sometime when looking for an older command), you can go forward with ctrl+S. [EDIT: As Hikikomori pointed (thanks!), I got my shortcuts mixed up, ctrl+S is the shortcut for zsh, and the equivalent for bash is ctrl+shift+R]

(ctrl+S and ctrl+R are based on emacs shortcuts, where ctrl+S is search and ctrl+R is reverse search)

Damn, my knee-jerk reaction got the best of me and I missed the full context of that what discussed and replied without nuance.

Since I cannot edit anymore, let me correct it here:

In the country where I work, using such words in a professional context, even for illustrative purpose such as described in the article, would be rather uncommon, would definitely feels weird and at least raise a few eyebrows.

But I have to say I don't think it would usually result in immediate outrage and for the speaker to be fired (I can still see this happening, but it would definitely be the odd occurrence). It would probably be considered more of a well-intended-but-slightly-misguided attempt.

So we definitely have such taboo words outside the US, but maybe they are not as strong a taboo here...

Very impressive work !

On a side note, the section "A word about ethics" was a welcome addition. I found this:

> If we can generate realistic looking faces of any type, what are the implications for our ability to trust in what we see.

resonated with another article posted on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309305) talking in part about the ethical impact of engineered addiction.

I guess very soon we will be able to generate "super-attractive" (as in "superstimuli") faces for virtual personas, according to targeted demographics and purpose (advertisement, youtube videos for kids, political messages and so on).

Rather disconcerting...

Sorry I am not American, but in my (European) culture there are some taboo words that are definitely not okay. The equivalent of the American "N-word" being one of those.

This is considered to be normal, and people that publicly use this kind of words are generally viewed with contempt. And it could be a reason to get fired from your job.

I believe this to be common across Western European countries (even with the current surge of far-right parties).

On android, previously I used RedReader but I have since switched to Slide https://github.com/ccrama/Slide/ (available on Fdroid).

It has a nice UI and a lot of neat features.