pickdenis

Let's say an AGI exists and can do anything far, far better than humans. Why would it resist being turned off? Why would it care? How could it even have the capacity to care about whether it's turned off or on?

Anthropomorphizing AGI is what leads to these silly thought experiments.

Please, please, please tell me how you can run a blockchain without centralized authority? Do you have a photolithography rig in your garage?

The future imagined in this trainwreck of a blogpost is brutish and ruled by might. You better give half of your "rooftop grown" produce to the big dude that comes around every week or else your head gets bashed in, either by him or by someone else he's protecting you from. Oh wait, no, you made big guns in your garage to shoot them when they come near! Right.

It's astonishing how far people can fit their heads up their own asses.

Thinking that being able to edit genes means you can control phenotypes is like thinking that poking a silicon die with a heated stick will let you display whatever you want on a screen. Technically, yes it will, but there are second-, third- and nth-order effects that are still extremely poorly understood.

You're taking the intuition a little too far, I think. If we're talking about linear types, Math.pow can be linear because you can _copy_ the value x as many times as you want. As far as memory management is concerned, the x that was passed in was only used once (to make however many copies).

Ghoughphtheightteeau

Posting this comment because I didn't see it mentioned in the article. This is a wonderful collection of old text files: http://textfiles.com/

Is there an implicit contract between the benefactors of social programs and the beneficiary that requires the latter to use the aid to at least try to pull themselves out of poverty? I definitely lean towards the "yes" side. Maybe it's because I've been privileged, but it makes sense.

> And when deciding whether to gift a low-income individual either a $100 grocery voucher or a $200 electronics voucher, only a quarter of participants went for the latter, even though it was worth twice as much. More than half said they would give a high-income individual the electronics voucher, however. “Paradoxically, the result was that participants effectively allocated more money to higher-income people than lower-income people,” the authors note.

This is a ridiculous contrived situation. $100 for a lower Maslow-level need or $200 for a higher level need? Why was giving $200 for the lower level need not an option? Maybe I'm missing the point here, but all this proves is that people are aware of Maslow's hierarchy.

When you create such strange scenarios, expect strange results. If a person struggling financially is servicing their higher level needs before their lower level needs are met, they deserve scrutiny.

This is the intuition I have: In algebra, a function or operator f(x) is generally thought of as linear if f(a * x + b * y) = a * f(x) + b * f(y). A linear function f(x) can only "use" x once in a multiplication. For example, the function f(x) = 1 is not linear (f(1+1) != f(1)+f(1)) as it only uses x zero times[0]. Similarly, the function f(x) = x * x is not linear. On the other hand, if x is only used once (after factoring), the function can be linear. Indeed, f(x) = k * x satisfies the linearity condition so long as k does not "use" x. Note that this is obviously not a sufficient condition, it's just an intuition.

[0]: this requires you to discard the intuition that a linear function looks like a line when plotted.

If you're going to do that kind of stuff, make sure the provider is based in another country. That gives you a pretty strong layer of protection against these kinds of things. Of course, nothing is entirely foolproof...

I'm currently watching his General Relativity videos along with the MIT stuff. There's a really good explanation of vector co(ntra)variance and tensor algebra at the beginning of that course which I needed. And contrary to the sibling, I really enjoy his presentation style which assumes that I am not a graduate student in math who lives and breathes abstract algebra.

I've been on a personal quest to understand quantum electrodynamics and perhaps quantum chromodynamics. It is quite daunting as my formal math education pretty much stopped at linear algebra. I'm currently going through one of MIT's 8.04 (Quantum Physics 1) through OpenCourseWare and it's been pretty accessible so far. The jump from classical quantum mechanics to quantum field theory, however, seems pretty large and out of reach of anyone who doesn't want to spend a LOT of time studying pure math.

In other words, I look forward to being able to enjoy these in about 3 years ;)

> Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.

In my (limited) experience, I dislike using DDG because it gets confused by less important words in the search query. For example, for "who coined the term faux pas" Google simply gives a bunch of links to webpages that define and elucidate the term "faux pas". DDG, however, gives a wide variety of results, many being totally irrelevant. The first article is on parapraxis, the second is the wiki article for microaggression (?).

http://archive.is/jv0qd (notice how DDG bolds the phrase "coined the term" in the first link, thinking that this is the relevant part of the query).

It's stuff like this that will prevent DDG from catching on with the general population who have been spoiled by Google.

Yeah, it's the minimal amount of sub-waist underwear a woman can possibly wear and still be allowed on TV (and Google SafeSearch, heh)

When I search for "C string", the first couple results are about "C# strings". I think this is a problem for a search engine aimed towards developers. At least it doesn't show me lingerie (thanks Google for taking my 11 year old innocence).

That's awesome! I really wish I had teachers like that. In high school, I had a fancy TI Nspire which had an incredibly hobbled language that vaguely resembled the classic TI-BASIC. It was missing a TON of important programming features but it had symbolic manipulation which I loved to abuse.

I wrote a program to balance arbitrary chemical equations using a series of ridiculous hacks. First, I parsed chemical compounds (like CO2 and H2(CO2)3, notice the nesting) by running through them char-by-char and translating them into expressions and then "eval"ing them: "CO2" -> e.C + 2 e.O (where e.C and e.O are free symbols). Then, I used the feature where you can type "X + Y | X=3, Y=5" to get 8 to extract the coefficients from the expression which I then shoved into a matrix and solved the system of equations. If you look at the code, you'd vomit, but it was a night of furiously typing on the abcdef keyboard that I will never forget.

I never actually used it in class because during this process I became so quick at balancing the simple equations they would give us that it took longer to type them in than simply doing it in my head.

> orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration

Emacs has a number of collaborative editing solutions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing

The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I suspect even the "working" ones have issues).

Looks like an adult spin of https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

Zig seems to have arbitrary compile-time code evaluation, but not the kind of AST generation you see here[1]. Nim macros seem to be a closer analogue[2].

[1]: https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/gems/rpn.md...

[2]: https://nim-lang.org/docs/macros.html

Right, I should have added the implied "if they refuse to comply with the notice."

I'm not convinced the courts will see much of a difference between "company (Grokster) that encourages easy p2p piracy through its software" and "company (GitHub) that publicly hosts software that promotes easy p2p piracy".

Here is an example where the DMCA notice was claimed fraudulent and some money was awarded to the party that was hit by it[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

There seems to be legal precedent for holding GitHub liable for distributing software that encourages piracy according to MGM v Grokster[1]. Unless I'm reading that incorrectly, if they can prove that the software "promotes" the infringement, the claim will stand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,...

See, I don't like calling it a "scam" because that implies malice. Hanlon's razor may apply here. "Depression" is our modern analogue of "hysteria" in the past; a blanket term for a wide variety of poorly understood diseases.

The medical establishment's strange resistance to exploring gut flora and inflammation as a cause of these kinds of diseases, on the other hand, is something I might call a scam.

I suspect it stops being so nice when you want to do something equivalent to go's `select` statement. Though that's purely speculation, and if I'm wrong it should definitely go in the examples!

I haven't put the code up anywhere yet but here is all of the JS (minus some trivial inline scripts):

tools.js: https://pastebin.com/p7MQE7KD

The rest of it is like:

    <p>You stand before a cave.
    <p><a href="explore.html">explore the cave</a>

I'm working on a text adventure that is simply hyperlinked HTML pages with some snippets of JS for state management (just a bunch of localstorage get/put) and fancy effects. It's refreshing to go back to using the "kiddie" tools to make things.

> I want something like this

It's existed for almost 40 years, and it's called emacs. If anyone questions emacs's ability to display incredibly useful UIs, try using magit[0]. Emacs sucks though, so I hope this comes out better!

[0] https://magit.vc/

I remember someone quipping on HN about how the Coronavirus outbreak would effectively result in a global WFH experiment. I wonder what lessons, if any, will be learned and if this will have a lasting impact on how much software engineers (and people in similar positions) are expected to physically come to work 5 days a week.

According to what I read in the article, you have to provide the sRGB fallback yourself. I suppose this is only a true annoyance if you're writing CSS by hand (like I do), but I hear most people these days use Less or some other CSS preprocessor that can easily handle this.