rfugger

Any political voting system will need a trusted third party to run the voter registration/identity system, so I doubt the lack of practical homomorphic encryption is blocking this. There are other voter-verifiable systems that don't rely on HE for trustworthy counting:

https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil...

The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against their wishes outside the watchful eye of election authorities. This may be worth the increase in voting ease, but it's where the real debate is.

We evolved living in relatively small groups where everyone knew each other and exclusion from the group meant likely death. Now we are part of a global social web where at any time, any of our people may be occupied by other parts of their network that do not involve us. This risk of being abandoned instinctively feels like an existential threat, so we live with a constant underlying anxiety that we do not truly belong and are not really safe. It will be interesting to see whether this reality selects for individuals better equipped to cope with it, or whether we develop better systems to allow everyone to cope better... I'd guess a bit of both.

I think the main benefit is your orders get higher priority during holiday season when it's busy and regular orders may take a long time to fulfill.

Inflammable?

I'd be pretty comfortable flying it after all this attention and review. It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.

Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Gödel incompleteness applies to any system capable of basic arithmetic.

Unfortunately, restricting to only computable maths means disallowing the natural numbers, basic arithmetic, or any equivalent structure, since Gödel incompleteness would apply. I doubt any system without access to the full set of natural numbers or basic arithmetic could qualify as "general AI".

I think your premises are fair, but assumption #3 ("Any mathematical rule can be computed by a sufficiently advanced computer") is effectively ruled out by Gödel's incompleteness theorem[1] and/or the Church-Turing thesis[2].

The problem then becomes finding an approach to general AI that avoids hitting incompleteness/undecidability[3] issues. My feeling is that this would be difficult. One way to try to avoid these issues is to avoid notions of self-reference, since self-reference spawns a lot of undecidable stuff (eg, "this statement is false" is neither true nor false). It seems to me, though, that the notions of the self and self-awareness are central to human consciousness, and so unavoidable when developing a complete simulation of human consciousness. The self is probably not computable.

Obviously there could be approaches that avoid these pitfalls, but every year that goes by without much progress towards general AI makes me feel more confident in this intuition. I do think there will be lots of useful progress in specialized AIs, but I see this as analogous to developing algorithms to decide the halting problem for special classes of algorithms. General AI is a whole different beast.

But if general AI is physically impossible, how does the human brain "compute" general intelligence at all? It could be that your assumption #1 ("Physicalism is true. Nothing exists that is not part of the physical world.") is not correct. Maybe reality has "layers" and our world is some kind of simulation in another layer. Or maybe there is only one consciousness like many spiritual people and Boltzmann[4] suggest. Or maybe the human experience could be a process of trying to solve an undecidable problem and failing...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

FEMA insurance could be to pay for relocation only.

He seems to have published no embarrassing or damaging information on Russia (at least in latter years?), and seemed willing to serve their purposes when it came to the 2016 election, by releasing hacked Democratic Party emails timed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Prior to that, I had considered Wikileaks a brave experiment in radical transparency. Since then, I've considered Wikileaks a somewhat biased source. The truth is the truth, yes, but every truth is partial, and context matters.

"Asset" is perhaps too strong a word, but "useful idiot" may apply, or "the enemy of my enemy".

Or maybe he was threatened.

I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to see ads.

If they didn't fully understand how it worked, but fraudulently represented that they did, they'd be on the hook. It all hinges on what he was promised when he bought it. If they had a good disclaimer, then he might be out of luck.

You sue whoever misrepresented the robot's capabilities to you. There's nothing wrong with making a robot that's bad at trading. There is something wrong with pretending it's not bad at trading when you're selling it.

At this point, I don't care about the origin nearly as much as finding an effective treatment :)

To be fair, if someone is overly anxious and neurotic about minor physical symptoms, to the point that the anxiety is making things worse, often the best thing a doctor can do is reassure them that they are fine, to stop worrying, and send them home. Taking those patients' physical symptoms too seriously may be the worst thing to do. I can see that it must be hard for doctors, especially if they only really have about 12 minutes to make a determination...

The hallmark of CFS is post-exertional malaise, which is feeling terribly after exertion that is overly strenuous (for you). The onset of PEM can be a few hours, a day, or even a week or more after the exertion, so it can be very hard to pin down. The real way to tell is to cease exertions for a period and see if there is improvement in your symptoms. Contrast this with depression, where exercise will tend to improve your symptoms.

A second hallmark is unrefreshing sleep. Not necessarily that you don't sleep or don't sleep well, but that no matter how long or how well you sleep, you wake up feeling like you just ran a marathon. If you don't sleep well, see a sleep doctor. That may fix the issue.

A sleep study is critical to ruling out sleep issues before getting a proper diagnosis of ME/CFS. No good doctor would diagnose CFS without a sleep study.

On the other hand, there are times when blaming people for their misfortune is appropriate, and serves a social purpose. The hard part is telling when it is appropriate. It does seem pretty clear though that we tend to both give ourselves too much credit for our successes, and too much blame for our failures, overall.

Thanks -- I just copied the first link I found in a search engine.

I don't disagree, but I still have hope. Most CFS cases come on suddenly with an infection, and something breaks in the body. That situation may have been brought on by a gradual weakening of the system over time due to stress, etc., but that doesn't mean that whatever has broken can't be fixed or reset in some way.

The issue with CFS isn't to do with stigma against mental illness. It's with the mainstream medical community being uninterested in anything other than mental health treatments for a disease that clearly has a physical (viral/immune) component in the vast majority of cases. There are drugs for depression, and vast amounts of research has gone into their development. Why no similar research effort into drugs for CFS? It's not because we don't know what causes it -- we don't know what causes depression in many cases. It's not because there aren't enough sufferers -- there are millions. It's not because of lack of demand, or lack of existing costs to medical systems, or anything like that.

It's because the medical establishment doesn't really think CFS is a thing. They don't care about it, they don't pay attention to it, they don't see it as real. It's not a fatal disease in the same way that cancer is, and its symptoms sound like a teenager complaining about not wanting to go to school. The answer, as far as the medical establishment is concerned, is that nothing's really terribly wrong, buck up, and you'll be better soon. Oh, and take these antidepressants. Any mental illness inevitably brought on by being chronically physically ill (and not really believed) is pointed to as the underlying issue.

(I mean the above to represent how the medical community collectively sees CFS. There are certainly individuals within the community who take it very seriously. There are simply too few of them, and too few in positions of authority. And, to be fair, as I commented below, it can be very difficult to distinguish between CFS and a neurotic who just needs to be told they are fine and sent home, especially if you only have a very short time to interview them.)

It's upsetting, but it's easy to see how a bunch of what seem like tired, unhappy people with normal blood tests aren't leaping out as needing special attention. That's why a biomarker is massive. All of a sudden the medical community has to pay attention, will want to pay attention. It's a huge new drug market, if nothing else...

Let's hope this biomarker holds up under further tests. There's still a long way to go before I get too excited.

Also check out http://recoveryfromcfs.org/.

This is true, but everything is complex only up to the point when you begin to understand it. Scurvy was a complex disease until the discovery that it was cured and prevented by citrus fruit(1). Now we have the technology to skip right to the discovery of vitamin C, a miraculous 100% accurate test for scurvy.

I know I'm oversimplifying, but I think the point is valid. This is why discovery of a biomarker is so crucial -- it begins to "decomplexify" the disease so we can properly define it and start to find treatments for it.

(1) Ok, it's never really that simple: http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-th...

My advice would be to come up with a plan to grow the system and design the implementation around that.

Mutual credit accounts have been present at every stage. They became less popular than the cryptocurrency aspect for awhile, but Interledger renews the focus on credit, while allowing for cryptocurrency integration where it is effective.

That's actually my point. Eventually someone will call you and want to negotiate to get partial payment.

You might have to just refuse to pay until someone calls you about it. Then you could offer to pay a portion. It may very well be a collections agency calling, and late payment could reflect poorly on your credit rating.

Hey, cool! I worked on something similar a long time ago:

http://ripple.ryanfugger.com/

Have you looked into using the Interledger Protocol? It's the most advanced evolution of the concept I know:

https://interledger.org/

Also, how do you propose to grow this network? That always seemed like the hardest part to me.

'"Be yourself" is terrible advice' is terrible advice... Ok, mediocre advice.