abeppu

67 ms·

721.
by abeppu 3y ago
I think we should aim for _fairer_ government intervention. What if this time, the government invests enough cash in banks to keep them standing and then retains ownership of a meaningful fraction of all participating banks? In however many
722.
by abeppu 3y ago
Electricity pricing is set to change to lower volume rates paired with a high up front cost to be connected to the grid. We'll see how the lower marginal cost changes consumer behavior.
723.
by abeppu 3y ago
But not just "consciousness" which has a bunch of problems of poor definition and epistemic inaccessibility, but "cognition" more broadly. In this "OS" situation, aside from not even simulating a virtual body,
724.
by abeppu 3y ago
At multiple points in the paper, they describe the agent as "embodied", but it seems like they don't really justify their use of that term. Embodiment is a loaded word with a lot of associations in neighboring fields. I think
725.
by abeppu 3y ago
> Corporations are not people and don’t have constitutional rights. ... aren't the rights of corporations in part derived from the rights of individuals? Suppose Alice and Bob each have small businesses, but Alice is a sole propriet
726.
by abeppu 3y ago
I understand the impulse to not want to support other countries who don't seem grateful for the aid -- but this sounds like one of those "cutting of your nose to spite your face" situations. Even if you're annoyed that a
727.
by abeppu 3y ago
> Presumably that extinction would take place several generations from now? One great way to avoid or slow extinction would be to procreate. ... is that necessarily true? If our current population is well above the long-term carrying cap
728.
by abeppu 3y ago
The other odd thing here is that SAR was alerted by a caller, presumably someone close to the hiker who knew their itinerary, and was worried when they were not off the trail by that evening. But that caller appears not to have tried to tel
729.
by abeppu 3y ago
But it does seem like US electricity prices are meaningfully higher than for a number of countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East. I wonder what stops mining from going to places where electricity appears to be cheapest. https:&
730.
by abeppu 3y ago
Regarding 1, I haven't seen comparisons to the overall energy consumption of the banking sector, but a lot of people have talked about the per-transaction energy of bitcoin vs other kinds of transactions, and the ratio is pretty crazy.
731.
by abeppu 3y ago
> The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022. What drove that? Since this is the kind of thing that you could do pretty much anywhere, why should
732.
by abeppu 3y ago
> The problems start when externalities (pollution shirking) and middle-men (rent seeking) enter the room. Both of these distort the price signals, which should (but rarely do!) convey the true underlying environmental cost. This makes i
733.
by abeppu 3y ago
... but b/c this is a highly competitive school, those "small" differences matter. Looking at figure 1, where they divide by scores into 16 equal buckets, we can tell that the median was over 1500, so the space between say 15
734.
by abeppu 3y ago
I think we're missing each other. Propensity to study may be a different attribute than IQ, which is a predictor for both standardized test scores and academic success. Normalizing for socioeconomic factors does not in itself disambigu
735.
by abeppu 3y ago
... is it close to an IQ test? Like, people study very specifically for these standardized tests, and success is also related to how much prep work you put in. I think that may also align with how people study for exams once they're en
736.
by abeppu 3y ago
I think one way of getting values that are reasonable is that if you claim something is worth X, the government should have the prerogative to call your bluff and purchase it from you for X * (1 + c). If you're making a reasonable atte
737.
by abeppu 3y ago
> It’s easy for the super-rich to structure their wealth so that it doesn’t generate much taxable income. That’s why the income tax fails. > Since the notion of income for the very rich is not very well defined, it should not be expre
738.
by abeppu 3y ago
Also: I think he's right to say that democracy is at risk when people realize they can treat the government as a way to enrich themselves -- but the homeless population isn't the risk here. No representative is being elected by th
739.
by abeppu 3y ago
> For shelter, a Walmart-grade sleeping bag and tent, issued to you at the border. Ok, so we're not talking about "ending homelessness", we're talking about shifting it into a segregated area. Note also this mentions
740.
by abeppu 3y ago
The last step of the journey we're on is when individuals taking steps to limit the data collected about them by corporations are charged with obstruction of justice because the government cannot buy enough data about them.
741.
by abeppu 3y ago
> All in all, the damages caused by the current system — how food is produced, marketed, and consumed — add up to $15 trillion in losses a year. > It’s time for a makeover, the authors of the report argue, which could garner up to $10
742.
by abeppu 3y ago
> Add the fact that afaik there's no universal cartridge standard, so to bring value to the table they should distribute their own cartridges globally... I would have hoped for such a company to target compatibility with the existin
743.
by abeppu 3y ago
Why are there not a bunch of cheap no-name printers from overseas companies happy to just make the sale without the subscription? Are they really hard to make? Is there not the right ecosystem of components? Is there somehow more enforceabl
744.
by abeppu 3y ago
It's Noe Valley. The article doesn't mention anything about the homeless population, but does mention it's known as "stroller valley". It's _not_ a hard problem to provide a small number of toilets for the home
745.
by abeppu 3y ago
I am a member of an urban community garden. Its goal is not just to produce food, but to be a recreational amenity for city-dwellers. Because it wants to be accessible for future potential gardeners, it has concrete pathways and ramps, and
746.
by abeppu 3y ago
I think there are a few cases when one can legitimately care about "complete" search, especially if embedding minikanren in another language: - if there's some other criterion or fitness measure which you can't easily ex
747.
by abeppu 3y ago
One area of frustration I've had when trying to get minikanren to actually "do" stuff is that the interleaving search, while "complete" is extremely sensitive to the specific way one declares relations. The order in
748.
by abeppu 3y ago
No, the relevant pigouvian tax would be about the waste stream from products which aren't feasible to repair and which are trashed, and the environmental damage in producing and transporting replacements. When we all have microplastic
749.
by abeppu 3y ago
This perspective is interesting, but I don't think it refutes some of the key elements of concerns that Bender and colleagues have put forward. I really like the "Thai Library" thought experiment [1], and I encourage anyone t
750.
by abeppu 3y ago
That's an interesting possibility. I think where one stands on this partly depends on how much about the technical approaches to AGI we can learn from the brain. The brain does seem to have a weird mix of specialization and flexible ge

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