arakyd

9 ms·

31.
by arakyd 17y ago
Yes, times have changed, but that's mostly because 99% of businesses prefer to make tradeoffs that allow them to develop applications more quickly and cheaply, not because Real Programmers suck. Let's look at the criticisms. Undocumented: T
32.
by arakyd 17y ago
FAI advocates are not satisfied with a 99.999% chance that the universe will not be turned into a uniform distribution of paperclips.
33.
by arakyd 17y ago
I guess we'll know that the browser has replaced the operating system when it starts deleting kernel32.dll.
34.
by arakyd 17y ago
The counter argument is probably that self-improving AI would need to be self-aware. Besides, it's a well known trope in these stories that AI becomes self aware on it's own anyway, so there you go. By argumentum ad Jurassic Park, life- I m
35.
by arakyd 17y ago
There are blind alleys, and then there are ideas that make people want to psychoanalyze you. To hyperbolize a bit, but only a bit, worrying about runaway AI that has the potential to turn the universe into paperclips is about as useful as w
36.
by arakyd 17y ago
Note the [Originally posted at http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/ ] at the bottom of that post.
37.
by arakyd 17y ago
I love how you classify the fossil record as "expectations." New species appear in the historical record, complete with transitional forms. What's your explanation? Repeated acts of special creation? Look, the reason I didn't link any more
38.
by arakyd 17y ago
Apparently they define it as noticeable changes in phenotype. I would have guessed speciation.
39.
by arakyd 17y ago
Your conception of science is twisted and narrow, your bomb example is a classic modus moron, and you would rather make a grand display of your ignorance than take a few minutes to Google up the sort of evidence for evolution that you claim
40.
by arakyd 17y ago
Forget maintenance, what about flying drunk, or tired, or without years of training? You say "flying cars" and people think "driving in the sky," but it's not like that at all. Basically, there are many different reasons why flying cars wou
41.
by arakyd 17y ago
I can't think of much to use Alpha for yet either, but I think it represents a significant accomplishment nevertheless, in a frontiers of knowledge representation/interaction sort of way. Doug Lenat describes it as halfway between Google an
42.
by arakyd 17y ago
I have come to believe that the effects of "overconfidence" are almost overwhelmingly positive. [..] I think that part of me is far more valuable than the part that just wants to behave, be nice, and get upmodded in places like this for go
43.
by arakyd 17y ago
Criticizing people for all sorts of valid reasons and treating them decently are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to know someone personally in order to give a fair critique of their published ideas, or to know that the reason they su
44.
by arakyd 17y ago
I don't know Wolfram either, but I have read reviews of A New Kind of Science by experts who are competent to judge, and they all say that the book is full of old ideas that Wolfram claims sole credit for. The only really impressive bit i
45.
by arakyd 17y ago
It's not so much that it's not interesting, or that involves working with non-technical people, or that it requires pixel perfect alignment, or that the screen isn't a deep enough level. It's that it is all about working with other people a
46.
by arakyd 17y ago
Heh. You still have anonymous delegates in C# 2.0, and you can roll your own expression trees if you really want them. Same thing for yield and extension methods. Of course your code will be much more verbose and unnatural, and you won't ha
47.
by arakyd 17y ago
Here's my observation: People buy products with features, not products that let you build features. Programmers are no different. Most of them will choose a language that does x over a language that can easily be extended to do x, even if t
48.
by arakyd 17y ago
Well, lesbianmonad, that's an interesting take I guess, but it's even more obscure than the story itself. I can't figure out whether you actually intended to refer to Charles Darwin or whether you were just smoking too much weed to remember
49.
by arakyd 17y ago
I think the point is to say something about the boundaries of "embedded systems," (a vague concept that I'm not convinced makes any sense outside of certain kinds of world simulations) in the style of Douglas Hofstadter (or that's my guess,
50.
by arakyd 17y ago
You are smoking the crack, sir. Games do not have 3D UIs, they have 2D HUDs on 3D worlds, if they have 3D at all. 3D modeling software doesn't even have 3D UIs. Outside of a tiny number of specialized applications, 3D UIs are another Micros
51.
by arakyd 18y ago
I was taking about Rand's philosophy in general, not just Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. http://groups.google.com/group/sci.philosophy.tech/msg/8cb6b... http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/ayn-rand.html The values you describe a
52.
by arakyd 18y ago
Of course, that's what everybody said about Watchmen. I've never read the book, but I've heard a lot about Ayn Rand's philosophy, none of it good.
53.
by arakyd 18y ago
Not to put too fine a point on it, you're a theist.
54.
by arakyd 18y ago
Perfectionists can apply higher standards than mathematicians - mathematics does not require anything like perfection. A mathematician sets the level of rigor he needs to prove an interesting theorem. A perfectionist mathematician would nev
55.
by arakyd 18y ago
Sounds like your attitude is pretty healthy. As a perfectionist myself, let me say that the key is being able to continue working on v1 even when you anticipate the potential for a problem with the finished v1 . The perfectionist failure m
56.
by arakyd 18y ago
No. Christianity is worthwhile because the Sistine Chapel is pretty. Whether or not the Christian god exists is undecidable and ultimately a McGuffin. I grew up with a literalist/fundamentalist version of Christianity, and when I discovered
57.
by arakyd 18y ago
In short: do whichever lets you explore the important effects faster. Sometimes a spec will make you faster and sometimes it isn't worth it. You can generalize from these two examples, but the more data points you have the better you will b
58.
by arakyd 18y ago
The second theorem says that the consistency of a system cannot be proved within that system (sufficiently strong, etc). If a contradiction is discovered in set theory, either it will be fixed by a change to the axioms, or another set of
59.
by arakyd 18y ago
Aha! It is a religion!
60.
by arakyd 18y ago
I exist because of a certain chain of historical events. I continue to exist because I am programmed to maintain my existence and because my environment makes doing so with high probability (at least in the short and medium term) remarkably

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