bbor

47 ms·

691.
by bbor 2y ago
How would you know one when you saw it, though? What is a p-zombie, if you’re not allowed to use any synonyms for “soul”?
692.
by bbor 2y ago
Ok I know that we're in the post-nerd phase of computers, but version numbers are there for a reason. 3.6, please? 3.5.1??
693.
by bbor 2y ago
Well, creation was made for one god, which happens to look just like us and never once mentions other peoples. To be a Christian astronomer you have to believe one of these: 1. God is wasting the vast, vast, vast majority of the universe
694.
by bbor 2y ago
How could you possibly be an affective agent without knowledge? And how could anything ever use knowledge without perceiving it? Whenever anyone talks about philosophical zombies, I say “show me one, then” — until then I’m sticking with (wh
695.
by bbor 2y ago
As another comment says we have a naming system for the Milky Way, but I believe the point of looking above and below the Milky Way is to explicitly find galaxies (/intergalactic forms), not stars. There’s commentary on stuff like supe
696.
by bbor 2y ago
That’s why I love this fun fact so much :) He spent a good deal of his life on natural science before turning to philosophy, not unlike Newton and Liebniz — he just happened to be way better at philosophy than science. It doesn’t help that
697.
by bbor 2y ago
Really impressive work, thanks for sharing. The video, that is -- the astronomy is indistinguishable from magic and thus way beyond the reach of words like "impressive", obviously. I do find it a little funny that physics is in su
698.
by bbor 2y ago
Hmm I think you may have misinterpreted. The accusation isn’t that the teacher used AI, the accusation is that these tools are unreliable
699.
by bbor 2y ago
Hah, that’s great! Hopefully this dramatic chapter in history is a short one, and we learn to adapt away from graded homework. A 4% false positive rate is insane when that could mean failure and/or expulsion, and even more so when an
700.
Bluesky grew by 10% in just two days this week, passing 12M accounts in total(bsky.app)
27 points by bbor 2y ago|14 comments
701.
by bbor 2y ago
Thought y'all would find this interesting -- TBH I still thought it was still in closed beta. I'm giving it a shot! Some pioneering soul should start a HackerNews "feed" (AKA bot?). For comparison, Twitter still has ~368
702.
by bbor 2y ago
Looks like they’ve been doing it since the start of the war, unless we have better source that it’s new than a tweet? I think it’s just coming up now because of twitch con related controversy. Either way it appears to be an attempt to keep
703.
by bbor 2y ago
I think your analysis is spot on, based on my expertise of "reading too much hacker news since every day since March 2023". This Bain report[1] barely mentions "Independent Software Vendors" and when they do it's cl
704.
by bbor 2y ago
Ok I’m opposed to this on a idealogical level—mostly because calling medical care “income” is so 1890, and it fails to mention the unusual private model we’ve stuck with as the primary cause—but this is a fascinating presentation. The facts
705.
by bbor 2y ago
…TIL how to pronounce “Aesop”! Thanks for saving me eventual embarrassment - now I know why other people don’t mix up Aesop Rock and ASAP Rocky! As a fellow Californian, I’d say we have authority anyway - I was taught in school that Ohio ha
706.
by bbor 2y ago
Hard agree. It's an archaic word, it seems a shame not to revel in that fact whenever you use it! I've been using "automata" a lot recently, and that's another one that is just more fun the unusual way. Also it help
707.
by bbor 2y ago
Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not &q
708.
by bbor 2y ago
Well, it’s the basis of programming languages. That seems pretty helpful :) Otherwise it’s hard to measure what exactly “real world utility” looks like. What have the other branches of linguistics brought us? What has any human science brou
709.
by bbor 2y ago
Huh, interesting. Programming languages were devised with Chomsky’s foundational theory of formal languages in mind, and they’re one of the few actual implementations of it. I read your comment and it seems your main thrust is that arithmet
710.
by bbor 2y ago
All well said, and I agree on many of your final points! But you beautifully highlighted my issue at the top: 'Reasoning' is a specific type of thought process If so, what exactly is it? I don’t need a universally justifie
711.
by bbor 2y ago
I’ll pop in with a friendly “that research is definitely wrong”. If they want to prove that LLMs can’t reason, shouldn’t they stringently define that word somewhere in their paper? As it stands, they’re proving something small (some of toda
712.
by bbor 2y ago
Well said! This is a great restatement of the core setup of the Chomskian “Generative Grammar” school, and I think it’s an undeniably productive one. I haven’t read this researchers full paper, but I would be sad (tho not shocked…) if it di
713.
by bbor 2y ago
Wow, stealing my own comment from last week’s Grokking at the edge of linear separability because it applies here even more so: this paper is so simple, dumb, and absolutely breathtakingly interesting. Thanks for sharing! Never would I ha
714.
by bbor 2y ago
I’d say it’s an interesting phrasing of a general principle, namely the four types of technical documentation. “Preparing people for decisions” is the first and third types (references and explanations) and “guiding people through tasks” is
715.
by bbor 2y ago
:( I know a lot of us would like to see more features on here, but at the very least I’d like to see them adopt a more mature stance to moderation and content approval sometime soon. This doesn’t have to be a goofy “meh it’s how I was feeli
716.
by bbor 2y ago
I get where you’re coming from and would also be interested to see, but based on the clips I’ve seen that wouldn’t be enough in this case. Of course the bias is inherent in what people choose to post (not normal and not terrible/liti
717.
by bbor 2y ago
Just the other day I wasted 20 minutes tracking down a problem before caving and pasting some code into Claude, running a massive machine learning model trained by the foremost researchers in the AI industry, all so it could tell me I forgo
718.
by bbor 2y ago
It’s absolutely amenable to practice, I agree. I don’t personally see it as an improvement to a cognitive ability like learning a concept/practice is, but rather as training yourself to notice . I’ve been known to infuriate many a (we
719.
by bbor 2y ago
Great article! That said, the Everglades and its web of life as we know it have existed for five thousand years. In the comparative blink of an eye, that intricate system has been upended. ...that doesn't sound so bad, when you
720.
by bbor 2y ago
I’m late to the party but I’ll drop the truth at the bottom: computer science in its own right is just modern philosophy of mind. It’s the specification of the conceptual limits of cognition. I love his “sociological sense”, and agree that

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