bnralt

44 ms·

421.
by bnralt 4y ago
Here's a separate issue I ran into the other day that almost made it impossible to find something Google had indexed. Type in "mumbai comes to norway," and you get a page and a half of results, with the date on almost all of
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by bnralt 4y ago
Boiled peanuts are also popular in China. If you want to try them, I suggest having a go at it. They're very simple to make.
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by bnralt 4y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting "vibes" from. Some things are pretty noticeable, like how often you come across blocked websites in different countries, what countries limit you from bringing in (such as bibles), manda
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by bnralt 4y ago
Singapore isn't noticeably more repressive than other countries in South East Asia. All things considered, I'd say it probably leans on the more open side, but these things are hard to judge. If people want to avoid South East Asi
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by bnralt 4y ago
I personally found Singapore charming when I was there. It's a fascinating mix of several different cultures who all seem to retained many of their traditional customs. I never understood the sterile critique myself, the city never str
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by bnralt 4y ago
Kind of strange that the only other two authors they talk about are Ursula K. Le Guin and J.K. Rowling. I don't think the use of depth by either was particularly noticeable compared to other authors, and certainly nowhere near what Tol
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by bnralt 4y ago
They're speculative assets bubbles (hence the enormous price swings). People refer to them as Ponzi schemes because a speculative asset bubble is similar, though the two aren't technically the same thing. But neither are good for
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by bnralt 4y ago
Indeed. I'm not sure talking about some idealistic form of marketing is any more useful than talking about an idealistic form of government where we get rid of all laws and just have people do what they're supposed to do. Sure, su
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by bnralt 4y ago
> how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter. That's not really a new issue, we only have to look at issues like abortion, animal rights, or euthanasia[1] to see situ
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by bnralt 4y ago
That's an interesting point I hadn't thought about before but it should have been obvious. Crypto is inherently inflationary to the system as a whole, since you're increasing the amount of currency without increasing the numb
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by bnralt 4y ago
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway. Yeah, I think friction ac
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by bnralt 4y ago
I definitely agree that it's worth thinking about things like scarcity, our ultimate goals, what kind of societies we're creating, etc., and that an over focus on GDP growth or personal wealth is a problem. I've often talked
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by bnralt 4y ago
I don't know, I read the interview and it honestly wasn't clear what he was saying. He never mentions any particular policy that should be enacted (other than tariffs against other countries that don't follow our lead), and t
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by bnralt 4y ago
> That article in turn puts forth a surprisingly thoughtful methodology: https://money.com/richest-people-of-all-time-methodology/ . Here's what this article says about Mansa Musa. First, very few reliable sourc
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by bnralt 4y ago
Interesting that the only king they can identify is Mansa Musa, and that he keeps popping up on the maps. Given how poorly documented Mansa Musa's reign was, and that the main sources are a small number of Muslim accounts of his Hajj w
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by bnralt 4y ago
Anecdotally, I've noticed that people who don't drink at all tend to be more social in general, while people who often drink in social settings can find it hard to be social if they're not drunk (and often if both parties are
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by bnralt 4y ago
> For instance, the majority of Polish citizens have not shown a single bit of decency towards refugees from Syria and Iraq - for decades. Almost no refugee was allowed in, and other were treated like subhumans. Also worth noting that, u
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by bnralt 4y ago
Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, written 100 years ago but honestly just as applicable today. Libre Vox even has a free version up on YouTube[1]. Chomsky actually took the title of his book from Lippmann's, but Lippmann's is a m
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by bnralt 4y ago
It's also interesting because there's 5 examples of American country songs in those videos. One sung by Johnny Cash in the 60's, one written and sung by Dolly Parton in the 70's, two sung by Kenny Rogers in the 70's
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by bnralt 4y ago
You can add the Robber's Cave experiment and The Third Wave (which seems to be mostly fictional) to that list as well. After WWII, there seems to have been a certain desire among some people to show that the average human (or rodent, h
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by bnralt 4y ago
I'd say the biggest slight of hand is that human's understand other humans "knowing" something as something happening internal to an individuals brain. Holding a biology book in front of you doesn't mean you know ev
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by bnralt 4y ago
> I think you've inadvertently shifted the goalposts. The question is, "is LaMDA conscious?". I don't think anyone proposes that LaMDA has a "general human level abstraction". Expecting it to do non-language
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by bnralt 4y ago
> If this is true then there is no reason that these abstractions couldn’t be learned, in which case you could take away the language, and perhaps the machine would continue to have thoughts; it would just be unable to communicate them.
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by bnralt 4y ago
The issue is how humans confuse "consciousness" with the ability to mimic what human output that modern people associate with consciousness. I'd argue that what we refer to as "consciousness" is the ability to form
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by bnralt 4y ago
What was the last successful offensive war? When was the last time American tanks were successful in creating a positive outcome for United States citizens (which, theoretically, is the entire reason they're built)? You could make an a
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by bnralt 4y ago
Human brains are able to create certain mental abstractions. There's good evidence for why this would be useful (think about how much more flexible humans are than computer programs). Referring to these mental abstractions as "con
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by bnralt 4y ago
> I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is. This reminds me of religious argument
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by bnralt 4y ago
> ... that sounds more like a military alliance between independent city-states in ancient Greece than your average human friendship. It doesn't sound like your average friendship in modern atomized societies. But it seems that it w
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by bnralt 4y ago
> But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on. I say &quo
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by bnralt 4y ago
At a certain point we have to make choices about what gets funded. Even if you think much more money should be going into science, you still have to decide what takes priority, and you're going to eventually run into some limits. One c

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