breuleux

22 ms·

241.
by breuleux 4y ago
Our understanding of computer instructions is propositional and logic-based. The hardware itself is a material thing: it's a bunch of atoms and electrons. So is the human brain. Whatever distinction we can make between them cannot be
242.
by breuleux 4y ago
Current AI as exemplified by LLMs like ChatGPT is not propositional/logic based, though, so I'm unsure what your objection is. Artificial intelligence can be just as messy and alogical as natural intelligence. It's not becaus
243.
by breuleux 4y ago
General-purpose hardware can never be as efficient as special-purpose hardware, unfortunately. All computation has a structure to it that is defined by the way the data flows into the operations, which in turn suggests some optimal physical
244.
by breuleux 4y ago
> I can't even picture a functional world where humans are cut out of most professions that don't involve manual work Many people do manual work. It may very well be the case that general fine motor skills are a far more comple
245.
by breuleux 4y ago
> There is no reason to suspect this is a technical limitation of the models we can build now, rather than a consequence of the fact that no one has bothered trying due to limitations on mechatronics. I think the point still stands, if m
246.
by breuleux 4y ago
I've only read two books of the Expanse, what I've read is a bit soft, but I would argue it is harder than TBP. I think one key difference for me is that we are not told what the protomolecule is, so we can imagine it is some kind
247.
by breuleux 4y ago
TBP is also very cavalier about basic interactions with energy. To make a sophon, I kid you not, the aliens unfold a proton into a 2D sheet that they wrap around their entire planet. The unfolded proton has the same mass as the folded one (
248.
by breuleux 4y ago
TBP's sophon is one of the most blithely nonsensical sci-fi technologies I have ever read. I found it far, far more egregious than the Expanse's magical alien molecule, to the point it put me off reading other books in the trilogy
249.
by breuleux 4y ago
> All skepticisms suffer from the same problem, namely, the strange belief that you can know something while undermining the very conditions possibility of knowing it. I think these conditions are overstated. The human brain is a paracon
250.
by breuleux 4y ago
> Ctrl + C to cancel a command in terminal but Cmd + C to copy text in terminal. Ok, then why Cmd + T to open a new tab in terminal instead of ctrl? Because Ctrl+T swaps the two characters around the cursor, which is what it should do in
251.
by breuleux 4y ago
"Ban cars" is a fringe position very few people actually hold. This being said. I mean. Cars have only been around for about a century, we've managed without them for millennia. Surely there is a way to reorganize many places
252.
by breuleux 4y ago
My point is that general elections are intrinsically mediocre at decision making. You can make them cheaper, more efficient, make sure everyone can vote, add a delegation system, and so on, but you'd just be polishing a turd. It's
253.
by breuleux 4y ago
I feel like there is a tendency for technology to overpromise by offering solutions to the wrong problems. To take your example, what is the fundamental issue with elections? I would say that it is that the optimal number of people for deli
254.
by breuleux 4y ago
This is to be expected, though. Given that there is an infinite number of possible things that could have existed, it is natural that they all had very low to infinitesimal probabilities to begin with.
255.
by breuleux 4y ago
Both conflict and technological advancement are destabilizing influences, though. How do these societies remain stable? My worry here is that any confrontation with an inventive upstart will require swift change and adaptation in order to f
256.
by breuleux 4y ago
Computers are a specifically engineered thing, they are not the sort of object that evolves naturally, at least not as an initial step (the first step is autonomous nourishment and, you know, motion). Silicon-based life forms would likely n
257.
by breuleux 4y ago
> Stable civilizations will be, generally, much, much older than expansionist neighbors, and so incomprehensibly more advanced. This is not necessarily true. A roiling cluster of ephemeral, competing life forms and civilizations may very
258.
by breuleux 4y ago
> Any kind of story that suggests a comprehensible outcome is already assuming a substantial amount of alignment. Not necessarily. You can also take the road that the first AGI would be middling and that its impact would be relatively
259.
by breuleux 4y ago
I don't think the voting system matters as much as we think. The main attack vector that interest groups use against democracy is shaping the public opinion in the direction that benefits them. Certainly, some systems may be easier to
260.
by breuleux 4y ago
> This was exactly what I had done to the past few therapists I had seen, and I wasn't trying to be disagreeable or charming or anything. I had simply stated what was my own reality: that I felt that my previous therapists didn&#x27
261.
by breuleux 4y ago
From a mathematical/algorithmic point of view, you could define a good explanation as a sort of compression process: on one hand, you have observations, data to explain, totalling a certain number of bits. On the other hand, you have a
262.
by breuleux 4y ago
I think it's kind of silly to expect that a satisfactory answer to that question exists. Given that there is an infinite number of possible ways the universe could have been ("nothing" being just one of these possibilities),
263.
by breuleux 4y ago
I find both quite clear. I think the main difference is that it's a lot more frustrating if you mess up a step in Ikea instructions than in a Lego build. So if you're bad at spatial reasoning or following instructions, you can sti
264.
by breuleux 4y ago
Small correction, Theano was made in Bengio's lab.
265.
by breuleux 4y ago
As a compatibilist, I don't know what to do with level 28 ("Oh no! A trolley problem is playing out before you. Do you actually have a choice in this situation? Or has everything been predetermined since the universe began").
266.
by breuleux 4y ago
For the record, I have written a reloading library for Python called jurigged[0] that works on normal Python code and can indeed replace foo() when it's being called in a loop. There is also a way to do debug-and-fix-up, but only if yo
267.
by breuleux 4y ago
Yeah, we are using different strategies I think. My approach is to not re-run anything that has not changed, so if you change the code of a function in a module, the module's global state will remain untouched, and if you change the co
268.
by breuleux 4y ago
Jurigged author here, just tried reloadium out of curiosity. I couldn't run it on my M1 Mac (unsupported, it seems), on Linux I was able to, and it seems to work similarly (identifying what needs to be updated and updating these things
269.
by breuleux 5y ago
Silicon-based machines do need cooling, and arguably an AGI-grade processor would be 3D, which is an even greater cooling challenge. Speaking of silicon, I'm curious why it is virtually absent of organic chemistry despite its sheer abu
270.
by breuleux 5y ago
I have seldom seen predictions about technology come to fruition at the predicted date. If they come at all (they usually don't), it's usually much later. Sure, some naysayers might have said "we will never solve chess/g

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