cmsj

21 ms·

241.
by cmsj 4y ago
> We now have an immutable ledger that requires zero intermediaries. > How is it possible for people to fail in understanding that value? Because so far nobody has shown me a way in which an immutable ledger can let me do something de
242.
by cmsj 4y ago
> The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users ha
243.
by cmsj 4y ago
All of those things you list ultimately do require trust. A trustless ledger documenting that I own the land my house is on, doesn't make me any safer against a government determined to steal my land. A car lease ultimately requires me
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by cmsj 4y ago
Then you might as well ban blockchain related posts until something in that space gains some kind of relevance, because until that point, the only thing we can really discuss is how nothing in the blockchain space has produced a compelling
245.
by cmsj 4y ago
I enjoyed the nostalgia of this piece, but in general I suspect that the proportion of the population who are predisposed to be "computer nerds" as we were often known in the 80s/90s, is pretty much the same. While the system
246.
by cmsj 4y ago
> Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together. Two thoughts: 1) I kinda agree, and it's interesting how many of the founders of game studios who are now retiring, got their start on the 8/16bi
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by cmsj 4y ago
Yeah that intuition is invaluable. It's what makes us the family "computer guy/girl", and is why we can help someone who uses some piece of software every day, that we have never seen before, figure out how to do some th
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by cmsj 4y ago
> functional incompetence Yep, our ruling class is educated to be quick witted in abstract debates and that is the extent of their depth.
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by cmsj 4y ago
I detest how right you are.
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by cmsj 4y ago
"creating a loophole" presupposes that we want to stop people as much as possible, from coming to our country. I consider it an extraordinary privilege to have people wanting to flee here for safety and opportunity, and not just b
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by cmsj 4y ago
Yes, I miss it very much. I miss the days when people wrote RFCs for something they felt deserved to exist, rather than business plans for something they hope someone will invest in.
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by cmsj 4y ago
Yeah we definitely shouldn't worry about the political sympathies/vulnerabilities of the web services we use as the foundations of our shared knowledge...
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by cmsj 4y ago
Yep, I used to do that when I had a thinkpad and a docking station and didn't want all my ssh sessions to drop. Before that I was even doing awful things like forcing the same IP onto both eth and wifi :D
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by cmsj 4y ago
> but to own them that is the key insight here. All of Canonical's marquee software projects over the years have been attempts to single-handedly control a given space, and they have essentially all failed. Canonical is good at inte
255.
by cmsj 4y ago
The tragic irony there though is that Canonical commits very little engineering effort to contributing to upstream projects that they don't control. They'll fix a few bugs that are affecting customers, but there's no genera
256.
by cmsj 5y ago
correct, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be rolling out thousands of them around the world next year or even in 5 years time. There are tens of thousands of fossil fuel power stations around the world, and we globally co
257.
by cmsj 5y ago
I don't think it's right to suggest that an absolute level of generality would be necessary for that kind of self-improvement. If we assume a future where humans are able to create a human-level AI, then it would have at least two
258.
by cmsj 5y ago
I think I would prefer to attempt to define it, than to simply assert that we don't have it (or some aspect of it). It's demonstrably true that our species' intellectual capabilities extend to solving problems far beyond th
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by cmsj 5y ago
> This is because consciousness is a fundamentally unfalsifiable thing The real unanswerable question is not "can I prove another entity is conscious", it is "does this other entity believe that it is conscious", beca
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by cmsj 5y ago
Your skepticism rests on the assumptions that a) we would recognise AGI when we create it, b) we would be smart enough to contain it. I'm not at all sure that a) is true, and I'm certain that b) is not true. We can't even pre
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by cmsj 5y ago
Unlike its stupid meat-monkey progenitors, our fictional superintelligent AI would likely be capable of vastly augmenting and enhancing its own intelligence, rather than replacing itself.
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by cmsj 5y ago
Point of order, evolution took a lot more than a billion years to arrive at generalised intelligence if you start it from first principals (ie abiogenesis), which seems like the most apt comparison to us starting from some sand and teachi
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by cmsj 5y ago
I have some bad news for you I'm afraid - fusion is not going to be industrially useful on an ecologically relevant timescale. It's a lot like AGI in its "maybe the next generation will have this, but we won't" prop
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by cmsj 5y ago
If AGI is achieved, and it is emergent out of multiple layers of "dumb" AI, is there any particular reason to assume that we will even recognise it? Or if we recognise it, be able to communicate with it? Will it even consider us t
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by cmsj 5y ago
My main thought whenever I hear my brain capacity trying to be measured in FLOPS is that I'm pretty sure I can't actually even calculate a single FLOP per second ;)
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by cmsj 5y ago
I am not a believer in the imminency of "the singularity", but I think it would be worth considering that sentient AIs would likely be as immortal as their power source and compute substrates are, which would allow them to think a
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by cmsj 5y ago
I happen to not believe that AGI is coming in any of our lifetimes, but it's undeniably true that our GI emerged from a design process that lacks a conscious designer.
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by cmsj 5y ago
> It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too. That right there is the best way to go. Everything in the open, everything can be self-hosted, but you can pay for the convenie
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by cmsj 5y ago
> Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds. I was walking down some very steep stairs once and almost tripped. I caught the handrail, but for the
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by cmsj 5y ago
profits are ngmi

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