fasterik

46 ms·

601.
by fasterik 4y ago
The post I was responding to said "Memorization is the same as knowing". I specifically chose a counterexample to suggest that knowledge is deeper than memorizing some facts about the world. In fact, I would argue that most of the
602.
by fasterik 4y ago
You can memorize every note of a difficult piano piece, but that doesn't mean you know how to play it well.
603.
by fasterik 4y ago
That's a logical consequence of one possible view in population ethics, which is orthogonal to utilitarianism. There are equally counter-intuitive consequences of discounting future lives or not valuing them at all. What makes this spe
604.
by fasterik 4y ago
"Pure" in this context means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements". Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways: - easily understood or d
605.
by fasterik 4y ago
Bach is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and he's as far from postmodernism as I can imagine. His music is simple and pure. It isn't trying to impress anyone with technical virtuosity or sentimen
606.
by fasterik 4y ago
Lucrative professions have their own ways of hijacking the need for cognition. For example, programming can be an extremely rewarding activity when pursued for its own sake, but in the corporate world it is often reduced to tedium and drudg
607.
by fasterik 4y ago
There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a
608.
by fasterik 4y ago
>It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar I find it far more distracting to find a modern term in an ancient text that I know the author couldn't have known about. It&#x27
609.
by fasterik 4y ago
How does this not make sense? As far as I can tell, your points don't apply to what I said. I'll quote myself: >The idea that machines couldn't do everything a human can do (and more) doesn't make any sense to me.
610.
by fasterik 4y ago
I agree with you in the sense that I think many problems don't require general intelligence once you have a solution. However, to come to those solutions it took decades or centuries of intelligent humans working on those problems. The
611.
by fasterik 4y ago
See my sibling reply to tw1984 where I discuss AAA games and high frequency trading. If Rust is unambiguously better, you would think there would be an incentive to adopt it in these industries where development costs are high and a lot of
612.
by fasterik 4y ago
The democracy quote wasn't meant to be a comment about the governance of the C++ standards committee. It was the "bad, but better than the rest" idea, as well as the humorous nature of the quote, that I wanted to use to draw
613.
by fasterik 4y ago
Churchill on democracy: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time C++ is the programming language equivalent of democracy. Nobody is thrilled wi
614.
by fasterik 4y ago
I may have read too much into your original post. I think I get what you're saying now. We apply the concept of intelligence to other species, so I don't see why we couldn't apply it to machines. If people want to redefine in
615.
by fasterik 4y ago
I'm trying to understand the worldview that leads to what you believe. As far as I can tell, you're assuming there is a supernatural aspect to the human mind. According to my worldview, humans are just robots built out of DNA, pro
616.
by fasterik 4y ago
> it is actually possible to write highly-reusable code that is clean, understandable, and not "over-engineered" This is true for systems where you already have working code and you have multiple concrete examples of code tha
617.
by fasterik 4y ago
What argument? I see a passing reference to the ontological argument followed by a bunch of metaphysical word salad. Not exactly a lot of substance to engage with there. Edit: Sorry about the snarky reply. I just don't have the patienc
618.
by fasterik 4y ago
Physicists also teach that there is a subsistent being. It's called the physical world :) > Its succinct expression is put forth by Thomas Aquinas and can also be found in the thinking of Aristotle. And its succinct refutation was
619.
by fasterik 4y ago
There are two separate issues here. One is how we choose to define God, and the other is what religious people actually believe. OP was referring to "billions of people" with certain beliefs. Most of these people believe in God as
620.
by fasterik 4y ago
The author cherry picks a couple of positive examples while ignoring all of the negative consequences of making believe. Believing things are true when they aren't has also been the cause of war, genocide, human sacrifice, and oppressi
621.
by fasterik 4y ago
That's a false equivalence between proof and disproof. If someone says they know there is a teapot in orbit around Proxima Centauri and I disagree with them, neither of us can prove or disprove the other. That doesn't mean we both
622.
by fasterik 4y ago
The advantage of vim isn't just shortcuts. It's the ability to compose movements with editing commands. For example, da" cuts text enclosed in quotes. ct; changes text up to but not including the next semicolon. Every movemen
623.
by fasterik 4y ago
Language understanding doesn't magically spawn itself as a process on your computer! Someone has to write that program first. Do you think it's impossible for such a program to emerge as weights in a Turing complete neural netwo
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by fasterik 4y ago
Modern neural network architectures are Turing complete [1]. So I don't see any argument for a limit in principle unless you are arguing that a Turing machine can't achieve language understanding. If that's what you're s
625.
by fasterik 4y ago
I like the Kierkegaard quote from the article: "The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes." Constraints are powerful and have a way of getting the human mind to focus on what really matters. I think this ap
626.
by fasterik 4y ago
You made two claims: (1) current language models are useless and (2) current language models have reached a ceiling. I said: How many people are using ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc. for economically or personally valuable activities? If
627.
by fasterik 4y ago
I thought the same thing at first (the website could be clearer). But it's actually a free beta. The subscription is there for people who want to help fund development and get priority support.
628.
by fasterik 4y ago
You make very strong claims about things we know very little about. It's far from clear that we have reached a ceiling. Who can predict how systems with 10x the parameters and as-yet-undiscovered deep learning models will behave? We do
629.
by fasterik 4y ago
Whether or not the current technology is useless is an empirical question. How many people are using ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc. for economically or personally valuable activities? We actually don't know. Even if we assume the tech
630.
by fasterik 4y ago
Arena allocation is useful when many objects have the same known lifetime. An example from games is per-frame allocations. All objects needed only for the frame being rendered are carved out of a large chunk of preallocated memory. The chun

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