habitue

34 ms·

961.
by habitue 11y ago
I think we're on the same page here. Usually qualia are brought out as a proof that there is some kind of ineffable quality that can't be replicated by machines, but can only be experienced first-hand by truly conscious beings. I
962.
by habitue 11y ago
Oh, I'm not saying qualia doesn't exist. Our experiences are definitely an actual phenomenon. And we can't currently explain exactly how it works and we should try to find out what produces the experience of qualia. What we s
963.
by habitue 11y ago
> if conscious observers didn't exist, in what sense would anything else exist? > [A] universe can only exist in the sense that some conscious observer in the future will VERIFY ITS EXISTENCE. > So, in what sense would OUR uni
964.
by habitue 11y ago
> you'll find out there are plenty of theories in metaphysics and spirituality on what it means to be and what awareness is I have encountered these theories. In the past I have been under the sway of them. They can be interesting t
965.
by habitue 11y ago
How do you know other humans can truly experience "yellowness"? What if we're all just pretending and you're the only one? Let's not talk about realistic AI for a moment, let's talk about hypothetically buildin
966.
by habitue 11y ago
That's what I meant by rational inference, but if we look at it from the point of view of intuition, I'm saying our intuitions will be better because we have much better information now. We have no particular reason to weight heav
967.
by habitue 11y ago
I was pointing out that the complex explanation is that comets have their own driving force, and tides have a separate driving force, and planets have their own reason for moving as they do, etc. Compared to that kind of hodge-podge, relati
968.
by habitue 11y ago
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that intelligence requires quantum effects to work. I don't see how going back to vitalist arguments will aid us in any way. Researching the phenomena, following evidence, making inferences fro
969.
by habitue 11y ago
> Yes, of course it is possible, if we change the meaning of "intelligent" to fit what a computer does. :) I don't think that's what he's doing. Otherwise he could just define intelligence to mean what computers
970.
by habitue 11y ago
Comets, and the planets and the tides, and apples falling from trees were found to be caused by the same underlying phenomena, despite seeming very different. Newton's insight that they were the same was not overturned by relativity, s
971.
by habitue 11y ago
It seems like the major issue is that attribution was removed. The reposting stripped credit for the guy. I think everyone can agree that putting a movie up on the pirate bay, and putting a movie up on the pirate bay after stripping out the
972.
by habitue 11y ago
Ah ok, I think the confusion comes from what we're talking about. So you're talking about something in between strong (humanlike) AI, and what we currently have now. Certainly there will be discussions about the capabilities of th
973.
by habitue 11y ago
Ah whoops! I'll correct it
974.
by habitue 11y ago
The paperclip thought experiment is illustrative of what happens when you ignore the full human utility function. When you give a superhuman intelligence the single goal "make paperclips", it will do it in ways you didn't exp
975.
by habitue 11y ago
This is pretty much what voat is. The biggest issue is handling the traffic. Only a fraction of users went to voat and it was offline for days, crippled by the traffic. edit: I previously said Voat was a reddit fork, that wasn't correc
976.
by habitue 11y ago
This is exactly the point. The variable in question is whether to try to reduce the gun-owning population to get shooting rates down. It sheds no light on that problem (and makes no sense) if you restrict the shootings to the gun owning pul
977.
by habitue 11y ago
It's certainly possible, but if true, its in spite of our tendency to have one device we use all the time, not directly because of it
978.
by habitue 11y ago
I would say the author's point about buying things and distraction from being connected is pretty weak. There's actually a tension there: why buy other stuff when you only ever interact with your phone? You can be a complete minim
979.
by habitue 11y ago
We could have used this at the last place I worked. So much time was wasted on ETL into and out of this master data warehouse schema that no-one could use directly.
980.
by habitue 11y ago
It's probably different in different fields. In CS it's common for the dissertation to be a compilation of several published papers
981.
by habitue 11y ago
The universities are complicit in it, but as an individual, you have the option of making a protest after working hard to do the research itself, by not passing your thesis defense or getting tenure, and having a very small impact on publis
982.
by habitue 11y ago
While I'm pretty sure the legal theory being espoused here has no chance in court, the fact remains that what Sci-Hub is doing is a good thing. Hopefully in a few decades when we finally get sane copyright laws, or open access journals
983.
by habitue 11y ago
There may not be an alternative, but that doesn't mean it isn't snake-oil. (It doesn't mean it is either. Those two things are independent) But, what he's saying has a good point, whether or not textio is snakeoil: it&#x
984.
by habitue 11y ago
The way I did it was just recursively pass down an accumulator argument to generate De Bruijn index-like variable names, rather than keeping a global counter Point taken though that it's a bit simpler with global state
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by habitue 11y ago
This is the real answer. The restrictions on functional languages that make them (perhaps) harder to use for everyday programming makes them much easier to reason about and prove properties of.
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by habitue 11y ago
I agree with you it'd be useful to see how you might implement lambdas in a language like C. But after that first example, implementing other more complicated language constructs in C, instead of learning ML/haskell is going to be
987.
by habitue 11y ago
Yes, this is true. There's definitely a difference between "this guy is making strategic decisions and interfacing with the rest of the company on my behalf" and "this guy is my superior and should be paid more than me&q
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by habitue 11y ago
And if you bootstrap, you lose freedom in other ways. What kinds of businesses can be bootstrapped constrains your options. The market becomes your boss, and no amount of soft-skills or convincing arguments can change its mind. Put that way
989.
by habitue 11y ago
You're human, but you're not all humans. I think people have a continuum of attitudes on what they're willing to trade autonomy for. I've met a lot of people who are happy to have someone tell them what to do, because
990.
by habitue 11y ago
Right, when you need to maintain (and patch) old versions of a piece of software, having eternal release branches is necessary. The fixes on those old versions often don't ever want to be merged back to master because the code is very

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