jtolmar

97 ms·

511.
by jtolmar 11y ago
You're anthropomorphising the machine. An AI will do what it's programmed to do, not develop free will and decide on its own destiny. Correctly programming something that takes into account all of the nuances of the human conditio
512.
by jtolmar 11y ago
"Motivated" is a weird word, it anthropomorphises the machine. It will do what it's programmed to do. It doesn't have a personality. Formally specifying what we actually wanted is why programmers have a job. And the diff
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by jtolmar 11y ago
AlphaGo's algorithms will generalize easily to other perfect information games, including ones that include randomness like Backgammon. Games with imperfect information will take some more advances, but AlphaGo just opened up a lot of
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by jtolmar 11y ago
On the perhaps more reassuring side, it's possible for there to be an AI that takes into account human emotion, but does not have any of its own. Given power in the real world, it would do a better job of making people happy than a hu
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Once it gets to enough nines, its monte carlo trees will run out of sample resolution. If it can resolve to three nines, then a 99.93% win branch has a 70% chance of being reported as 99.9% and a 30% chance of being reported as 100%. When a
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Building on that, I suspect that if AlphaGo thinks it has a 100% chance of winning with any of several moves, it has no way of distinguishing between them and chooses effectively at random. The longer that goes on - and once it hits 100% ch
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Score in Go is captured stones plus surrounded empty territory at the end of the game. Captures are well defined when they happen, but territory is not defined until the end. The incentive structure of the game leads to moves that firmly de
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Psycho-Pass is a lot like the GITS anime, with a side of Minority Report. Not quite identity stuff, but still classic sci-fi concepts in a near future setting in the form of a police procedural. It spends much more of its time on multi-epi
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by jtolmar 11y ago
My key takeaway was that mathematical properties like associativity, commutativity, idempotency, and having an identity value are good tools for communicating with compilers. An associative binary operator plus an identity is enough to aut
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Even among tech companies designed for fast growth, I'd like to see more structured as worker owned co-ops instead of having investor ownership. Without investment money at the outset, they'll have to bootstrap longer, but that&#x
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by jtolmar 11y ago
It depends on the game and your expectations. Super Mario Kart is basically obsolete unless you have very specific acquired tastes. Super Mario Bros 3 is still one of the greatest games ever created, but if you go play it, it will just be
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Paying $1 extra for a better apple is worth it if you value the better flavor by at least that much. It shouldn't matter whether the choice is between $4 and $5 or between $10 and $11 - how did that dollar become less valuable, or the
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Who puts hats in a stable? At least with unicorns it makes sense.
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Java is missing some features I'd really like, but there's nothing actually wrong with the language. You can write a C-like interface in Java and it will come out slightly simpler because of the garbage collector. It has feature
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Clearly this is a cynical move by a company that knows that healthy people are more likely to buy their services than dead ones. It all goes straight to Google's bottom line.
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by jtolmar 11y ago
With the comment that sparked off this thread, I wasn't implying the car had any sense of agency. Rather, that legal personhood might be a good way to sort out the laws. A corporation is a legal person, which makes it a lot easier to e
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by jtolmar 11y ago
The purpose I had in mind when I first mentioned the idea was just to provide a convenient way to reason about the law. It lets you re-use laws written with human drivers in mind, instead of having to individually recontextualize each as a
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Algorithmic personhood seems like a pretty good path forward for all the inevitable legal questions this will stir up. You could prosecute the individual instance of the algorithm when it breaks a law, and if that's successful charge i
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by jtolmar 11y ago
The best way to do it that I've found is to arrange a folder hierarchy of "where" rather than "what." So there's no one place with all the game's rock models, but rather firelands/towerofeternalflame&
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by jtolmar 11y ago
GI Joe dolls have clothes and the physique of a refrigerator.
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by jtolmar 11y ago
The amateur game development community would love these. Designing logos for in-universe companies is a thankless chore. But they're really adverse to using things without an explicit license. This could really use a CC0 stamp somewh
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by jtolmar 11y ago
This is a frequent pitfall in video game AI - people go into it thinking the AI's goal is to win, then learn the hard way that the AI's goal should be to lose in an interesting way. Nobody says that the red koopa in Super Mario Br
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Yes, it will be possible unless you specifically construct your definition of consciousness to make it impossible. However, having a mind is unnecessary (and inefficient) for the most intelligent possible machines. Imagine extremely advance
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by jtolmar 11y ago
That doesn't help anything. You can't guess the next hotfix number, but you can still tell what order they were in and, after seeing a few examples to figure out how long the non-random part is, tell how many were skipped.
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by jtolmar 11y ago
I've heard that being too keen on real estate is a common pitfall for middle class investors. Between that and personal bias, I'm avoiding it (at least directly). My portfolio is primarily stocks, which I find surprisingly easy t
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by jtolmar 11y ago
My parents started out very poor and climbed into the middle class by the time I got to high school. The extended family is still poor, so I'm still exposed to how they think about money. I think the mindsets can break down into thre
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by jtolmar 11y ago
There can be obviously good principles while design still remains hard. Chess, for example, has plenty of simple principles (like "control the center of the board") that are hard to execute. However, designers writing articles te
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by jtolmar 11y ago
It's a RAM hack!
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by jtolmar 11y ago
That's not how Occam's razor works. Neither explanation - political connections vs kindness - is simpler than the other. You're just using a more prestigious-sounding name for cynicism.
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by jtolmar 11y ago
Taking a best-fit line like Moore's law as a fundamental law of the universe is a classic mistake. Of course, there's no such thing as an inevitable progression of progress in AI research. Until we have AI software capable of con

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