nbouscal

9 ms·

31.
by nbouscal 10y ago
The cult of 'AI will be totally fine' is a religious belief that brooks no dissent, and unfortunately has its claws in a lot of otherwise smart people.
32.
by nbouscal 10y ago
To the company that his roommate works for as a researcher. The way you're phrasing it is pretty misleading.
33.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I really, really don't think modern AI capabilities and AGI are as dissimilar as airplanes and rockets. Neither do many AI researchers. You're obviously welcome to disagree, but you don't just get to declare their opinions in
34.
by nbouscal 10y ago
What's your suggested alternative? It's really easy to criticize, but a lot harder to do any better. If you aren't suggesting any other methods, you're implicitly saying we should just ignore the problem. I really don&#x
35.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Your opinion about how far off AGI is is a totally reasonable one, and some AI experts agree with it. Other AI experts disagree, and think that AGI is basically tractable with current research methods plus a breakthrough or two. Yes, there&
36.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I agree with what I take to be the main point of your argument, which is that OpenAI will use the money for a variety of different things, many of which aren't averting the apocalypse, and that those things are good. I think it's
37.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Pretty sure AJ007 wasn't including transhumanism in the things they were calling "human species extinction", so I doubt you actually disagree.
38.
by nbouscal 10y ago
That's… not at all true? There have been numerous thorough attempts at coming up with as reasonable an estimate as possible, involving in-depth conversations with most of the experts in the field. Maybe it's not strictly a "c
39.
by nbouscal 10y ago
There's a decent amount of research into functional graph algorithms. The right approach depends on the application, but two interesting ones are inductive graphs[1] and zippers[2]. I also agree with other commenters that you should ma
40.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Haskell is used successfully in industry, e.g. at Standard Chartered where they have >1MM lines of Haskell in production. Take a look: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry
41.
by nbouscal 10y ago
A few years and maybe ~50k lines of code, iirc. I've heard the exact same reports from people who work on multi-million-line Haskell codebases, though (e.g. Standard Chartered).
42.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I've never used a modern Java IDE (as I've been fortunate enough to never have to program in Java), but still feel confident in the claim that refactoring Haskell is 100 times easier, yes.
43.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Not quite sure what you're talking about but it sounds like you want lenses. Mutability is definitely not less hassle or time if you account for the dramatic difference in error rates and maintenance costs.
44.
by nbouscal 10y ago
That's… exactly the opposite of my experience, and that of every Haskeller I know. Refactoring is 100x easier in Haskell than any other language I've worked in.
45.
by nbouscal 10y ago
> Don't things get messy and ugly as the pure world of Haskell is being tainted? Haskell is excellent at handling state. "Pure" doesn't mean no state, it means all state is handled explicitly in a type-safe way. >
46.
by nbouscal 10y ago
You think that sounds like a research paper? What field are you reading research papers in?! For what it's worth, the author of the article has written multiple best-selling books for popular audiences.
47.
by nbouscal 10y ago
"Serial sexual assaulter" isn't hyperbole, and I'm not screaming. fletom's comment is correct. It's not just an allegation when it's on record for everyone to listen to.
48.
by nbouscal 10y ago
It's not about Thiel being indifferent to the issue in general as a passive observer. He's actively making things worse by supporting Trump, and he's indifferent about that. He's willing to take his policy wins in exchan
49.
by nbouscal 10y ago
You're right, Thiel's position isn't based on hatred – it's based on indifference. It's based on being privileged enough that Trump's hatefulness doesn't and won't personally affect him. I don't
50.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Scott Adams has been obviously supporting him since last August, his claims of endorsing other candidates have been very clearly not genuine.
51.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I would attribute this discrepancy to a natural extension of pg's thoughts about the blub paradox ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ). Most PHP developers I've talked to justify their work in PHP by saying that e
52.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I worked professionally in PHP for years, and have since worked professionally in Ruby and Haskell. I'm not following a status quo by saying that working in PHP was exceptionally painful by comparison even to Ruby (despite Ruby being q
53.
by nbouscal 10y ago
In the majority of cases, risk compensation leads to a decrease in expected benefit of legislation, but does not eliminate the benefit. (At least, that's the message I came away with from reading Foolproof .)
54.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I upvoted you for the useful perspective, but wanted to point out that smartbit was almost certainly just sharing information that most readers are unlikely to have, rather than implicitly insisting anything. I don't think your tone in
55.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I've listened to 新闻联播, the way they pronounce shi sounds much closer to sure than to ship. It is somewhere in-between, and that vowel is more rhotic in Beijing dialect, but Standard Mandarin definitely still rhotacizes that vowel (es
56.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Um. Modern Standard Mandarin pronunciation is based on Beijing dialect, and it doesn't take a Beijing accent to pronounce it like "sure", that's totally standard. Beijing dialect does feature more erhua than other dialec
57.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Standard Mandarin (especially Beijing dialect) pronunciation of shí is much closer to the American pronunciation of "sure"†, though, so shít would be pronounced more like "shirt". (Sorry to ruin the joke.) †IPA something
58.
by nbouscal 10y ago
I agree that people summarize things in a sensationalist manner, and that cherry-picking endpoints is unreasonable. I disagree that the pound hasn't tumbled: it did in fact drop substantially in a very short period of time. I also don&
59.
by nbouscal 10y ago
Yes, just can't be bothered to make an arbitrary amount of profit. That's definitely a justifiable reason. ಠ_ಠ
60.
by nbouscal 10y ago
You're explicitly claiming that it won't stay "irrational" in the 2-3 month time range. If you actually knew that with any degree of certainty, you would be able to profit from it. If a pattern actually does happen aga

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