rsaarelm

24 ms·

211.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
There was once a wise and venerated fish who preached about water. Water, he would say, surrounds and supports us. We are all in and of the water, and where there is nothing else there is water. Fish came from all over the ocean to hear hi
212.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
(Just to be clear, my practical argument isn't "just send robots", it's "you're not going to know how to build good enough robots for the in-vitro thing to work".)
213.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
The sufficiently advanced AI is going to have to be able to do pretty much the same things humans can do for the thing to work, so it'd be a game-changer in itself, not something that gets waved off as an aside. Re. the preservation thing,
214.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
If you have robots that can raise babies into grown-up humans, the robots need to be pretty much the same as humans themselves at that point.
215.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
The stirred-up crazy in the comment thread there is almost more interesting than the post itself. I never realized how religion-like this stuff has ended up being for a lot of people before seeing that.
216.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort, skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.
217.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
Especially with Andrei Alexandrescu on board, D is striving for some very interesting stuff with its template metaprogramming system. I think Alexandrescu said in an interview somewhere that the goal is to have a language where you don't ev
218.
The MIT style in Artificial Intelligence 1958 – 1985(vanemden.wordpress.com)
10 points by rsaarelm 15y ago|1 comments
219.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
The idea that people who aren't so sure about this as you are have isn't that telepathy is going on. It's that if this sort of mind-state cloning is going on, you might no longer have grounds to expect to wake up as the physically original
220.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
My take on that is that mammalian intelligence was already a massively powerful thing, and just needed to stumble into some sort of trick to make it more, I don't know, recursive? to start the emerging human dominance. I'd bet money that go
221.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
Not sure just how important the humans being different from other animals thing is. We've got a billion years of evolution of multicellular life, working up to the brain of the not-quite-human primates, and something like two million years
222.
by rsaarelm 15y ago
Freeman Dyson's got some ideas about how some type of life could keep going for an arbitrarily long time even in an universe undergoing heat death: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson_ad/dyson_ad_index.html
223.
The myth of the Lisp genius(johndcook.com)
113 points by rsaarelm 15y ago|108 comments
224.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
Figure out how much sleep you need per day, and try to set up a rigid schedule where you wake up when you want to and go to bed the required hours before the time. Hacks for getting to sleep at a specific time: - Take an hour long walk, go
225.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
Finland is the odd one out in the language similarity thing. Scandinavian languages and Dutch are pretty close to English, but Finnish isn't even Indo-European.
226.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
I wonder if there's any hope of ever getting type classes in OCaml. Then you'd be able to have stuff like a single "print" function you can give any type of value that can be turned into a string representation.
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by rsaarelm 16y ago
Is there a particular technique you can describe that brings about that effect?
228.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
I figured robots haven't gained momentum at anywhere the same rate as personal or distributed computing since robust sensing and interaction of the physical world is still mostly an unsolved problem. Robots are useful in carefully physicall
229.
Helplessly dominant(antipope.org)
5 points by rsaarelm 16y ago|0 comments
230.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/etu2s/i_was_born_in_sh... This Reddit IAmA has the poster claiming his grandfather was pretty deeply involved in the plan. Relevant subthread: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/etu2s/i_was_born_i
231.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
I, for one, would dearly love to see an Elite-style game but no one has made one (worth talking about), be it single-player or an MMO. Have you taken a look at Egosoft's X3? It starts out like Elite, but eventually you can apparently end
232.
John Baez: Green Mathematics(johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com)
30 points by rsaarelm 16y ago|7 comments
233.
Ultima Underworld bugs(dfan.org)
109 points by rsaarelm 16y ago|17 comments
234.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
SimpleRL is an ultra-minimal seed for a roguelike game: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL . It'll make you look into doing an application with an interactive UI somewhat less trivial than what you can do with bare stdin/stdout. From a game
235.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
You can also do `(+ 1 2 3)` in Lisp, but `3 2 1 +` doesn't evaluate to 6 in Forth.
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Scruffy vs Neat AI: The Lighthill Affair(vanemden.wordpress.com)
7 points by rsaarelm 16y ago|0 comments
237.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
If a tablet with nothing but a good 10" screen, a web browser and a pdf viewer was be cheap enough, say sub-$100, I'd definitely consider buying it.
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Goodbye to academic research(blog.devicerandom.org)
270 points by rsaarelm 16y ago|92 comments
239.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
Maybe the idea of the new book was to point out that you can read LotR and Silmarillion as myths and histories written in-universe, instead of an objective and reliable narrative. Suddenly all sorts of things might be slanted to make the wi
240.
by rsaarelm 16y ago
For another fun scale-comparing trick, if you had a model of the whole visible universe, somehow flattened into 2D, with the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri being around a millimeter, you should be able to fit the whole thing on a h

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