saulrh

111 ms·

721.
by saulrh 12y ago
Blindsight by Peter Watts. The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. Ra, by Sam Hughes ( http://qntm.org/ra ). The Sequences of Less Wrong, and a good chunk of the related writing (HPMOR, Three Worlds Collide, https://w
722.
by saulrh 12y ago
Permutation City by Greg Egan. Accelerando by Charles Stross. They'll guide you to shape your though processes in strange ways that are probably useful for logical thinking.
723.
by saulrh 12y ago
For whatever reason, most of the programmers I know are intrigued in some way by brains; maybe it's something to do with being able to handle abstraction, or seeing consciousness as just another process or program, or something like th
724.
by saulrh 12y ago
Talent is a thing. However, it's a bit different from what people think it is: inherent talents are about acquiring skills , not having skills . Talent won't make you magically good at something. What it will do is make it easie
725.
by saulrh 12y ago
There are two major things that can make AI difficult: having too many options to choose from, and having difficulty figuring out which options are better. NetHack is nasty in both of these dimensions. • Many options are available: - Many d
726.
by saulrh 12y ago
Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you
727.
by saulrh 12y ago
Huh, interesting. Because for the longest time I've been going "I can cause the placebo effect on myself by believing that it works" whenever I feel bad, but I've never been able to find any studies that'd confirm t
728.
by saulrh 12y ago
> and the belief in the placebo effect itself would effect the desired results Are there any studies saying that this precise trick, consciously invoked by people who understand the situation, doesn't work?
729.
by saulrh 12y ago
Yep. Ebola is just not a very scary disease. Its incubation period is short and reliable, it doesn't become infectious until symptoms display, it's not particularly infectious in the first place, and its transmission mechanisms ar
730.
by saulrh 12y ago
Good. Scream as much as you want about facial recognition software; it doesn't give them any capabilities they didn't already have and if they do _anything_ with it it will eventually mess up and they will be eviscerated in court.
731.
by saulrh 12y ago
We get a lot of these in AI research. When your math is a hideous snarl of abstract algebra and graph structures and your code includes a novel 3d dynamics engine and custom collision detection, it's exhilarating to see your simulated
732.
by saulrh 12y ago
If you can tie a definition of "heavy drinker" to "causative factor in 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults", I don't care whether it agrees with the common definition, it's still useful. If anything, it's
733.
by saulrh 13y ago
They missed an important datum - drone operators suffer from PTSD and burnout just as much as pilots of manned combat aircraft and almost as much as infantrymen. They don't need giant pictures on lawns; that know full well what they&
734.
by saulrh 13y ago
Agree, I see the same. I see posts prefixed with "[pending]" and with an Endorse button in the grey at the top; I hit Endorse and the "[pending]" goes away. So I'm pretty sure the system is live.
735.
by saulrh 13y ago
Try using xbindkeys and xdotool together. xbindkeys uses guile as an extension language, with guile functions bound to keyboard shortcuts to invoke xdotool to simulate inputs. It works well enough that I get annoyed every time I have to dea
736.
by saulrh 13y ago
There's also the "Killing Star" argument[1]. Basically, when your weapons are relativistic planet-crackers, any civilization you can observe is an existential threat: any civilization that shoots destroys another [2]. Civiliz
737.
by saulrh 13y ago
I'll throw in another vote for the "six-by-four area" group, this time from communicating the sizes of lego pieces to my brother while we were building things. I also see a malformed attempt at typing in a hexademical number.
738.
by saulrh 13y ago
Plastic bags last longer in landfills than nuclear waste will last in a repository; plastic photodegrades in about 500 years, multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years [1]
739.
by saulrh 13y ago
Slow emacs startup isn't a problem thanks to the new emacs-server stuff. Running emacs with the "--daemon" flag will cause it to do initialization, fork into the background, and become persistent; now edit files using command
740.
by saulrh 13y ago
Here's some research from Thad Starner, who is actually the person in charge of the Glass project over at Google: Citation: http://dmrussell.net/CHI2010/docs/p1695.pdf . He studied the performance of people do
741.
by saulrh 13y ago
Agreed. The really interesting point of the "How NOT to build a Terminator" talk was not just that we had to avoid building evil machines, but that we have the potential to build machines with better ethics than human soldiers.
742.
by saulrh 13y ago
It's actually a useful thought to bring in. You can actually prove, mathematically, that controlling a system becomes "more difficult" in a few important ways when your input is to a derivative of the system rather than the s
743.
by saulrh 13y ago
If you can do well on your science homework following "memorization not rationalization", your science homework is not preparing you to do science. Same with math.
744.
by saulrh 13y ago
Keepass runs reasonably well using mono. There are some bugs that would cause problems for real power users - for example, opening multiple databases with the same instance of 2.x is bad - but for basic use it's more than good enough.
745.
by saulrh 13y ago
For me, it wasn't just that it popped up a notification, it's that hitting the arrow on the popup gives you a reply-to window with the text of the notification already filled in. Really made me feel welcome.
746.
by saulrh 13y ago
If I use my home internet, yes. If I use my lab's internet through a tunnel, no. I have checked that a forced-reload-all does not fix it, that switching back to home internet breaks comments again, and that this is true across multiple brow
747.
by saulrh 13y ago
If it turns out to be a big enough problem, Google could probably add a way for people to run Glass off of a throat mike [0], simultaneously solving the "crazy bluetooth headset person" and "hostile takeover" problems. 0: http://en.wikiped
748.
by saulrh 13y ago
Diamond made out of isotopically pure carbon-14. Ring laser gyroscope. Negative-refractive-index metamaterial. A single giant LED. Nanolithography to produce structural coloration. I've wanted a cool physics ring for quite a while.
749.
by saulrh 14y ago
I'm not disagreeing with that. As I said, "even more hyperbolic what-if". Call it the same kind of science fiction that people were writing about smartphones in the 60's: a kind of general direction that far overshoots reality in many ways
750.
by saulrh 14y ago
One simple example where a good BCI could beat hands and voice every time: window switching. No more task bar, no more start menu, no more alt-tab or window previews or virtual desktops. Just think "firefox" and you get firefox. If you want

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