simonh

40 ms·

781.
by simonh 3y ago
$10 million? That's maybe 20 developers for a year, including costs of employment, office space, IT services, etc. Less that 1% of Youtube's employees. Chump change.
782.
by simonh 3y ago
It looks like Lira is a grade A scumbag, but he seems to be a very careful scumbag. If he’s being persecuted for voicing opinions, no matter how distasteful, that’s a problem.
783.
by simonh 3y ago
The tricky side of that is how to distinguish between luck and opportunity. Loads of people might be friends at school with someone with a great complementary talent, or have a connected uncle, or happen to start a business in a sector that
784.
by simonh 3y ago
Dangerous asteroid sizes span many orders of magnitude from the smallest real global danger to the largest. Breaking one up would work for asteroids over maybe tgevlowest order of magnitude size range, but that still leaves many more orders
785.
by simonh 3y ago
A vast, intricate design with microscopic details at hundreds of levels of emergent forms, coloured in semi-transparency generating holographic effects, using spectra of light far beyond the human visual range, executed in three dimensions
786.
by simonh 3y ago
It's assuming something we know to be false. AlphaZero wasn't even trained against humans at all, but still beats them at Go and Chess handily.
787.
by simonh 3y ago
The article is claiming that advanced AIs cannot become more intelligent than humans, essentially because LLMs cannot become more intelligent than humans. LLMs aren’t the be all and end all of AI though. They’re an impressive but inherently
788.
by simonh 3y ago
We can see the relative motion of galaxies up to the edge of the observable universe from their red shift. So we know they were all 'in one place' 13 bn years ago. It also means we know what the distribution of initial vectors mus
789.
by simonh 3y ago
What on earth makes you think violent crimes are being decriminalised, or that anyone is advocating that?
790.
by simonh 3y ago
You’re right about the distribution of the velocities of galaxies. The problem would be the distribution of the density of galaxies. Even in an instantaneous snapshot of the state of the universe now, there would be more galaxies in the dir
791.
by simonh 3y ago
No idea, I’m a Brit so not familiar with the details of the US tax system. I’m mostly talking generally about free societies, as the sentiment in the book is broadly applicable. There are many forms of tax. If the system is unfair, sure, it
792.
by simonh 3y ago
What was done in Oregon, based on the successful policy in Portugal, was decriminalising use and possession of very small quantities. Distribution and sale are still just as illegal as before. Basically I think this is the right approach. D
793.
by simonh 3y ago
> The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted.. We do conscript capital to fund military spending, through taxation. It’s levied across the whole s
794.
by simonh 3y ago
> which has seemingly been ignored I read comments like this almost every time SpaceX is mentioned here, and climate crisis extremists bang on about it endlessly. It’s impossible to ignore, it’s just that most people disagree. >you ca
795.
by simonh 3y ago
Yes sorry, FAA. I’m a Brit so not as familiar with the US institutions. My point is there is extensive and persistent oversight, debate and opportunities for input and objection. Journalists play a role in the public interest in any democra
796.
by simonh 3y ago
Sure, the reasons why some creatures evolved this sort of behaviour could be different to others. I was specifically talking about Endopterygota.
797.
by simonh 3y ago
I think the hypothesis is that it started as a delay in the internal development of wings. This split the creatures life cycle into a pre-winged feeding stage and a post-winged adult breeding stage. The possession of wings in the later stag
798.
by simonh 3y ago
There’s been a lot of research on self identification in many species. One paper I’m aware of did an analysis of 50 years worth of research on over 30 species. So we have a fairly decent idea about the development of theory of mind and self
799.
by simonh 3y ago
Where by ‘stole’, you mean granted licensed access to the commons by elected representatives, under strict regulation and monitoring, in order to provide services to the public at competitively bid prices.
800.
by simonh 3y ago
There are thousands of people responsible for planning, certifying and monitoring the operations of these launches. Within SpaceX, but also the launch site owners, the FCA, journalists covering it all. There are comprehensive environmental
801.
by simonh 3y ago
For me the sweet spot is an SE with a battery case. A ‘full size’ phone still wouldn’t cut it with my usage, so this way it’s heavy, but still fairly compact and gets the job done.
802.
by simonh 3y ago
Even within my immediate family we seem to have distinct differences in our conscious experience. My wife has very little visual or auditory experience of thought, no inner voice even when reading a book. While I mostly experience speaking
803.
by simonh 3y ago
If you mean deep learning type systems, you need to train them on vast training sets of similar data so they can learn very general patterns, similarities and connections. Like giving them 10,000 pictures of dogs, so they can learn to recog
804.
by simonh 3y ago
Proof is tough, but there are approaches to reasoning about it. One is statistical models of phoneme development which indicates that languages in Africa started diversifying up to about 150,000 years ago. However I think it seems likely th
805.
by simonh 3y ago
These “we all think this, we all do that” arguments are cartoonish nonsense. Just because you can find some people that think X and Y that doesn’t mean we, the human species, think X and Y. Do ‘we’ as a species think that centralisation do
806.
by simonh 3y ago
None of those investigations showed that parts supplied to Apple came from Xinjiang. Only that one of their suppliers operates a plant there. These suppliers are huge conglomerates with plants all over China. Apple is one of a tiny handful
807.
by simonh 3y ago
I did that once. After I snuck back into the house I heard our 3 year old say to my wife "Mummy, did you know that Santa Clause looks like my Daddy?"
808.
by simonh 3y ago
I think it's fair to say it's something we should all strive for if we're able.
809.
by simonh 3y ago
Yep, flaws I saw in how my parents brought me up definitely informed the way I approached bringing up my kids. But then I look at the childhoods my parents had, and honestly they did a heck of a lot better job than I could have had any righ
810.
by simonh 3y ago
Sure, it’s only called dark matter because we find it hard to observe it.

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