walleeee

40 ms·

541.
by walleeee 6y ago
> Imagine if human-like life had evolved a billion years ago, when the reservoirs of petrochemicals were a billion years less developed? Perhaps then we (they?) would have had time to contemplate the consequences of burning through that
542.
by walleeee 6y ago
Sure, I don't disagree.
543.
by walleeee 6y ago
If unicorns weren't real we wouldn't have a word for them.
544.
by walleeee 6y ago
Assuming this is satire, how does it add to the discussion?
545.
by walleeee 6y ago
> monitors suspended above you facing down Or aim a projector at the ceiling
546.
by walleeee 6y ago
> I am coming around to the POV that soil should be thought of as a kind of organism. More people need to realize this! Healthy soils are enormously rich ecosystems. They're also fundamental to the water and carbon cycles. Soils are
547.
by walleeee 6y ago
It did not solve human starvation. That is a problem of distribution as well as production. It did allow us to feed far more people, temporarily. Meanwhile we will face mass starvation on a level never before seen if we can't figure ou
548.
by walleeee 6y ago
Your point that existing systems tend to conceal complexity and embody tested strategies is well taken. I would just point out that incrementalism is not at all guaranteed to converge to sustainable solutions. Decisions which at one point i
549.
by walleeee 6y ago
So long as a human remains in the loop somewhere no decision is "purely logical and data-driven", although you make a good point about the risks of chasing efficiency over all else
550.
by walleeee 6y ago
There is active research into engineering crops for increased CO2 incorporation rates and subsequent passage to soils. In this case the carbon sink is the terrestrial landmass itself, not the plant. This would have the added benefit of rest
551.
by walleeee 6y ago
Sure, and the point of simulation in the first place is often to understand how the system in question will behave, in advance. The distinction I meant to make is precisely that some processes may not be computable in this way; that they ca
552.
by walleeee 6y ago
There's no reason that feedbacks must be positive in principle. Regardless, though, as the earth system wanders farther from its most recent stable state (the Holocene equilibrium), its behavior is likely to continue to become more cha
553.
by walleeee 6y ago
> You can absolutely reversibly compute conways game of life state, and you can compute it forward as well (after all, it is a game). That's prediction. Notice I said irreducible , not irreversible. Yes, you can reverse the computa
554.
by walleeee 6y ago
> Get it? It's just... insane. The rules of the universe are the rules for all things in it. They apply to everything, at all scales, at all times. This is nowhere near as certain as you make it out to be. Take Conway's Life. W
555.
by walleeee 6y ago
> There is no Mysterious Stranger. ... besides ourselves. It's not that we don't relate to anyone or anything this way; its that the relation is reflexive.
556.
by walleeee 6y ago
Yes. We can point to processes and relationships at various organizational scales and levels of abstraction (e.g., physical principles, chemical gradients, genes, hormones, morphological growth, phenotypes, ecosystems) but knowledge remains
557.
by walleeee 6y ago
If we intend to upload ourselves into anything, it will need to be an organism unto itself, however artificial. A machine will not suffice. The challenge is akin to creating life de novo . It seems easier to just quit destroying so much of
558.
by walleeee 6y ago
> But at one point, it will be more efficient to go full synthetic. If you kill all life, all fungi, all bacteria, everything will be dead matter, and like rocks on Mars or frozen seals at the poles, nothing will move in an uncontrolled
559.
by walleeee 6y ago
> You can ask the same question for all the other functions that plants perform. most of these functions we might not even know of and only realize once it's missed. > in short, it's not economical for us to do. it might not
560.
by walleeee 6y ago
Agriculture must become net carbon neutral if not negative to confront the effects of climate change. As Gates mentions, soils comprise a larger carbon reservoir than the atmosphere. A successful strategy may include the following (likely n
561.
by walleeee 6y ago
> A lot of the power of the thought experiment hinges on the fact that the room solves questions using a lookup table, this stacks the deck. Perhaps we be more willing to say that the room as a whole understood language if it formed an (
562.
by walleeee 6y ago
> If you have 10 fields in your class, a constructor with 10 arguments is not appropriate. Instead we prefer object initialisers, but this requires exposing the ‘set’ method, and allowing mutability. Why not have the ctor accept a single
563.
by walleeee 6y ago
Yes, I'm glad you mention that; unfortunately I think sometimes the idea that causation may be multi-dimensional (in other words, that there is not necessarily a single implicative model capable of wholly explaining all things) gets mi
564.
by walleeee 6y ago
Life can't exceed the capabilities of its substrates on their own terms, but it's not clear that life can be fully explained in or reduced to those terms either. Anyways, yes, this is super cool.
565.
by walleeee 6y ago
You just have to move around every 20 something days, although I don't know if it's enforced.
566.
by walleeee 6y ago
Similarly, can someone explain why the bombs weren't dropped a few miles out to sea? It would still have clearly demonstrated the capability.
567.
by walleeee 6y ago
Obviously YC is about startups, but startups aren't exactly the subject of HN. Only a small minority of posts here are actually about them.
568.
by walleeee 6y ago
I agree with everything you said.
569.
by walleeee 6y ago
I think we're talking past each other. I agree with what you're saying here. Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I agree that e.g., watching cable news and skimming headlines will not give one a particularly accurate or useful
570.
by walleeee 6y ago
Who said we ought to wait to act until the White House calls?

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