xamuel

41 ms·

391.
by xamuel 7y ago
The Bible works on many levels. Advanced knowledge of the context will unlock certain levels, but isn't required for many of those levels (including, I think, the deepest levels). Jesus himself explicitly addresses this, saying: "
392.
by xamuel 7y ago
Best of both worlds is a modern translation with footnotes/introduction. Even without these, it's amazing how well you can glean the necessary context in most cases.
393.
by xamuel 7y ago
You don't even need to do the imagining yourself. You can just have your AGI do that imagining for you. "Computer, come up with a way for us to take over the world without anyone noticing."
394.
by xamuel 7y ago
People mistakenly extrapolate technological progress to progress everywhere else. Thus, they reason, surely the best source for Stoicism (or any other ancient practice: Christianity; Zen; Platonism; etc etc) is something written in the 21st
395.
by xamuel 7y ago
One way to see it's more subtle than meets the eye: suppose the website defines a function F which is annotated as taking a string argument. The website itself only ever calls F with strings. But suppose I go to the website, open the c
396.
by xamuel 7y ago
Maybe Idiocracy was right about the whole "It's got electrolytes!" meme, except swap out electrolytes for neural networks.
397.
by xamuel 7y ago
https://xkcd.com/592/
398.
by xamuel 7y ago
If someone has discovered AGI, it should be trivial for them to completely dominate absolutely everything. There would be no more need for capitalism or anything, we would be in a post-singularity world.
399.
by xamuel 7y ago
Prediction: If this goes through, there will be such an oversupply of drivers, that in order to beat the competition, drivers will de facto have to adopt unofficial practices like "Ok, you wanted to go 20 miles, we've gone 10 mi
400.
by xamuel 7y ago
They already made a minimum viable product self-driving car. It's called a "train".
401.
by xamuel 7y ago
It's like if someone watches "2001: A Space Odyssey" and takes HAL as the model for AI, so they work really hard and create a computer capable of playing chess like in the movie. "Well, that's not really the essence
402.
by xamuel 7y ago
Re: Comparing self-driving cars to AGI: It's counterintuitive, but depending how versatile the car is meant to be, the problems might actually be pretty close in difficulty. If the self-driving car has no limits on versatility, then, g
403.
by xamuel 7y ago
Reminds me of back in the late 90s, any time there was a thunderstorm, the clerks at the public library would go around and unplug all the computers. Anguish and misery for all us kids awaiting our turns on the precious internet terminals w
404.
by xamuel 7y ago
The approach here is unnecessarily constrained because the author is seeking glyphs in advance for all two-letter pairs, "one size fits all", so it's unsurprising that the results are rather ugly and hard to read. If the font
405.
by xamuel 7y ago
>The decimal representation of a number is really a string representation It is incorrect to speak of "the" decimal representation of a number, as many numbers have non-unique decimal representations, the most famous example be
406.
by xamuel 7y ago
That's not how falsifiability works. >"If we find a completely different way of computing [the universe]" We can only compute models of the universe. If a model apparently never contradicts our observations of the univer
407.
by xamuel 7y ago
I was utterly confused by trigonometry in junior high, it seemed to be some kind of secret language I had missed the sacred initiation rites into. And everyone seemed to treat it as exactly that--meaningless esoterica. And then one day some
408.
by xamuel 7y ago
Re your parenthetical story, So like, the TA asked you to compute <1,2,3>X<4,5,6> and you jumped straight to <2x6-3x5, -(1x6-3x4), 1x5-2x4>, without the intermediate step of | i j k | | 1 2 3 | | 4 5 6 |? Or did you begin
409.
by xamuel 7y ago
Nice quote. I love the double-meaning in that poem. "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair", intended by Ozymandias to mean "despair because you are so much weaker", but the double-meaning is "despair because my
410.
by xamuel 7y ago
Caves would be a step up from tent cities, and we grunt at each other these days in 140 characters or less--even our kings! People follow their GPS systems off of bridges into lakes, our ancestors could navigate by the stars. Our bards earn
411.
by xamuel 7y ago
>"Our times are different" thrown around without care is a very widespread cognitive error. Absolutely right. The Book of Ecclesiastes talks about this at great length. History repeats, no-one will remember those of us alive to
412.
by xamuel 7y ago
Stanley Kubrick already poked fun at this in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). Midway to Jupiter, astronaut Frank Poole reclines and utters robotic-sounding commands to the much-more-human-sounding onboard flight computer HAL while
413.
by xamuel 7y ago
You are mistaken because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God. Christ spoke many times about baptism, even in the very final climax of the Gospel of Matthew. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and
414.
by xamuel 7y ago
I do wish more churches would take advantage of the fact (they're probably unaware of it) that U.S. Copyright Law has exemptions for churches. So if you wanted to, say, show "The Passion of the Christ" in church as part of wo
415.
by xamuel 7y ago
I agree that it was inappropriate for the comment I was replying to to be flagged. I suspect the mods probably flagged it in fear that the "Christianity is a slave religion" comment would spark a flamewar. mynameishere's comm
416.
by xamuel 7y ago
Not exactly what you're asking, and not meant as an endorsement, but I've heard the following theory, which at least seems plausible. The theory goes that when the multitude followed Jesus into the wilderness, each individual brou
417.
by xamuel 7y ago
The article specifies that the tribe in question had more women than men. I don't understand why the Jesuits made monogamy a requirement for baptism. The idea of having any sort of "litmus test" at all for baptism is a blatan
418.
by xamuel 7y ago
If you like that sort of thing, try doing similar code for the Ackermann function [1]. In a certain sense that can be made semi-formal, if you can do this sort of thing for the Ackermann function, then you can do it for almost anything. ht
419.
by xamuel 7y ago
Nonsense, the digits of sqrt(2) most definitely are computable and there are bounded algorithms that can check, given inputs n and k, whether or not n is the kth digit of sqrt(2).
420.
by xamuel 7y ago
If you give someone gold long enough, eventually they'll complain how heavy and ugly gold is. Whiteboards are an unbelievable utopia compared to so many other disciplines. It's an amazing stroke of luck that software developers do

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