BadThink6655321

I love coding.

Of three news articles of which I have first hand knowledge, two completely misreported facts. They were exercises in reinforcing a narrative - the truth be damned. The third was accurate, but it was over 45 years ago.

> There are currently things a brain can think about that a Turing machine cannot...

Such as? Are these things forbidden by theory, or just simply beyond current engineering practice?

Clockwork parts? No. Parts that select from a combination of inputs? Yes.

Computability theory demands repeated combination/selection and memory. It doesn’t otherwise care how this is accomplished.

Men know this reference and find it funny. Boys don’t. //smiley_face

If Apple has to open their infrastructure then there needs to be reciprocity. I want Apple Pay. I don’t want Wal-Mart pay, Starbucks pay, CurrentC, ...

Of course a neuroscientist can understand a microprocessor. That’s easy. Let me know when a microprocessor can understand a neuroscientist.

A lambda calculus of two variables requires the law of the excluded middle, or it won’t work. The alphabet of the calculus has to be distinguishable and unambiguous.

First, the answer to whether or not an alien would understand the lambda calculus is no different than whether a dog or a dolphin can understand the lambda calculus. It depends on the wiring of their brain. The lambda calculus is recursive; perhaps then self-awareness/self-reference is a prerequisite to understanding.

Second, the claim that the lambda calculus was discovered but all programming languages are invented does not take into account LISP, which was both discovered and invented (cf. Paul Graham's "Roots of Lisp" (https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/jmc.ps?t=1564708198&).

Are you blaming the victim?

It has to agree with every prior measurement in Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. That, in itself, is impressive.

This is wrong in so many ways. First, I know the language. I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years. This isn’t a question of what the language allows but what the coder is trying to do.

Second, experience has taught me that code and comments often don’t agree. Too, if you have to comment that a loop really isn’t a loop then this is an indication that something is wrong.

Third, it isn’t a loop: while(false) never loops. That’s the point. Having to use a forward reference to understand the beginning of something is bad practice.

Fourth, this construct is almost always a sloppy way to prevent if-else creep. The code is invariably improved by a) not lying about the loop and b) refactoring.

The problem is trying to understand that it’s not a loop. The first line of the block says “this is a loop”. The last line of the block says “this isnt’t a loop.”

The code is, if not outright lying, at least misdirecting.

I'm reminded of two things. First, Knuth's article "On the Complexity of Songs", which features K. C. and the Sunshine band's "That's the way..." (Knuth, btw, is a Christian). Second, many years ago, a music minister and I were goofing around with worship songs set to disco music. I did, "That's the way, uh huh, huh huh, I praise Him, uh huh, uh huh..." This was, partly, to express my discontent with I-focused worship and banal lyrics. He responded with an amazing, impromptu version of the Bee Gee's "Staying Alive" with the lyrics "He is alive! He is alive!".

“Bullshit” is in the eye of the beholder. One view is that if it makes money, it isn’t bullshit — because someone values it enough to pay for it.

How do you arrive at an acceptable secular morality, especially since science claims that it cannot speak to morality?

The prices will stay hard to know because middlemen don’t like to be cut out.

Not according to my taste in beer, black coffee and gin and tonic (https://www.popsci.com/psychopaths-may-prefer-bitter-foods)

Humane to who? Ending one person’s life kills you a little on the inside, too. I have had to put three dogs to “sleep” and the fourth will come sooner than I want. I am not a better person because of it.

Is the problem of mindless censoring of content the “mindless” or the “censoring”? Or, as the first comment indicated, it’s not really a problem?

“... but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it.“

I’ve read it cover to cover, twice. It’s not a bad book, but it would have helped if he had used the Lambda calculus. YMMV.

No mass transit system makes a profit, at least the last time I talked to someone who was heavily involved in the numbers. They require a subsidy of, what was it, 70%? That doesn’t make it wrong, but it has to be considered.

No, freedom is against public transport, not the other way around. It may be a silly argument (personally, I like BART and Metro in D.C.), but you don’t get to erect a straw man.

Maybe we should care about beauty because Nature cares about beauty the way she cares about symmetry. I’m just spitballing here, but maybe Emily Noether’s intellectual heir will find a link between the conservation of energy and Kolmogorov complexity (if this hasn’t already been shown).

I’d use another, less charitable, word. Finding the laws of physics isn’t any different than finding a winning play in Go, except the search space is vastly larger. If we aren’t going to pay for things like the Superconducting Supercollider, we aren’t going to pay for a brute-force search to find the laws of physics. We have to use heuristics to guide the search. “Beauty” has worked in the past (Gell-Mann has a TED talk on this) so there’s no reason to abandon it - until it doesn’t work. Then we’ll try something else. In addition it took, what, 300 years to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem? Good grief. For hard problems, 40 years is nothing.

Necessarily. They make a claim that they then don’t prove.

This really isn’t hard. Morality is just goal-based behavior. Paths that lead to a goal are called good; paths that lead away from a goal are called bad. Whether or not a goal is itself good or bad depends on where it lies on a larger path.

So, what are the ultimate natural goals? Easy. One is life, which is the prequisite for being able to make choices; the other is death, where no more choices are possible. Certainly, you can switch between these goals, but the key point is that nature gives no clue which you should choose. Therefore, all natural ethics is based on personal taste.

N.B. In Christianity, something outside of nature steps in and says, “choose life.” That’s why atheists can act morally (search heuristics can end up being similar).

You may have a chain of logic, but what is the first link in the chain anchored to? It’s not too hard to show that this first link is anchored in belief.

Yes, jargon is just words. But words can clarify or confuse, enlighten or darken, convey truth or lies, exaggerate or be accurate.

As someone famous once said, “if you can’t explain it so your grandmother gets it, then you don’t understand it.”

You can signal virtue by actually being virtuous, or you can just talk about it.

Give me somebody who can actually do the work instead of talking about how great they are — or about how unfair others are to them.

The first is inefficient. The declaration statement writes eight zeros to dest. strncpy() writes len bytes of zeros to dest, then copies the string, stopping at fewer than len bytes if a NUL is found in the src.