If I used a locksmith to get in to your house without your permission, it would be "breaking in" in colloquial language.
Your reply is overly pedantic, when taken in the best light.
160 karma · joined June 17, 2014
Your reply is overly pedantic, when taken in the best light.
Clearly, it's reasonable for people not to expect to have to pay airlines for travel to Europe.
If this lowers that rate, it's possible that the difference in beatings, shootings, and home invasions will be basically even, because there isn't a large portion of the criminal element which is waiting for better encrypted cellphones to do these things (hint: other things about cellphones make these problematic, and most depend on other evidence anyway when prosecuted), where there is a reason to think that police being restrained in using illegal investigation methods will decrease the rate at which police use other illegal investigation methods.
But that's exactly it: if you leave a gaping hole for the feds to get through I (in the sense of a hypothetical attacker) can go through it too, especially with how easily most federal secrets leak out and the fact that rekeying is essentially impossible for this use.
It doesn't, for instance, counter-balance the trade benefit with an assessment of the societal cost of our production moving overseas.
- The time to set up certain kinds of facilities, eg, good physics labs or mechanical engineering labs, can be on the order of several years to a decade.
- There is a limited ability to scale up, as it relies on its own out put to keep functional (eg, professors and TAs).
- Non-responsive hiring managers whose cultural sense was normalized before many of these changes impacted colleges (eg, >20 years ago) haven't adjusted their hiring practices, and place an artificially high reward on college degrees.
> says that we should use more internet in our solution, because this is the future and clearly interconnectedness is the future in book! and socialization!
How am I supposed to take your opinion seriously, and what actually is your opinion, when you say such contrary things in such little time?
It's about at that point, particularly if there's multiple files, that I find myself suddenly wishing for stronger type systems.
That being said, most things I write (outside of work) aren't that long, and you can get started faster in dynamic languages.
We have a precious example occurring not on Earth, and within a few decades had figured out how to make large pulses out of it.
Your summary also does a great disservice to the history of using assorted biochemicals as fuel, from various plant and animal oils through initial study in refinements and use of various technologies to aid in their burning.
You can hardly claim, as your statement implied, that we had full mastery of burning hydrocarbons the first time we tried - or that it was anything like when we tried to scale that technology up.
Given 62 years, we have systems with controlled fusion and systems without energy reclaim that are energy positive. A lot of the lack of progress is due to the relatively low level of funding. (The entire cost of fusion research so far is about the same as one stealth bomber.)
I find it unlikely that over doubling the time, with better technology, won't let us solve the capture problem, especially since the facilities of many studies are actually using old technology which we already know how to do better than. (Example: the ignition laser could be purchased in reduced size and with more efficiency for much less than it cost to initially build the laser.)
Your argument seems to largely be "It's complicated to me compared to what I know about these other methods, so can't happen!"
> Technology is a function of available energy (Tainter, White, Prigogine), not vice versa.
This is super unrelated to what we're talking about, because not even you are arguing that we're going to run out of the ability to produce electricity in <100 years.
I have the feeling you didn't read what I wrote.
Looking at the relative rates of technical growth and computing power, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll be able to accurately pick out what the future is going to bring.
Examples of technologies that are expected in the next 50-100 years: 3D printable organs which can be transplanted, based on your own stem cells; the first smarter-than-human general purpose AI; fusion power; the ability for bioengineering to be done with a home lab kit. (We're actually at the cusp of the first and last of these now.)
That level of bioengineering, computing prowess, and cheap power will have an incredibly hard to predict effect on issues like food production, ecosystem maintenance, etc.
So which of your warnings are only problematic at 100+ years?
I'm considerably more worried that a giant space rock is going to come turn my continent in to a pool of molten rock.
The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us.
I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do.
There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.
No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy.
The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants.
The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests.
Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role.
Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.
A lot of our bottle necks occurred at times before we really spread out all over the place.
In what way?
The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior.
I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous.
Ed: A key word.
To be an existential threat, there have to be less than 5 million humans left (in my mind, at least, and this is probably a really high figure to be 'existential'). This means whatever you propose has to be at least 99.9% deadly.
To put that in perspective, that's three viruses each as deadly as ebola at its worst (~90% deadly) striking humanity one after the other. /That/ would leave ~5-10 million humans alive.
So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity?
Even the human mass extinction has given life time to adapt, by way of crops, farm animals, pets, etc. We've even helped make sure that hundreds or thousands of species across many different kinds of life are 100% going to survive along with us if it's remotely in our power.
There are likely hundreds or thousands of other species like raccoons, pigeons, rats, jellyfish, various kinds of insects, etc that are going to thrive in our cities and continue to coevolve as parasites.
I'm not entirely convinced a human caused mass extinction is really all that much worse than other kinds, because we provide some guaranteed survival routes to animals that can coevolve with us, and be useful in some way.
I charged people with your opinions higher mark-up (effectively) by declining to give them discounts because I didn't like their entitled attitude. Sometimes I also threw them out because I just couldn't be bothered.
In general, they actually paid less (even not getting discounts) and took up more employee time than other customers, and we were better off without people like that.
I think the only people who actually tolerate them are large chain stores, and only because they can't be bothered trying to assess whether their drones are exercising good judgment.
In short: get lost, we don't need your money.
Ed: typos. Early morning. Blah.
A random walk on a gradient tends to go downhill, and becoming airborne is a long uphill trek.
Theoretically possible, but unlikely to the point I'm more concerned with other things.
I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to.
Conflating secret law with law being the basis of our large scale interactions doesn't make for a strong argument, unless you can show that one necessitates the other.
Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it.
I'm curious what you'd propose as a stable large scale social structure that doesn't fundamentally depend on us establishing a mutual rulebook that we all agree to play by. I don't mean that sarcastically, I honestly want you to suggest one.
Further, it's not the case that actions like those done by the NSA happened in a vacuum. The reality is that most of the country demanded, following one stinging terrorist attack that this must never happened again. The men and women of our military fulfilled that wish: at the cost of $20 billion a year, they delivered to us most of the globe on a silver platter, completely electronically dominated and ready to be watched to stop even a whiff of such a threat.
That our social demands (in aggregate) are childish, insane, bipolar, etc isn't their fault. They simply did what society demanded it needed to feel safe, what they saw as their duty.
The simple truth is that the current state of affairs is exactly what we've asked for, in large part, and that the most realistic way to reform it is to engage with other citizens and help them understand why their contrary and silly demands are contrary and silly.
All that pulling away from the political exchange will do is lead us down the path of a civil war (or other turmoil) as people who refuse to be part of the rule making also refuse to follow the rules.
My point wasn't that this didn't happen or the US was some magical egalitarian wonderland (though the foundational period of the US had a surprisingly level of wealth equality compared to some other periods).
Rather, my point was the manner in which they did this was to construct a system of law that protected the private individual from the instruments of government, and that we're slowly undoing that precise social contract - not stealing their wealth in exchange for restraint on government powers.
It's hard to argue even though the founding of the US wasn't perfect, and that these instruments largely came about as a protection for the wealthy, that it didn't significantly raise the profile of the citizen-as-having-rights-to-be-protected form of government or that the US doesn't have a long history of viewing such policies as important, even if there have been historic violations.
I think you'd even have trouble finding periods similar to the 50-70 year long ratcheting we've seen meant to undermine those exact same rights, or that their infringement has crept so far up the social ladder.
> I think that the fact that there are uncountable sets which means there is not a way to map the natural numbers in any "relation" to that set seems like it undermines the Aristotelian idea of linking mathematical objects with physical things.
I try to think of infinite things as extending finite mathematics by replacing a simple set with an equivalence class of pairs of (set, make_more_elms), where set is a set and make_more_elms is a constructor to make set in to a set with more of the "whole" set in it.
Then we can view acting on infinite sets (as long as we generate finite results, which we by default always will) as interacting with these tuples using finite math.
The fact that the naturals have a different cardinality than the reals can be expressed by ({}, build_naturals) and ({}, build_reals) being in different equivalence classes.
At no point do we have to deal with anything actually infinite to come to these conclusions, we're just looking at objects that are both finite with a pretend "infinity" constructed out of them.
What if MIT were logging who went to the bathroom?
There's clearly no fundamental difference in securing a different part of the building. Does Mr Stallman (or perhaps an employee of the building if he's just a third party) not have a basis to criticize MITs tracking of bathroom habits because he (or they) don't own the building?
In what way is door access different?
If the problem is that an incomplete switch to technology left us in a chimeric state where we have the worst of both worlds, why not remove one of the two? If we remove the cameras, old umpire error will move the box up; if we remove the umpires from pitch calling, the new computers will have no trouble doing a bunch of math and moving the box up.
This seems more like an incomplete implementation of an idea, rather than a fundamental flaw.
This just makes me think he both doesn't understand brains or AI.
I also don't get the insistence on a 'body'. If we weren't planning on having the AI totally isolated, and intended to say, talk to it in order to see if it was an AI, then we were already proposing to give it senses right from the start.
In fact, I don't think I've seen a single proposal for an AI that didn't give it at least one external sense and many internal ones. I don't see why we would think it would have that much trouble building metaphores.
As Lera Boroditsky says:
> If you’re not bound by limitations of memory, if you’re not bound by limitations of physical presence, I think you could build a very different kind of intelligence system
> I don’t know why we have to replicate our physical limitations in other systems.
Those are subjective criteria, to decide if a country not only "efficiently" settles a matter, but it also does so "quickly".
Similarly, there's not a single country where we'd find there is literally "no corruption", which means it's just a subjectively strong form of "nearly nonexistent", or where we'd find there is "no expropriation" ever in its history, as opposed to it just being "highly unlikely" to happen to you.
These subjective differences account for the difference between a 90/100 and 100/100. So if your example was that only 10% of the score depends on the difference between a figurative "no corruption" and "nearly nonexistent" corruption, you've done a very poor job convincing me it's an objective test.
Which types are required to define the function, both as parameters and through any global/inherited scope/other state? Which types are directly related, eg, containers to string, containers themselves, indexing, etc?
By the time you have some sense of what things go where in the program, and what they turn in to, you usually have significantly narrowed down what the program can be doing.
Note: This works considerably better with some languages than others, but can work reasonably well on weakly typed things like Python.