RupertEisenhart

> Penrose

Penrose is great but resting your argument on his work is dubious. I would go for a portfolio approach when thinking about these things.

> Proof by assertion re physics & intelligence

Physics does indeed tell us that intelligence is possible, inasmuch as we are intelligent. Unless you are claiming that you are not a materialist?

> More proof by assertion

The GP is just asserting that 'a lot can happen over a few orders of magnitude', they aren't trying to proove anything.

It seems like you are making your 'proof by assertion' rebuttal do a lot of work for you, without making and strong claims yourself other than 'GP didn't give good reasons why AGI will be a thing'.

Maybe GP didn't give satisfying reasons, but if you know so much about this stuff it would probably be a worthwhile thought experiment for you to attempt to steelman the Strong AI position instead of shouting it down.

Sticking my German sim card into my phone for fifteen minutes in all sorts of random countries and continents and waiting for a number to come through always feels absurd.

I pray for the rise of esims! I feel like it's on the cards.

I use Syncthing[0] for continuous file synchronization to/from my phone, its pretty nifty. Way more memory-heavy than something like this though.

[0] https://syncthing.net/

I would recommend trying to set up tailscale[0] in the servers instead of a VPN, its similar to the reply about SSH ProxyForwarding but it has a lot more tricks under the hood. Of course you need somewhere (aka an AWS server in eg. europe) to connect to.

Also have a look at their blog post about NAT traversal for some potential inspiration: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

Good luck out there! I'll have a look at your github repo now.

[0]: https://tailscale.com/

Check out the original simulation argument paper[0]. The issue is, if we think we are heading to a world in which we can do simulations, it becomes increasingly likely that we are in one of those (presumably very many) worlds, rather than in the one world that existed before the advent of such simulations.

[0] https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

Have you tried MUBI? It takes a lot of the hassle out of finding quality arthouse films, there is a lot of good stuff on there.

Though I must admit that if I didn't have friends holding my hand through the minefield of modern cinema, I would also just stick to books.

Overpass[0] is made for exactly these kinds of queries, I'd recommend playing with it.

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_AP...

As an expat Brit who has been living with ESL speakers for over a decade and gotten sloppy on many of these things, some part of me lives in constant fear of exactly this eventuality.

Ain't been caught yet tho

Could you support markdown headers like these:

---

date: 2021-09-14T22:51:33+02:00

modified: 2021-09-29T15:40:38+02:00

---

Then it would interoperate with GitJournal perfectly I think :).

I just pointed GitNoter at my GitJournal repo and it loaded fairly well :). I'll investigate fiddling with the settings (dates get dumped into GitNoter notes), would be nice to have them interoperate perfectly.

Thanks for GitJournal!

For more background and related material, look at Hansons blog[0] or the dedicated website[1].

[0]: https://www.overcomingbias.com/?s=aliens

[1]: https://grabbyaliens.com/

That is incorrect. Good reasoning can lead to conclusions that are strictly false.

For example, when asked to be more granular, the turtle could say 'I reason that there is only a 1 in 10 chance that seafaring civilizations exist'. The existence of seafaring civilizations doesn't make the turtle wrong in this case.

If the turtle concluded that 'there can not possibly be any seafaring civilizations, because I don't see any' then you could accuse it of bad reasoning.

See my post below, but here is one paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350

I have a citation[0] that disagrees with your characterization, suggesting (the obvious) that while it may technically be possible for humans to live in harsh environments, they tend not to, they tend to live in a small subset of all places, and climate change will move those places everywhere, even in the first world.

"We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y."

Unless you are cheating by saying 'first world' without noting that the places constituting the first world will likely migrate rapidly in the coming century.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350

Yeah, I was amazed by good moby dick was. It's rare that a famous book so fully lives up to the expectations that society has set for it.

I feel the need to point a finger at the gun death rate, and also point out that many suicides are probably gun deaths too [0] (not in the trivial sense of suicide by firearm, but that many of those suicides would not have happened without the availability of guns).

[0] httpss://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/

Imaging doesn't necessarily produce 'images' in the common meaning of the word.

You may think that those 'images' of proteins you see sometimes are 'real images', because they are grey and grainy, but they are just computer-generated diagrams.

I'm not really sure if this comment has any substance. What do you want/expect to see?

"have used a method called atomic-resolution electron tomography to determine the position of every atom in a nanometre-scale sample of a metallic glass" assuming the accompanying diagram is exactly that, it's as much of an image as you will ever get, of anything, afaic.

Edit: formatting

Can't you ban the malicious Devs? They keep creating new GitHub accounts or what?

I love that this is still a topic-- along with 'is glass a fluid', this is one of the few questions I recall from childhood that turns out to still be relevant serious physics.

(Re 'is glass a fluid', my condensed matter professor said something like 'if it is, it flows too slowly to observe significant movement in the lifetime of the universe'.)

I definitely did something like this for column-climbing on occasion, and also tapping shift with fingers from two hands. But yeah n was more about accuracy.

(Hey scythe, brocerious here!)

Thats.. almost literally unbelievable. I almost want to suspect that that's a code name? For any sufficiently large ship that blocks a major waterway? Incredible.

Letsencrypt provide a really good service.

I can recommend the docker image made by linuxserver in particular [0]. Makes Https a (tax free) breeze.

[0] https://docs.linuxserver.io/general/swag

Is that at all possible on the time scales we're talking about? It depends so much on the distribution networks, health services, willingness of population and everything else of each individual country.

Unless I read this wrong. You are seriously suggesting that we should do global risk-factor prioritization? Meaning that the 50year olds in New York are not allowed to take their doses until 70 year old anti-vaxxerss in the Slovenian alps have had theirs?

Thanks for this.

Bringing this down to the CPU is as absurd as all those 17th century opponents of materialism. "How can rude matter bring about all the ineffable qualia!" Hilarious.

None to add to that, though I was more thinking (as another child post) of poets and thinkers who were clearly self-referentially aware of what they were doing and what was going on generally with literary narrative (Swift and Coleridge come to mind).

Edit: oh that child post was you :). Yeah there was for sure a gaping lacuna before Chaucer, and even then you may be right that there was nothing as explicitly on the nose until the 20th century.

TV tropes and Mr Smithsonian are still late to the race in the scheme of things but nearer the pointy end than my original post may have given credit.

Not to be glib, but this reminds me of days spent reading TV tropes.

I think the author is stretching a little to say noone considered this since Aristotle. Not only is there a lot of overlap with meme theory, people have been doing literary criticism forever.

Nice article though.

It's also the incongruence which people like I think.

It would be great to see Adolfo Mateo[0] as a 20 year old Japanese girl, not that he needs any improvement as he is.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES

51% hashpower != 51% of stakeholders, this is an important distinction that many comments about democracy are missing.

Hence GP talking about bodyguards at a concert-- who would typically be a minority of persons there.

Even just using text files surely? Even a single document can benefit from git-- or are you thinking that tree-history and other things which are sometimes provided by editors are enough?

Do you also find it hard to sympathise with people who are trying to escape the trap of poverty? If I made assumptions about your circumstances, would I be surprised?