SomeStupidPoint

It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth.

If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them.

Hypervolume grows exponentially.

One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually.

Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it.

What is the shape of that space?

You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.

It's not:

There's just a massive failure of leadership in tech companies (well, in general), so rather than deal with real challenges, they smother themselves in carbon-monoxide statistics -- things that don't set off alarms, but destroy the business through misoptimization.

One could even argue what was so enraging about Clippy (and MS's recent foray into helpbots instead of actual support) was the personality-sans-utility.

No, I don't want to forcibly converse with a brick wall that clearly doesn't understand my question and is chipperly excited about that fact, fuck you.

So I went from loving my latest Windows 10 PC (-- second in a row that had been awesome, even!) to swearing off MS for years (again) in about 30 minutes of completely terrible bot-based customer support.

I sincerely hope that strategy works for them, and they're gaining income somewhere to offset what they've lost from me.

I don't think it will.

You know they're getting crafty when you can lend them your account for 72 hours to unlock your PC.

Legitimate History as a Service?

If it's good enough to handle secret information, it's good enough for my official mail to corporations.

http://www.wrc.noaa.gov/wrso/security_guide/mailing.htm

In the US, you want to send mail to the registered agent.

That's the person on file with wherever they incorporated who accepts legal paperwork during business hours -- and thus can always easily be reached by mail. Companies are required to have one of these, and they'll deal with routing legal complaints internally. Just send your angry letter with tracking to the registered agent, so you get a signature when they drop it off.

For Netflix, it seems like:

> The address of the registered office of this corporation in the State of Delaware is Corporation Trust Center, 1209 Orange Street, City of Wilmington, County of New Castle, Delaware 19081. The name of its registered agent at such address is The Corporation Trust Company.

So if you send your angry mail there, Netflix legal will almost certainly read it.

You could hit the level of physical exercise I'm speaking about in 30-60 per day at home with bodyweight exercises, with a very minimal chance of injury. (To the point my 90 year old grandmother can do the exercises -- she's just slower and does lighter versions.)

That's not a priority for some people, but that's a choice they're making.

It's absolutely not about access or time -- it's about choosing to do it or not. Frankly, given how much more efficient it makes everything else, I think it's harder not to.

Other people feel differently.

The most important role of exercise in weightloss is hormone regulation, not the calories burned. (As you correctly point out.)

Being less stressed and routinely expending large amounts of energy simply causes your body to run differently (because of the hormones produced and burned off), which in turn changes how it processes food and fat stores, what it craves, etc.

I think proper hormone regulation is far more sustainable than the calorie restrictions necessary to offset out-of-whack hormones.

Why is this being upvoted?

It's literally just 20 random quantum computing papers with an unrelated heading and a Google banner, because they got flagged with a tag somewhere.

There's still not an entirely compelling reason to believe it's digital gold and not digital Beanie Babies.

> Unless someone forces them to inter-operate, it's winner takes all.

So you mandate inter-operation at the same time you break up the biggest, just like we've done with every other natural monopoly.

That's the very premise behind democracy:

That different parties have different concerns and foucses, such that the process of mediating between their different plans leaves us better informed and prepared than listening to a single group.

The problem is that over the last 100 years, psychology has been weaponized and deployed at scale against the public, essentially drugging them on fear and anger hormones until they're incapable of rational responses.

The various factions have entered what can only be described as psychological trench warfare -- locked into positions, toxic things sprayed virtually indiscriminately, absolutely no actual progress.

No one is quite sure what to do to fix this.

Sure, but the same objection applies --

The Cave itself is only given definition in terms of what we might call the Ultimate (in a Platonic setting); though it's essence is to obscure the Sun (a symbol of the too bright to observe Ultimate), the very ability to do so is fundamentally related to the fact it's also a manifestation of the Ultimate.

Similarly, the Fire and anything used to cast Shadows. By careful observation of the nature of Shadows and Light from the Fire upon the Cave, we observe a manifestation of the Ultimate interacting with itself, because the Light from the Fire is merely a transposition of Truth from the Sun, while the essence of the Cave is revealed in it, and we can see the Ultimate through the lens of the Cave.

It's fundamentally impossible to separate the manifestation of an Essence from an expression of the Ultimate interacting with itself; ergo, any structure capable of self interacting and capturing its "Errors" will find in them the ability to distill a view of the Ultimate.

-- the argument is pretty endemic to any structure capable of expressing existing: what exists cannot be cut off from the nature of existence, because fundamentally it's doing that.

(Also, first time I think those philosophy classes came in handy.)

Out of curiosity -- what's your SSH tunneling rate in the same setup?

> Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up?

I'm probably using slightly different terminology than other people -- I haven't played much in a while.

The basic idea is to use two quasi-connected redstone wires hooked up to a piston -- one providing an update signal but no power and one providing power but no update signal.

The circuit is such that the two wires are actually branches off of a single redstone wire, using only redstone -- so you can detect if the left or right branch off of a redstone line updates first (within a single update cycle) based on if the piston extends: it only extends if the line carrying the update signal is updated after the line carrying the power signal. (If they come in the other order, it stays retracted because it updates before there's power available.)

> how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like?

You only have an operational model, just like us -- but it's eventually going to look like an extremely localized computation running their world that occasionally gets bumped by outside sources. That sounds like them discovering that their reality is a subregion hosted in another, richer reality.

The question of "game mechanics" only has meaning to the people outside in their language for discussing their actions -- at the end of the day, there is no "game", there's only what the simulation does as a facet of reality. The people inside will accurately suss out a model that includes a structure that looks like them being run as a simulation.

How they interpret that is likely to be different, but no more or less correct, than how we do.

A child you made deaf like that would still discover sound as the vibrations that distorted the lenses on the eye once detection got sensitive enough.

I dispute the very notion that it's possible to cut someone off from the basic nature of reality, because you must fundamentally have constructed the cage from that reality and thus their interaction with their cage will reveal its mechanics (and hence the mechanics of reality) to them.

You can only make it take more time by suppressing noise, but eventually the "errors" will carry accurate information inside. (And someone inside can accelerate this process by causing noise in certain manners.)

> lacking outside interference

Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is either impossible (Bohmian; maybe all of them) or insufficient (Copenhagen, MWI) -- in either case, small "errors" will reveal information about the actual nature of reality.

Yes, lots of ways:

For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system.

A character in Minecraft could build a cosmic ray detector, for instance.

So yes, absolutely -- my expectation is that any intelligent structure in a computational "bubble" will be able to detect that it's in a bubble managed by some outside system.

Is your argument entirely from lack of imagination in how it could be done?

Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation?

That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.

I honestly think that physicists are trapped until they eat their peas about the Copenhagen extraneous assumption and rewrite physics to remove it.

Einstein-Bohm-Bell turn out to have been the right camp, and non-locality not non-determinism is the kooky thing about quantum mechanics. And now we need to rebase ~70 years of physics.

(Also, no one has explained to me why it's appropriate to incorrectly model the topology of tunneling, hence all quantum interactions by pretending things are operating in a manifold.... But that's a debate for a different day.)

Running a 120GB DB on spinning rust to the level of a dozen tx per minute is a jokingly light load on modern hardware, and dead simple to set up in the cloud.

You don't even do anything with most of the DB once you have it.

It's just asking if many 3 term clauses ANDed together are true for a given input set, so you'd give the inputs to spend it to your wallet. Automatic bounties on optimization (sub)problems, yep.

For various reasons, you probably want to use arithmetic and string operations for encoding certain problens. You could do it in bit operations, but efficiency.

I can't take credit for it -- it's one of those things that was floating around as a usage early on, but the features were killed.

It's also an opportunity to drop stock you don't want before the end of Q4.

My impression (about the retail version, say 15-20 years ago) was that it was companies offloading stock they wanted off their books at something of a discount ahead of the holiday season, since it let the companies close out their books for the year and customers get a little bit more for the holidays. It was a win-win in a lot of ways.

Then the disgusting marketing/accounting shenanigans took hold and made it shitty, particularly the online version. It's still possible to find genuine deals, mostly because retailers do still have stock they want to offload.

Targeted ads are basically homeopathic medicine in a different market:

They take a small group of people with money who don't care about the shit you sell and honestly resent seeing your beef jerky ad when trying to buy a couch, dilute it with a bunch of people who once Googled "beef jerky" to figure out that one brand or make a funny meme so as to neutralize statistical qualities about the cohort you might not like, and pretend it'll do something for your business besides act like a sinkhole for your money.

But I've slowly come to think most business statistics are deeply flawed, but now we're trapped using them because there was an upward slope to the cliff and people are dumb. Even if you point out that their flawed number models caused their businesses to collapse over and over for no reason but poor optimization, most people just hear "made money for a while".

C'est la vie.

> it's a great way to stay independent while still having a more reliable income for basic needs

You should be careful with that -- you can get nastier IP agreements through consulting firms than you might at full-time employment.

Similarly, even if it's not in the contract, you probably want your contracting work to be fairly orthogonal to your side projects, so you don't get sued for something by a client. It never looks good if you work on say, a networking project, and then a month later, your networking related product appears on the market.

Wait... you're offended by a non-gendered joke about the fact that interpersonal relationships in an office environment can impact the enforcement of contracts against you?

Do you just look for things to be offended by, or is there a particular reason?

3-SAT solution verifiers, and modest extensions to other kinds of problem spaces.

Maybe they do.

I can't find a single reference on them that contains actual details on the computational model because the internet is full of vapid circular search bait, particularly about cryptocurrencies.

The last I checked, the BTC VM disabled most useful opcodes, which meant you couldn't actually make money automatically redeemable for a large number of constraints you would want to impose.

My quick search seems to support that the VM still disables many opcodes: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

It could also choose to open a steel factory and produce I beams -- why are we not criticizing its low steel output?

Twitter would immediately lose all utility to me if it transitioned out of the business of being a forum/socialization platform to a poorly sourced algorothmic newspaper. (They're flirting with it -- and frankly, it doesn't seem to be going well, because that's not what people want.)

It seems outright disingenuous to suggest that Twitter and the NYT are in the same business, and seems to be based entirely around a false equivalence about "publish". There are multiple kinds of businesses that publish things, and the solution to problems in one domain aren't just to be a differemt type of business.

No, I would bifurcate research into two classes --

Let's call it 'science' and 'hunches'. (I'm sure marketing people would think of a better name.) There's nothing stopping you from publishing hunches; there's nothing stopping the same journals from publishing science and hunches. It would just be the case that we'd treat publishing a hunch as science as fraud, because you're outright lying about how sure you are.

It is the case that several fields would get (almost entirely) moved from science to hunches, but that would be good! The label will match what's inside.

If we have this split in the product lines, if we have these two tiers (models where we're really sure and complex systems where we only have a working hunch), then we should just own it and put that on the tin.

All I'm asking is people stop labeling composite wood as lumber -- and understandably, a lot of people selling composites act like that would make the sky fall.

Hardly, there's a real demand for both products and both serve a real need. Let's just be honest in our marketing and stop conflating the two.

Comparing a centralized, unified group like a newspaper writing team with a diffuse, decentralized mob like Twitter makes me question your sincerity.