Udo

Well that's this specific AI...

> A preview of... gray goo!

We are the gray goo, or rather: our ecosystem is. A flood of self-replicating machines that took over the planet a long time ago, eating everything. If we introduced a new kind of nanite-based life that actually managed to devour our ecosystem (which is probably more challenging than it sounds, given that there are real thermal limits on how fast such molecular disassemblers can work), I'm "optimistic" that they would differentiate into another complex ecosystem over time as well.

It's a site for tabletop/pen&paper roleplaying.

It started out many years ago as a simple dice roller, it parses and executes commonly used dice codes you find in rulebooks, such as "4d6+4" - and it contains many custom codes for different systems. Pretty soon I added the ability to roll and chat in private rooms with your friends, so it became basically a chat site for roleplaying games.

Then Roll20 launched, and my Rolz was basically crushed by it. Other sites have sprung up en masse, too. Rolz doesn't really have a userbase left right now.

Nevertheless, it is the only thing I ever did/launched that people actually used and cared about, so I decided to finally start adding features again. I'm working on a Virtual Tabletop feature right now, it's very early, but usable in a rudimentary way.

I'll probably post to Show HN when it's more fully featured and battle-tested (no realistic expectation of making front page though), but if you want to check out the progress so far you can try it out right now.

While I do share the author's frustration with the fact that GitHub does zero fact checking, my concerns go entirely in the other direction: much of the internet now works in such a way that a DMCA takedown notice will effectively remove any content someone doesn't want out there.

I do understand why platforms do it like this, being in the business of arbitrating who is right and who is not is not feasible (and it's probably also not legal).

Criticisms of this process should be levied against lawmakers and the law itself.

However, to be perfectly frank, it's a good thing that hiring a lawyer to send this letter on your behalf is the minimum effort required to do this. Of course that doesn't solve malicious takedown notices sent by big law firms and corporations, but I do believe it limits the overall amount of letters that get sent.

For example, a common way to reach "millions of degrees" is to pump the air out of a container to an extreme degree, then introduce trace amounts of a gas, and then accelerate or otherwise heat those few particles.

If this happened under normal pressures, there would be no container material that could withstand these temperatures. But in a near-vacuum, the collisions between the accelerated particles and the walls can be kept low. In an experimental fusion setting like this, they also employ a magnetic field to keep the plasma away from the container.

You're implying a context that was not really part of my post or the post I was replying to. I didn't get the feeling that the OP was frantically trying to catch up on C++ because their workplace demands it. Rather, they seem to be a person trying to gauge what languages they should pursue in addition or instead of C++, of their own volition.

> Not everyone is self employed and working alone.

I'm not asserting otherwise.

> So my advice to a young developer would be to learn all of C++ or steer clear of it altogether. Learning C++ well enough to not be dangerous is a major undertaking.

My advice would be: it depends on what you're going to do with it. What kind of projects are you involved in? Are you programming for yourself or in a team? If you're in a team, these decisions all get made for you. If you're programming for yourself, it may not be a problem to "be dangerous" while you're learning.

It's also worth considering what "learn all of C++" means. In my post, I didn't mean to imply that people should refuse knowledge of features. What I meant to say is, they should make informed decisions about the features they'll use. All of which applies of course only, as you so clearly stated, to people who actually have control over their usage of the language.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I believe personal fit in a programming language is just as important as its fitness for a purpose. I always like to check out new languages and features, but in the end I'm very likely to stick with what feels productive for me personally. If that means dropping half of a language's features, I'll do that, too. Chasing "modernity" or buzzword fads is a recipe for unhappiness in my opinion.

If C++ (modern or reduced) feels good and productive to you, I'd say there is nothing wrong in sticking with it.

Then I put in a Raspberry Pi with a Retropie SD card, two gamepads, a mouse, and that's all.

I didn't put a lot of effort into making it look nice, so it's basically just a bunch of cables coming out the back of the Amiga, but at first glance it's still an ordinary Amiga.

Works pretty well overall for Amiga, C64, Spectrum, Atari, and DOS games. Of course boot time is not great, and add to that the time spent navigating Retropie's menu system, it's all a bit of a hassle. It does work better than my actual Amiga for "productivity" applications because I can set it up with more memory and better networking options.

I advocate we draw the line where people are harmed. In other cases it may not be as clear, but in this one it is. There is no real question whether a caste system harms people, and as a concept it is not compatible with humanist values.

I'm not sure about that. To keep with the examples you stated earlier as being normative (namely being disgusted by homosexuality and being an early riser), for example, I am neither. Which according to your opinion is abnormal and should be shunned by society, because you consider not shunning homosexuals and nightowls anti-social. That sounds fairly dogmatic in these specific cases, and in general the attitude that minority behavior and tolerance of minority behavior should both be punished is itself a dogma.

To be fair, I don't see how dogma is avoidable. My assertion that minority lifestyles should not be shunned as long as they don't harm anyone is also dogmatic. It's just that we all have a habit of calling principles we disagree with dogma.

But if I had one shot to change your mind about this specific issue, my argument would be like this: there are so many opinions to be had and so many behaviors to engage in. Chances are, you are yourself also holding opinions or doing activities that are not shared by the majority. Do you consider those tendencies abnormal and anti-social? You may not like homosexuals or nightowls, but surely there are things where you diverge from the statistical everydayman? Would you then apply those policies of social repercussions to these activities by default because their existence threatens the integrity of the majority? And if so, why do you allow yourself those outlier behaviors, but don't apply the same tolerance to others?

> expecting the majority of people not to be insinctively disgusted by your sexual practices is anti-social

I strongly object to this characterization.

How is letting people live their life "tiranny (sic) of the minority"? You think instinctive disgust for other lifestyles is and should be the norm?

I realize that the term diversity has been poisoned in public discussion, but for lack of a better term: diverse cultures are stronger, both in biology and I would argue socially as well. On the other hand, the authoritarian monoculture you advocate is a joyless and brittle construct that has to be policed strongly and viciously all the time or it will fall apart immediately, and it also doesn't have any immune response to radicalizing forces.

In this specific case, a society with nightowls can do more than one without. There are plenty of jobs that have shifts where not being a nightowl destroys people. An ex girlfriend of mine had to do regular night shifts at the hospital. It became a real health issue for her, but me being a nightowl freelance programmer at the time voluntarily keeping the same schedule, I was doing just fine.

Being a nightowl is also a social equalizer to an extent, because it allows people who are not rich enough to live distraction-free lives to carve out a time of the day where interuptions are virtually non-existent.

It was really a matter of time. I'm sure most of us were already amazed it lasted this long - and it did because it remained a relatively obscure tool for years.

It's also the case that the development of subversive/illegal tools requires a certain amount of subterfuge and sneakiness that the youtube-dl developers apparently weren't ready to engage in. While this is understandable, it also underscores the fact that such tools live on borrowed time (as does, I would argue, general-purpose computing itself).

I think success here is somewhat incidental. No doubt the vast majority of niche workers are pursuing non-viable careers, a minority can just about wring a living from it, and a vanishingly small part will actually see some measure of success - upon which that path too will close off quickly, both due to masses of people flocking to follow those footsteps and active gate keeping by value-extracting entities.

Implicit in this model, there is a dark timeline where there are always many more people than there are opportunities. Since this system of exploring possible paths and then closing them off to the lower masses is so extremely effective, eventually every single niche will be flooded with overqualified eager young upper-class people who are just perfectly networked for success, and even though they are so many there are still untold thousands more of hopeless dregs below every single one of them.

I went to a school that taught ancient Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. With that came loads of bible passages to translate. Having grown up a non-believer (many people tried to literally "cure" that during my lifetime, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know there is a simple drug I could take to make me normal) I can honestly say it's about what you'd expect from religious texts of those time periods. I found it less relatable than, say, Greek mythology.

What I found interesting is how many parts modern Christians habitually ignore, either because they'd be arrested if they'd follow them, or because those parts don't fit in with their personal beliefs. Of course, the entire corpus of text has also seen numerous redactions, in an effort to streamline it and make it more coherent (with mixed results).

Is it culturally significant? Honestly, I'm not sure. The Bible as an idea sure is, and certain famous passages are. But a given group's or individual's interpretation of it seems more informative, and that's often only losely based on those ancient texts.

Needless to say, I don't think there is anything in there to convince a non-believer of the existence of dieties, much less that one specific pantheon. And to be fair I don't think that's what the authors had in mind. It was probably intended as a shared folklore for groups that already strongly believe. Conversion, I suspect, comes through missionaries, not through the text.

All of this is painful. Youtube's ineptitude specifically has been painful to content creators in the past. Censorship of a "public" forum is always immensely painful, and heavy handed attempts by Mega Corporations at controlling public discourse always feel dystopian.

The most painful aspect of it all is that I have come to personally agree with these measures, purely as an immediate firefighting response.

But this is not a solution. As a society, our mental immune system is weak against disinformation and even the most obvious unscientific propaganda. These traits are even welcomed by the powerful in other contexts, that's why it's such a big deal that the people who started those fires are so closely related to those putting them out right now.

It's not necessarily the case that all organic materials are ephemeral over these timespans. Assuming that a tool-using civilization would have needs covering a wide range of material properties, including high corrosion resistance, there is no reason why even biologically-grown building materials would automatically be less durable than, say, concrete. Not to mention the tools and trinkets of everyday life. The assumption is that a large population always has a large footprint regarding the traces it leaves behind, even if that footprint is very different from ours. We found this to be true in fossils that have been left behind even by exceptionally fragile creatures.

Once we're talking advanced biology-based tech, this becomes even more pronounced. Outright genetic engineering in Earth's past would be bound to leave very curious traces in lifeforms that are around today. In fact, if I wanted to leave a message behind for a hypothetical civilization located on this planet a million years into the future, leaving it in DNA would be one of the very few viable choices.

I would posit that even DRMed biotech designed to turn every single piece of a civilization into mud once the license runs out would leave behind very detectable traces in the form of strange geological deposits and individual artifacts that survived against all odds.

What you're describing is physically impossible and has in fact never been observed by science. Electrical activity implies chemical activity and an active metabolism. Dead brain cells lose their electrical potential, eventually the cell walls break down and spill their dead biochemical machinery, effectively liquefying the organ. Our cemeteries are not full of intact, electrically active brains somehow.

When a neuron is deprived of oxygen, it shuts down. Some intracellular processes run until their educts are exhausted, and then come to a stop. When an anoxic brain cell is then re-supplied with oxygen after this shut down has progressed too far, the sudden resumation of processes means that these previously accumulated cytotoxic reaction products are now suddenly disrupting normal biochemical processes - this disruption leads to the death of the cell after it has been re-supplied. We call this category of damage reperfusion injuries.

Reperfusion damage is perverse in the sense that, while the neuron was damaged during anoxia, its actual death only plays out once its chemical programs start running again. But in a way this is also promising, since in the future we should be able to prevent this kind of cell death, effectively prolonging the time a patient can survive anoxia without brain damage. There are drugs that we give stroke patients today with this mechanism in mind, but so far the results have been mixed.

> stroke or in coma and have large areas of the brain with dead cells

In a live body, dead brain cells quickly break down and are resorbed. There is nothing left to fix there. The correct time to take action is while cells are still intact, in the delicate stage before and shortly after oxygen supply is restored.

Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis by David T. Moore, also available online: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a481702.pdf

I can definitely empathize with that, I'm happy with what's being achieved as well. Seing how SpaceX and Tesla are routinely achieving their goals and arguably change the world, I often can't get over the fact that the output of our civilization seems to hinge on the iron will of a few billionaires.

Elon Musk (and SpaceX as his tool) is just an extremely illustrative example of this, because we can directly see what our space capabilities and ambitions would look like without him.

I wish there was a Musk-like figure focused on transhumanism, but sadly it may genuinely be too early for that in my lifetime. Or not. And that's the frustrating thing: we wouldn't know until one appears.

I know this sounds like I'm writing a love letter, but it's really not meant that way. I would rather live in a civilization that has its own momentum and a better-distributed capacity for achievement, as opposed to putting my hope for the future on a few tenuous human pivot points and their whims.

That's true.

> Basically, you're saying that keiferski is making the claim "we don't know whether cells are machines", which he should prove.

No. He/she challenged me, repeatedly, to prove my assumption that we're talking about machinery, which he/she called foolish and handwavy. I take the position that my assumption is in line with current understanding, and that the entirety of modern biochemistry is based on and working with that assumption. keiferski holds that I'm ignorant for taking that position, implying that wide and extraordinary counter claims of something paranatural going on with minds should be considered reasonable until explicitly disproven. The basic difference of opinion is - as I understand it - what the default position should be.

I'm trying to think of a way that would not have us go in circles ad infinitum. So I'll try one last time to convince you that this is a misrepresentation.

My assumptions are indeed, given the body of data we have gathered so far, that what lies ahead will fit into what we already know - as opposed to being something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding.

Whenever there are unknowns in our scientific understanding (and I'm sure we'll have more than enough of those for aeons to come), it has so far not been fruitful to offer magical external influences as the explanation. It has so far always turned out that natural forces were at work, forces we can reason about rationally. From my perspective, there is nothing unusualy going on with minds in particular that would warrant a different approach.

Our current understanding may be narrow by your standards, but it doesn't follow that people just get to make up whatever lies outside and then insist on those doubting them being unscientific.

> "based on our current understanding of the mind, our metaphorical model X is the best model we have created, but it is merely the best answer up until now, not the ultimate solution."

That we can agree on. What we don't seem to agree on is the amount of credibility we should assign to claims that lie far outside of our physical expectations. Just because there are unknowns doesn't make it reasonable to assign extraordinary values to those unknowns.

> The onus is not on me, as I am not making broad unscientific claims

If you make a claim, especially one that falls widely outside of extrapolated scientific understanding, the burden of proof does indeed fall on you. By contrast I am making the claim that whatever gaps we have in our theory about minds will eventually turn out to be an extension of what we already know, as opposed to some revolutionary but as of yet unseen aspect of the universe. My claim is small, yours is quite large and also seems vague to me.

That's an understatement, as I'm sure we both know. A more apt word would be "extrauniversal".

Once again, that's quite an assertion you make against me there. At no point did I argue that we understand everything about nature. My point is just that every single thing in nature has turned out to be eventually accessible to rational modeling and understanding. To carve out a niche for certain areas and argue that these will eventually turn out to not follow that pattern has been a losing strategy throughout the history of science.

> To make broad statements like "reality/cells are just machines" based on this tiny portion of information seems pretty foolish.

The onus is on you to show me how exactly that is foolish, given the fact that every single scientific observation we have made in this area supports the hypothesis that there is nothing more than physical law involved.

It's true that I don't lend credibility to supernatural hypotheses, which I'm sure isn't the most popular position to have, I understand that. However, given the fact that everything we can actually observe so far seems to follow natural laws, I posit that the burden of proof is on the dualists to show me something that cannot possibly work without supernatural intervention (or, preferrably, directly demonstrate such intervention).

Which of course brings us to the reason why this article is written in this way and why it's being discussed here in the first place: because people use the Gödel argument as such a demonstration. However, the argument does not support the claims it generates.

Am I right or wrong to assume a naturalistic default position on this? Whichever way you answer on this will most likely determine your position on the meaning of the Gödel thought experiment.

That's a baseless assertion. In fact, I made it extra clear to distinguish between minds and the hardware they run on. By necessity, we need to talk about the "interface" between both though.

> Our minds extend beyond our bodies, we act on the basis of our friends and society.

How does that counter the argument that minds (already) run on machines?