Udo

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?

> "Therefore the machine cannot produce the corresponding formula as being true. But we can see* that the Gödelian formula is true."*

Essentially, the other side's argument boils down to the idea that minds can reason in a way that machines cannot - they can intuitively look behind the Gödelian curtain so to speak.

However, this contest between "mind" and "machine" only works as long as you tie the machine's hands behind its back while letting the mind roam freely: a mind forced to operate within the same formal system would come to the same conclusion as the machine, and conversely there is no reason to assume that a machine allowed to apply intuitive reasoning would not come to the same realization as the mind.

This entire argument is a philosophical parlor trick that only works as long as you don't pay too close attention to the unequal restrictions imposed on the two participants.

However, the next issue is using Cloudflare or similar front ends. For example, I use their free tier on most of my websites. These reverse proxying services / DDOS mitigators / TLS terminators tend to set identifying cookies which website operators have little to no control over.

My point is that the web ecosystem contains lots of integration points that could lead to operators being liable in the eyes of the law, even if they're not actively tracking their users themselves - the services they use, do.

I would have had to go to a convention/trade show in Paris next week, but luckily it got postponed for two months. So far people are getting more cautious.

Between the two standard criticisms "too little, too late" and "unnecessary panic" there is very little margin, especially in public opinion.

Here in Germany, people are starting to stock up on supplies, which is reasonable unless they completely plunder the supermarkets. Otherwise, it's all wait-and-see over here. Of course it doesn't help that Europe is also in the midst of flu season...

I remember there was a project exactly like this in nReduce (a communal online incubator which sadly died quickly), a few years back.

That would mean 5W per inhabitant. In 2020, this would barely be enough to charge a phone, and in 1934 that would have been a light bulb per 20 citizens.

You're probably right, but that's not a solution to the Fermi Paradox. The central question is not why we don't see any spaceships, it's why we don't see anybody. No large scale construction, no radio signals, nothing.

A solution to the Fermi Paradox needs to provide reasoning for why nobody is visible. It's not enough to argue that most civilizations won't (visibly) exploit the resources of their home systems, or that the most prudent way to exist in the "Dark Forest" that is our galaxy is to stay very very quiet. It has to address why we don't see anything, meaning that not a single society decided to do this.

It's just by my (admittedly subjective) impression large-scale, community-wide adoption of decentralized networks has been mostly by radicals or militants, because they have increasingly been banned from mainstream social nets. They had an easier time taking the hit from jumping to a new network, because they had been ostracized.

> Federation results in the data of users being subject to the whims of the owner of the federated instance

In the largely unfederated world we have right now, that boils down to one single owner per platform. The promise of a federated system is that you can always set up shop on another system of the same platform, without losing access to your relationships. And that other system could in theory even be run by yourself.

> Administrators can see correspondence and derive social graphs trivially. They are also in a position to selectively censor inter-instance communication.

Again, right now we're putting that trust into a single entity for the whole network instead. An entity whose interests we know for sure are not aligned with their users, but with their customers. Giving participants in a network the choice which administrator they want to work with is not strictly worse than that.

> All the privacy issues, none of the scale advantages.

Social networks are not a place for privacy. Not in a federated world, and certainly not in the unfederated model we have right now. Once more the case can be made that the current system is worse, because not only is your communication and metadata not private, but the unfederated systems we have often demand, or at least can correlate from context, your real-world identity. A federated system can at least do away with that issue to some degree.

If you require privacy, and there should absolutely be a place for that in a civilized society, you need to use an end-to-end encryption scheme for point-to-point data exchange. There are fundamentally opposed design goals that apply for such systems.

> Considering that one of the main goals of decentralized systems is privacy preservation, and thus, control distribution, we must develop better models than “the most popular federated instances gain full control over the users interactions”.

Control distribution is absolutely achievable within a federated context, while privacy preservation will always depend on (in this case: unwarranted) trust. Just because you can't reasonably achieve one, it doesn't follow that the other is a fool's errant. I would also argue that the quoted sentence at the end here is a bit of a straw man, because taking away that power from the individual instance is - or at least should be - the actual design goal of a federated system.

Don't get me wrong, a network design should do what it reasonably can to prevent and mitigate abuse, but I believe advertising inflated privacy expectations to end users is fundamentally dishonest. What they get is not privacy. What they get is some degree of control and independence. Which incidentally is one of the reasons why no federated system has really taken off yet in the mainstream: those are not big enough selling points on their own, and they're certainly not enough to motivate people into taking the huge social hit from moving onto an empty new platform. So far, only fringe groups have taken up these decentralized offers - groups who frankly almost nobody wants to have associations with.

> Reliability & Discoverability being the main two.

I agree very much with the problem being discoverability. None of the open networks really tackle that aspect, but it's not a problem coming from the fact that these are federated.

That's what makes it so fascinating. The bingo ball machine concept you describe requires a lot of trust, that's why so much effort has to go into continuous verification. As resiliency goes, this isn't really a feature.

The underground lottery is interesting precisely because it requires comparatively little trust, and the trust it does require is based on reputation and decentralization. For example, as a numbers player, you would be placing your bets with the same banker, one who you know has always paid out in the past, and who has personal ties to you and your neighborhood. The data source and hence the information about whether or not you won is public and hard to fake.

What makes numbers an illegal racket probably has more to do with low payout ratios and the fact that it's not linked in with the tax system (also, it's an unregulated chaos of private persons conducting it).

I think you're right that there is some hypocrisy involved when CEOs publicly denounce unpopular politics only to support deplorable practices as soon as money is involved.

Could it be more prominent? Yes. But it's not like the author didn't attempt to communicate the language context, and in that I argue, this blog is still doing better than many other.

For example, if you had a vehicle weighing 10t empty (but including energy), and a thruster capable of accelerating ions to 1% the speed of light, you'll only need 17t of reaction mass to achieve a speed delta of 1% the speed of light.

This ratio holds up as you scale exhaust velocity and delta V, so the exact same reaction mass would be needed for a 10% light speed delta V using a thruster shooting ions at 10% c. As a rule of thumb, you always need a reaction mass about 170% of the vehicle's dry mass when your thruster exactly matches your target velocity.

Now, to illustrate how critical exhaust velocity is, imagine you make thrusters with exhaust velocities 10x that of the target delta V. In those cases, you'll only need a reaction mass of roughly 10%. However, if your exhaust velocity is 0.1x the target delta V, you'll need a 2200000% reaction mass!

Bio has been touching all of our lives for a long time now, from vaccines to food to basic research yielding large advancements in medical understanding.

What we are on the precipice of may be personalized or customized biochemistry, which is something we desperately need if we ever want to attack diseases like cancer, enable radical regenerative intervention, or tackle the effects of aging.

On a side note, I feel that we should put a moratorium on the phrase "X is eating the world". Right now we're using it whenever something needs to be hyped and it's becoming quite cringy.

This article talks about a potential way to increase lifespan and quality of life by a very modest amount, by a process that if it is feasible at all for humans (which it likely won't be), will only be available in the somewhat distant future. Digitizing yourself is several orders of magnitude removed from that, both technologically and in terms of what it would mean for the individual.

> you're still limited by the ultimate end of the universe.

There is a huge chasm between the prospect of an increased your lifespan and the notion that existence should never end, even if that increase in life expectancy would happen to be extreme from our current point of view. Just because literally eternal life is not in congruence with physics (or most practical definitions of intelligence for that matter) doesn't mean the idea of living far longer than currently possible is invalid. I would even say these two have very little in common.

> (which seems to be the fantasy of many posters here)

It's an aspirational fantasy that I share. I recognize the fact that this will not become feasible in my lifetime, but I do not think it's a fantasy in the sense that it is unattainable if we work towards that goal. Given the choice, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's possible that we as a civilization will just opt to not pursue the matter further, the same as with any other scientific or technological goal.

It's a strange disparity in the data, I wonder if it's due to sampling or if people genuinely think their own experiences are atypical.

Edit: I'd be interested in finding out what's so offensive about this observation. I'll gladly take 100 more downvotes and flags, but please tell me what caused so much consternation.

That's also what I suggested in my answer to onion2k below. I agree, it's not hard. But it does require their design team to overcome some instinctive minimalism.

The problem with just showing a bar at the bottom is that iOS already uses a bar at the bottom to invoke the app switcher. Maybe a small triangle in the corner would help.