abecedarius

All our structural carbon is low tech by the relevant standards (civilization that can send star-seeds). https://dspace.mit.edu/entities/publication/49f95196-2ddf-48...

> complex and interdependent ecosystem

That's why my other comment pointed to the autotrophs with the simplest requirements, and the (unknown but complexity-bounded) origin of life.

> pace of biological activity is a lot slower than industrial ones

Bacterial replication times can be under an hour.

In the outer solar system organics and water are abundant (and in the inner there are plenty of carbonaceous chondrites, admittedly not the most generic inner-system bodies).

Agreed that metals should unlock wider opportunities in the inner system where solar energy is more abundant. I just don't think it matters much, you need a good place to plant your seed; once you've built up to scale you can then build wherever.

(False that life dies in minutes in space; plus the engineers can invest in even greater error correction than radiodurans.)

If physics were to forbid closure at small scale, how could life begin? And how does a micron-scale autotroph reproduce?

Yes, I was wondering why the focus on metals. (Admittedly they might be needed in trace amounts for catalysis, or convenient for conductors, etc., or for structural material if you're on a carbon-poor asteroid. Most metals are worse than carbon for the latter if you have reasonably high tech.)

To target the "poor people need more money" problem, the most direct answer is give them money. If someone's answer is a variety of politically-allocated narrow subsidies, you should wonder what interest they're really aiming to satisfy.

When you get money, you can choose to spend it on what's worth the most to you. Thus "strings attached" on the opposite.

This assumes the best models continue to be publicly available. There's some level of capability where it makes more sense to go in business for yourself.

The same AIs are doing math research now, you know. At what point do you stop explaining it all away?

"High speed" here can be taken in terms like this: the phase of the wave function changes rapidly with position and time. (Changing with position -> a superposition that's heavy on short wavelengths, high momentum; with time -> high frequency, high energy.)

Re "observed all the time": when gold interacts with light, the light's normally of a strength that's a small perturbation on the fields internal to the atom, which is basically why you can treat the atom/light-field system as two weakly coupled quantum systems. It's an "observation" when the light leaves a classical trace such as a current in a CCD.

(I don't expect this to leave you unmystified about QM, but hopefully a bit clearer about it.)

An OS is a virtual machine meant to be shared among programs. Sure the central examples expose most of an ISA that they run on themselves, but there are also examples like Inferno, Taos, AS/400.

Aside: the example question ("What is the intuition that two reflections gives a rotation?") could have a more intuitive answer involving flipping an actual flashcard over twice, funnily enough...

I don't know, I'm not very chemical, but fwiw: a friend and I were favorably impressed with Linus Pauling's general chemistry textbook. It tries to supply enough of the physics for the chemistry to make sense. We only studied for a few weeks before moving on, though, and it's a big fat book.

There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any complication or unfamiliarity is a problem in multiple ways. (Score voting goes from checkbox to a 1-5 stars or whatever.)

I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.

Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite codebase.

> libertarian fantasy

You can see it that way... though the Prof was not expecting uptake for those proposals, he didn't get them, and the protagonist at the end is thinking of emigrating to the Belt. The U.S. was a libertarian fantasy before its founding.

Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.

Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:

> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

Heh, unintentional. Another term shorter than spelling out "orders of magnitude" is "decades", but I figure that's less familiar and even more confusing here. "Memory price started out falling two decades per decade..."

Can you blame Moore's Law ending? The graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law looks steady up to the 2020s.

1979 to 2009 in the OP graph has a pretty steady drop from 10^7 to 10^1 USD/GB: 6 OOMs in 30 years. Then till before the recent spike it was around 1 OOM in 15 years: 1/3 the rate of progress on a log scale.

When it comes to CPU progress we blame the end of Dennard scaling several years before the knee in this memory curve. I'd guess the story of memory is similar in also hitting technical difficulties, but I don't know.

National debt to GDP was much lower in the 70s.

You might be right that near-term disaster is unlikely, but comparing to a lottery win is ridiculous. Orders of magnitude off.

It's funny, in the 8-bit days a lot of us learned programming for its own sake without much expectation it'd be lucrative. Took ~50 years to get back to that spirit as the default.

Permission should be in the form of a capability, which need not end up on the built-in OS network capability. If an app insists on your car's steering wheel, you can be like "sure, kid, here's your Help Daddy Drive(TM)".

If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.

(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)

Has LuaJIT been superseded?

"I expect they're too expensive" is a terrible reason to ban them, though.

Antiseptics did make a big difference in the century before antibiotics...

I thought CF workers could be self-hosted? I haven't tried that system but saw Kenton Varda tweeting about running them locally for development.

I only spot-checked the section "Problems with Scheme" in the motivation doc and got a similar impression. The last three short paragraphs were reasonable on why not Scheme for this, but they were preceded by a greater bulk of confused or vague complaints. (E.g. "nil being mixed with '()" -- what nil?)

> like transcriptions of vibes derived from AI discussion

I was wondering whether a human wrote it too.

Quite possible this section was unrepresentative! I hope so.

AlphaGo. Reinforcement learning on math with proof assistants was clearly going to be workable after that, even if not right away.

I'm on your side in this argument (approximately; asking what ethics even is and where it comes from can be productive but shouldn't conclude "and therefore AI agents working with humans don't need to integrate a human moral sense" -- at least that'd be a really bad conclusion to humanity as AI scales up).

Can't recommend letting an LLM write for you directly, though. I found myself skipping your third paragraph in the reply above.

Thing is, when you open a webpage it's clear that it may automatically execute code (Javascript, WebAssembly). What needs to be clear (and by default limited) is the authority of that code.