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allturtles

2,655 karma · joined January 12, 2021

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allturtles··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
Why? Are we doing labor theory of value now?
allturtles··on Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%
Yep, familiar with it. I think the Chinese room is clearly a bad argument. The brain is just as much a "chinese room" as a computer is.
allturtles··on Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%
So by your lights, the vast majority of humans don't reason either (and even those who do don't do it most of the time)?
allturtles··on George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts
> Chicago would have been in land owned by the Chicago Park District which is part of Grant Park and is meant to be free and open to the public

You can call it part of Grant Park if you like, but it is a big paid parking lot. The Lucas proposal would have replaced some of the asphalt with new actual green space that was free and open to the public.

allturtles··on Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space
For those who doubt the AI apocalypse is possible, because "you can always pull the plug", our AI overlords provide a ready-made answer: the data center whose plug can't be pulled! Put a few nuclear warheads on board (we need our own weapon to answer the threat of Chinese super AIs, after all) and you're good to go.
allturtles··on OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
You could say exactly the same about humans. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Every human depends on a vast corpus of prior human knowledge to be able to accomplish anything. This doesn't mean they have no intelligence.
allturtles··on Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
You're also against public education, I guess? Kids should just figure out what's valuable and do that without having values and habits imposed on them.
allturtles··on The Beauty of Roundabouts
> They work where each direction has an approximately equal amount of traffic. However, usually, one direction (north/south, say) has a larger share of the traffic. In those cases, the bulk of traffic all needs to slow down, downshift, turn a bit in one direction and then turn a bit in the other direction for the minority of traffic that's bleeding on or off the main artery. In those cases, a traffic light is better because the timing can be adjusted to the proportion of traffic from each direction (and more flexible since it can be adjusted over time).

I'm not convinced of this either. It may make sense when considering one intersection in isolation, but over a corridor with ten intersections, you are going to get caught in a red light at least once, and that one full stop will cost you more than all the gains you get from not having to slow 10 mph through each intersection.

This is setting aside fuel efficiency and safety considerations which also favor roundabouts, IMO.

allturtles··on The Beauty of Roundabouts
> Small fender benders and sideswipes are much more frequent

All the sources I can find say roundabouts reduce crashes of all types.

Carmel, IN, America's "roundabout capital" has more than tripled in population while reducing overall traffic accidents / year: https://eri.iu.edu/erit/case-studies/carmel-indiana-roundabo....

allturtles··on An Alien Mind
I don't think it requires the agreement of that many parties. How many organizations/physical sites can create chips capable of training and running frontier models? That is your bottleneck. It is equivalent to targeting uranium enichment in nuclear arms control.
allturtles··on An Alien Mind
> if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.

What if the most dangerous strategic adversary you have is the one you are building?

allturtles··on Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again
This is a power they already have. Google could ignore this change just as MapQuest has done. They are not legally compelled to follow government naming conventions, and I think it would be a clear first amendment violation to attempt to compel them to do so.
allturtles··on Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again
> No, they show what the respective government datasets contain

Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work.

For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they had automated pipelines for ingesting geographical names.

allturtles··on Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again
> Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.

Huh? Isn't that exactly what you've described? In the UK they show the popular usage in the UK, and the same in France.

allturtles··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
This is exactly the kind of pointless concern I'm talking about. How many legal digitial providers of those rare books are there now? Zero, I believe.

It's the logic of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, which prefers that no one benefit rather than Google see any benefit.

allturtles··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
Yes, this was a great tragedy. I was very sad to see academics at the time arguing against Google providing what would have been one of the greatest storehouses of readily available knowledge in the world, in favor of an imaginary alternative that didn't exist and never would.
allturtles··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
There is so much misinformation/confusion about this... they go sued after lending "unlimited" copies, but they were sued (and lost) for lending exclusive copies (controlled digital lending):

> “At bottom, [the Internet Archive’s] fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book,” Judge John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan wrote. “But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.” [0]

[0]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/teaching...

allturtles··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
> Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness?

Possibly riffing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description?

allturtles··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such?

We did talk about these things in English class in high school. The teachers would lay out the historical/social/cultural context of each book we read. Did your school not do that?

allturtles··on The only known trebuchet casualty in history
This person is not named, unless you consider Skeleton 150 a name. 'known' is the appropriate word here.
allturtles··on Waymo in Dallas
Some do. It all comes down to whether the local government cares/thinks about this when setting up ordinances and approving PUDs. I was also appalled when I moved from a place that did this to one that didn't. There were so many obvious opportunities to improve connectivity with a few hundred square feet of easement.
allturtles··on Dolmenwood: Fantasy RPG built around the acclaimed Old-School Essentials rules
Whatever the merits of the rules themselves (which I think are estimable), the OSR "ecosystem" is buoyed up by a huge network effect. I would wager that just the list of official D&D modules from the 80s, all of which are easily playable in something like OSE, dwarfs the amount of support that's available for all of those other games combined. That's not counting the many many additional adventures, settings, rules addons, megadungeons, GM aids, etc. that have been created in the last 20 years for various OSR games, which are mostly cross-compatible. It's very hard to come in fresh and compete with that.
allturtles··on Map of the world's great castles and fortresses
This dataset is bad. The North Carolina state capitol is a castle?
allturtles··on The Voice of Google
> But it's a paradox that on HN, Google gets far more hate than any of these.

There is no paradox. This is Hacker News. It's a site of by and for people in the tech industry. Of course Google's activities (good and bad) get far more attention than those of Chase, or Coca-Cola.

I certainly wouldn't agree that Google "gets far more hate" on HN than Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, or Palantir.

allturtles··on Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
So someone introduces a new, problematic feature to a long-existing technical system, and your answer is to "just" reorganize all of society to eliminate that system?
allturtles··on A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria
That's what the robots with guns will be for.
allturtles··on Modern Board Games: and why you should play them (2022)
> he article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim.

Indeed, but neither does the article try say you should play games with "20 different piles of crap to set up at the start, and then a dozen different pieces of state to track in your little corner of the table during what will inevitably be a complicated five-phased turn", which is the comment I was responding to. It doesn't actually recommend any specific games at all, but those types of games are really a small subset of modern board games (of the games mentioned in the article, I think only Twilight Imperium and maybe Labyrinth would qualify).

> is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.

Okay, great, you have learned that board games aren't for you. This article is aimed at people who haven't tried modern board games: "I chose to introduce them to the world of modern board games in an attempt to encourage some of them to give them a go."

allturtles··on Modern Board Games: and why you should play them (2022)
I think the lesson to learn from this is that different people are different?

While most people are repulsed by the complexity of extremely heavy games, others will luxriate in them. There is a whole 40-year-old community built around Advanced Squad Leader, a game with rules so complicated that there's a 135-page tutorial to teach the Starter Kit version of the game [0]!

The board game industry creates many very mainstream games with wide popularity, and many games across a large number of niches that each have their own narrow appeal.

I think this is great!

[0]: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40482/jay-richardsons-asl...

allturtles··on Books are not too expensive
> Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later.

Well it doesn't matter. Even if you compare to books that are newly published, new hardcover fiction is not $43-54. Typical is about $30.

allturtles··on ML promises to be profoundly weird
I see this kind of take a lot, and I don't think it's convincing. To me it's similar to saying that the water frame and the power loom won't change anything, because people have been able to make thread and cloth for millenia.
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