darkmighty

This discussion really depends on how animals experience the world, if we can assign them consciousness and value to their experience, etc. But if we give them some degree of conscious experience, it seems the jungle is far preferable to factory farming.

Would you rather live in a tiny cage stuffed with other people, doing nothing during your short life except eating, or living with a tribe in a jungle/savannah (more or less our natural habitat) ? Remeber you'd not be teached anything, learn no language and wouldn't experience much about the world (its richness) -- the cage is your entire reality. I'd very much prefer the jungle. For the free animal the gruesome death is just an episode to a rich life of hunting, fleeing, nurturing, seeing nature, communcating with others; for the caged one the painless death is just an end to a joyless existence.

That said, I think there are kinds of acceptable compromises... not extremely intensive farming seems reasonable to me. Again, dependent on their ability to experience the world. Chicken seem to have less cognitive experience then cows, for example, so it should be acceptable to not spend as much per individual in controlling their environemnt.

And this line of reasoning suggests a (ethically delicate, but interesting) solution: Should we select (breed) animals for lower cognition, thus making factoring farming acceptable? (or equivalently making acceptable farming practices more efficient) It seems logical. If the animal ultimately has no brain (as weird as that sounds), in principle there doesn't seem to be much difference from lab-growing meat.

Yea, sometimes if the stakes are high enough you may have to get it right without multiple attempts.

Depending on your time constraints, the tips given here seem to apply particularly well: find proxy problems that allows you to learn without as much hardship would be a good idea, as well as the other strategies of breaking it down, etc.

Sometimes time is not on your side though, and you have to get it right without time to practice on proxy problems (at least I believe this can occur).

Then you can use what I call it the 'Kitchen sink' approach: grab a bunch of tools, a bunch of approaches and start digesting your problem through as many viewpoints as possible. If your problem has safety implications and you can verify it, then well enough. Otherwise you make an attempt if you are sufficiently confident in your solution; and take some kind of NOP otherwise (if a guaranteed 0-return NOP even exists).

Also, if you're solving something while time constrained, you may need to reflect afterwards if you could have either prevented the time constraint or prepared better somehow.

In general though, there's hope in the sense that if something is verifiable or approximately-verifiable you can approach good solutions with time. At least I have high hopes of always finding a solution given enough time (i.e. "You're not good enough" does not exist).

That's only not applicable if your time is finite or in the same vein you need to improve a skill to apply a series of finite-time decisions. Eh who cares about finite time anyway? :P

(Yes, in reality everything is limited but there are plenty of tasks you can take your time with...)

What about realistic optimism ?

I firmly believe in space colonization, but I also firmly believe in realizing things, not just pushing propaganda or fantasy (sometimes with ulterior motives). O'Neill cylinders as a panacea are just that, as far as I can tell (I admit I haven't seen any objective analysis on it; my total guess calculation would put it at say $20M/person absolute minimum for a large city of say 1M persons -- which would be several times the US economy or the assets of a large number of most valuable companies combined).

We just can't not fix Earth. There's no alternative. I've studied quite a bit about Mars colonization (and have my own thoughts about colonizing other places -- in particular I find underground habitats in Mercury intriguing), and it is quite clearly a project for the end of the century at least. Even when the soil, the gravity, and the materials are all more or less at your disposal, it's still extremely difficult to kick start a quasi-self-sustaining manufacturing base, even less one capable of producing exports and growing rapidly. The cost constants per inhabitant are very high.

Like anyone else, I think we need to move off this planet as soon as feasible. But we need a real vision, and we need to do it in a way that makes us truly more resillient and further reaching -- that is, we need colonies to be self-sustaining to the point of surviving catastrophe on other colonies without themselves disappearing -- this is the truly worthwhile goal I believe we need to pursue.

Imaginary space cities relying thousands of billionaires / millions of millionaires spending all wealth on are not that.

Heck, I even believe in Interstellar colonization in the not-too-distant future.

See also, other strategies for ensuring human survival:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17646897

(Underground habitats on Earth)

Is activism completely useless though? I do think most of it, in particular group-focused preaching is probably very close to religion and soccer teams in engagement, with little critical thinking. However, there is probably a role for voicing opinions and even stating publicly (as in "the emperor has no clothes"). Not everyone is fully informed and those networks of opinions can have a significant/important impact I imagine. Then again this occurs inside close circles.

As mentioned elsewhere, I think by far the greatest threat to democracy is groups enclosing themselves, forming rigid identities like has happened to right-wing (and some left-wing) groups in the West: this makes them far easier to manipulate (by tying propositions one wouldn't accept together with the collective identity). This effect has been amplified massively by technology. You can stay insulated by exactly what you want to hear by visiting certain sources exclusively, or worse -- most people are being isolated automatically.

The solution to this seems quite obvious: if technology is fostering isolation, it could instead foster contact with distinct ideologies, by default. Give more weight (through visibility) to long, well thought out arguments instead of short quips and 'likes'; have some kind of diversity bonus (where people a certain 'ideological distance' away are not given lower weight).

The problem is enforcing this kind of structure on social networks. If most people get a large chunk of their information from social networks, we're being controlled by an obscure algorithm that's probably not in our best interest (instead simply driven by simple profit measures). Given how large and impactful Facebook (and Youtube, Twitter) is, I don't think it should be out of question to regulate those algorithms somehow (given repeated failure to self-regulate). We should have a right for seeing the algorithm implementation, have an option to upload a curation algorithm (given some specified API), and if we want select from a few sensible options, like simple chronological ordering, to the aforementioned civil-discourse-promoting ones (which should probably be the default).

It's not that simple. It's not like a) Some galaxies fit predictions, b) Some do not, and we add unknown dark matter.

It's that when they do not fit predictions, there is a single parameter (the mass of dark matter) that does explain its behavior, whose model is that of a weakly interacting gas halo. So dark matter tries to fix things in a very precise way, it's not an arbitrary curve fitting exercise.

Now whether there is really weakly interacting matter out there or some other explanation is valid is still an open question afaik; but the evidence is quite strong so far.

I agree, that analogy seems a bit excessive. A little afraid of commitment and building deep connections and deep joys.

I mean, there's the phenomenon of building over-expectations on someone else and becoming excessive in trying to monopolize their attention (although I believe it's mostly only a problem when not reciprocal).

Let's not go the other extreme though. When no one can really connect and trust someone else, you're just sharing a moment of warmth in the vast darkness...

I have some friends that understand me very deeply, and that I also understand very deeply. Spending time with them and talking I feel like discovering the same things they did.

And then I try to cultivate friendships with people quite different then me (but that I admire of course). This is to not be caught in a bubble thinking my field is all there is in the universe ...

( Funnily enough any field can suffer from that -- Your field Technology? It is the structure that supports everything; Your field is Language? It is the medium that underlies all thoughts; Your field is Mathematics? ... )

Overall it shouldn't be about number of friends, but about being able to share deep (in the sense that you both really capture what's being shared), good things (feelings, emotions, lessons, etc) as much as possible. If you feel you're having that you're in the right path.

Apart from the power supply mentioned, is your temperature fine?

Interesting. In your daily activities, you cite your mind as 'clear' -- is it just of visual imagery/sounds, or in general? Do you 'feel' thoughts some other way? What is going on when you 'zone out' in your mind? Say for a programming problem, If you don't see code in your mind, do you still 'feel' it some other way?

Can you describe what you experience when recalling something?

For me, (it of course varies by the object of recall) it is most times imagery, although sometimes it can be emotions, sounds, etc. (I use the imagery as an 'address' after which other related memories are linked to and emerge).

If you want Star Trek ( and so do I, of course :) ) then the simplest way I can imagine has to be with headsets as currently is.

Making them imperceptible, if that is even so important, has some challenges but not impossible (e.g. increasing resolution, lowering weight, or even adding devices to compensate its weight if the former is infeasible).

I've had good experiences with some chinese manufacturers (first hand experience, Jumper and Alldocube, heard of Chuwi and Xiaomi), they're putting out good quality very cheap products. I'd just go for metal/aluminum body if you can find it.

Is the scattering probability a function of flux density or simply of photon energy?

If of photon energy, then the device is clearly impossible -- you would need to use invisible (and harmful) gamma-rays for scattering.

If of energy density, it still may not be theoretically feasible. For instance, you cannot make monochromatic pulses arbitrarily short -- eventually they will become spread in frequency (more and more energy in higher and potentially harmful frequencies), such that the total dosage necessary to get the desired visible flux is too large. (some calculations would need to be made...)

I feel that with 5 kids special provisions and certain difficulty will be necessary no matter what. You would be moving around with all children a lot less in any case. But I don't see why it's impossible to go car free; specially considering some kids will be older than others (not 5 toddlers simultaneously).

Just for reference, their normally-powered website is also available: (I prefer despite the solar novelty)

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

And likewise contains some amazing content.

What I don't understand here: Why can't we just work less?

I know it's not trivial, but it can't be impossible either. I doubt he would starve if he got a part-time dev job (are those easy to find? I have no idea). I agree wholeheartedly with all that he said. I think a life of work-home-work without breathing is almost meaningless unless you can have possibly unreasonable amounts of fun and freedom in the job (few if any industries allow/demand this kind of work). Indeed if a job allows for fun and freedom markets will usually exploit this advantage to try and push you to work even more (if you let them of course).

I'm still a student but I'll certainly look for a job that's either totally fulfilling (rare) or allows as much freedom as possible while maintaining a reasonable lifestyle and quality of life.

A conclusion I've been reaching as I've grown older is that motivation is one of the most difficult and important things for any individual to learn. Once you have a clear objective, achieving things isn't so problematic -- having clear, realistic, well thought out things you want to achieve is much harder. Even failure is much more tolerable to me when I've failed knowing I were pursuing the right thing; failing when you don't even know what you want is much more painful. That's why taste is probably one of the best skills to develop in your child, letting him make decisions for himself and assessing the consequence of those for himself (instead of mandating anything -- although every now and then kids need stimuli or being slightly forced to try new things).

So high-involvement parenting to me is only good insofar as it helps those things, not if it sets everything you must do and how to do it.

Taste is not something you can't teach either, imo. There isn't anything necessarily more right or wrong about your tastes than the tastes children would pick up from friends and teachers. But I think you should make sure to clarify and expose your tastes instead of mandating (or even hiding) them; and understand your child is unique and your tastes may not fit her in every way.

All this of course lines up pretty well with the definition of "authoritative parenting" in the article, which is valuing 'adaptability, problem-solving and independence'.

"He who has a why can bear almost any how"...

I think it's a shame sodium vapor lamps are being replaced. Low pressure sodium (LPS) is actually highly efficient, provide a very soothing color for nighttime, and for me most importantly are easily filtered by astronomical observations (their spectrum is nearly a single line). Their size and unwieldiness is justified in utility street lightning setting.

http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?2001IAU...

Valid point. I thought about this, for system apps you would be able to assign lasting permission requests to read/write/modify anything., by default -- so it would work as right now. Just like in browsers, permissions (permission type prompt) could be remembered in a cache. If you're not comfortable with giving any command full reign on your system, you could simply give granular, temporary permissions as required.

A concept I find useful is that there are two kinds of security:

-- Accidental security

-- Malicious security

Permissions help with both. Not only you don't want 3rd parties to invade or disrupt your system, you don't want users to invade or disrupt your system (or their own systems) accidentally.

A classic example I believe is an user wanting to delete all files in current directory, typing

  $ sudo rm ./*

and missing the dot, getting

  $ sudo rm /* #(delete *all files*)

Ideally in this case you would see two different requests:

  > The command rf requests root access for file deletion at /
  > Accept? (y/N)
  > User's administrative password:

or

  > The command rf requests access for file deletion at /home/user/cache/
  > Accept? (Y/n)

Note you're not prompted for password in the second case because you already have permissions for this operations (only the process 'rf' doesn't).

You may not be particularly worried about malicious security for system programs, but even professional administrators could be worried about accidental security and best practices (if they're not they could easily select persistent full permissions). I get the impression the last thing e.g. sysadmins want is mess up production systems, and wouldn't mind a few more prompts when doing things manually (which should be rare?), or assgining scripts the exact permissions needed for their job.

Yes, this could be just a change in focal length and aperture* product statistics, not any kind of length getting heavier.

*: Observe e.g. most astronomical telescopes have similar magnification, but widely varying apertures.

Plant a flag on the roof? :P

su - <username> also works.

Indeed the capability exists (unix/linux pioneered it?), but it relies on manual containment by the user. It should be automated, with prompts at install or execution time, like on mobile OSs.

An idea is each file should have its own user, basically, with both relative and absolute file creation/modification permissions. If you run an arbitrary executable as a user there's great security risk since it can do anything you can (without sudo of course).

It seems like the natural progression from

Run everything as root ->

Separate root and day-to-day user ->

Don't use root and achieve things with sudo ->

Each file has its own permissions (i.e. essentially its own user) set by the parent user

Permissions should be both for individual actions and permanent classes of actions, on the user's discretion (i.e. allow it to create this file or always allow it to create files)

This approach is even naturally hierarchical, executables could create other executables as long as they have permission to do so, and set the child permissions to at most its own. In this context an executable asking for permissions can be akin to sudo: it really is a file-user asking for its parent file-user for expanded permissions.

To give a real life allegory, consider a Technician in a company wants to make a tool purchase, so he asks the Engineer. The Engineer doesn't have permission, so he denies or asks the Manager. Finally the Manager either denies or asks the CEO which has permission over everything.

> not least because if humans realise they're at a disadvantage it would be essentially impossible to prevent them from colluding with other humans to get an advantage, even to some extent unconsciously

Indeed versus a single opponent, you can play an "optimal" (e.g. Nash equilibrium strategy) and basically win/solve the game. But in a multiplayer setting (in poker and similar games), you rely on your ability to predict opponents. In the former you could essentially assume your opponent is as smart as possible ('rational' in game theory language), and if it is not rational it will necessarily do worse. In the latter however, by assuming every player is rational (e.g. playing N.E. strategies) you lack the ability to exploit weak players which are decidedly suboptimal, predict their moves, and capitalize. Thus winning is conditioned as much as the knowledge of your opponents, their skill and style, as in your own power to play probabilistic 'optimal' moves.

A good simple example is also Rock-Paper-Scissors: a N.E. strategy just plays randomly -- it clearly cannot lose even against the most skilled players every -- but it also cannot win versus weak, predictable opponents. So e.g. in a tournament setting it would always lose, depending on the tournament structure (in particular if tournament stages are not all pairwise elimination).

I find it a fascinating contrast to traditional game theory, and sort of conventional view of games, that there are "good players" and "bad players" in the sense of their execution being superior in an absolute sense, independent of opponent. In reality success in a variety of games (and real world scenarios) is won by tailoring your strategy to a particular opponent, using information from outside the game, and specifically predicting his plays vs. utilizing universal strategies (again this is particularly relevant in non-pairwise tournaments, non-zero sum games, etc).

In real life, almost always the "game" is non-zero sum, multiplayer, with non-rational players, etc., even in a sports setting. Roger Federer might play slack and save his body in the early stages of a tournament vs a known weaker player, and give it all vs his most fearsome opponents.

And also finally to quote "The Art of Strategy" (introductory game theory classic), 'There's always a bigger game.' (in real life it's the ultimately the entire Universe, and no one is quite sure of the Rules :p )

Yea stepping back a little I agree it's a fundamental achievement. It's all about expectations -- I were expecting a Lee Sedol kind of event, and it was more of a Fan Hui (or a bit further) kind of demonstration. A milestone for sure considering how difficult the problem is with various previously unconquered subchallenges (uncertainty, partial observability, massive control space), different but in some ways more difficult than OpenAI's Dota 2 matches.

> I'm going to live dangerously and make an assumption - you probably understand Starcraft better than Go, so can see the flaws more easily

Correct :) Although I'm not great at either.

This comes closer to opening doors to real uncharted territory in robotics and general agency; it trained in crazy low wall-clock time. But now we're this far it makes me question even more the cost, flexibility, adaptability, of the AI less forgivingly. How much did it actually cost to train? Would it be economical to train one of those for every single task? (e.g. in a factory or warehouse setting), Would it be vulnerable to those exploitable strategic weakness in a real world setting?, etc.

It's definitely not over yet as far as SC2 goes though :)

Two additional points, aside from APM effectiveness:

- The APM constraint by AlphaStar seems to be average APM (or some variation thereof), while it reached 900+ APM in battles -- again with 100% effectiveness. That's insane and definitely beyond human capacity.

- It didn't waste APM in the early game (when humans are warming up and spamming APM), further leaving slack for when engagements came.

I mean, when gauging practical applications, we shouldn't be too concerned about good reflexes and superhuman effectiveness; however, part of the point here was to gauge other aspects of cognition more related to strategy, large decision spaces, etc; and in this setting it makes sense to constrain those non-strategic (more mechanical/tactical aspects). I'm sure e.g. constraining humans to <300 APM for example would change player style/effectiveness that much, while e.g. the blink stalker micro displayed in Game 4 vs Mana was really reliant on massive parallel single unit/group control (blinking every single low health stalker individually, engaging from multiple sides simultaneously, etc).

It's not about telling companies how to build products. It's literally about the right to tinker, hack, repair, etc -- which could be heavility discouraged with EULAs, ToSs, or even legal action.

And in many cases the OEMs have all the parts to fix things, will happily want to fix things, but won't sell them except through their overpriced 1st party service -- or even build into the hardware repair-detecting and disabling countermeasures (like Apple or John Deere does with some hardware iirc).

It seems like asking for the very basic right.

Even from the industrial side, reversible manufacturing is usually the best way to design a product -- it wouldn't surprise if some manufacturers (particular for products that don't have enough competition) go out of their way to make their hardware difficult to repair -- e.g. using glue instead of screws, complicating assembly, etc. An easy, reversible assembly process should be expected to cost less; using screws is much easier to automate, debug and qualify than glue; and so on.

Asking for the right to repair, and availability of parts/manuals when reasonable, seems like a very healthy, pro-efficiency, pro-competition move.

I was left unconvinced (reproducing my comment from reddit):

AlphaStar had 0 cost to sense the entire map simultaneously, and when they introduced the attention/context switching cost (camera control) in the showmatch, it lost.

Also very notable for me in the showmatch was it seemed completely blind and exploitable to some strategies. When AlphaGo played top players, it made a few mistakes, but there wasn't anything obvious that it just couldn't see. Here it just couldn't think of making phoenixes vs. the warp prism harass which shows strategically it isn't near human level yet. It could clearly be exploited by back and forth harassment too (probably has to do with the limited memory those networks have).

Finally, DeepMind were just emphasizing average APM, when it clearly reached totally superhuman levels at times -- even a top professional can't execute 900+ flawless apm in a battle that we saw.

David Silver was clearly expecting the showmatch to be totally one sided (hence his speech that 'this is another historic victory for AI), but I were left with the opposite impression: that strategically top humans are still ahead in this game. This is not the end of the game for humans yet !

Does it have some kind of built-in redundancy? And how are you aware that it needs repair?

It could be better because it seems hard to make low-pass solids at audio range and beyond: for example, while you can easily make a spring which has low pass behavior in the few Hz range, the spring itself is made of metal and conducts sound normally. I guess you have felt pads and foam (which have thin strands and large number of interfaces for sound to reflect). The magnetic force however should retain its springy behavior up to arbitrarily high frequencies.

Yes I think it's good not to be carried away and burning yourself is definitely not good. What's certainly good for you is getting consistent, long term exposure that's compatible with your levels of tan.

Fascinating! I assume this kind of technique has been obsoleted by branch prediction, or are there imaginable modern applications?

See also: https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/sandb...

(disclaimer: self-promotion)