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eouwt

31 karma · joined November 11, 2022

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eouwt··on Black holes might be defects in spacetime
> We do know that mathematical frameworks cannot be at the same time totally complete and internally consistent.

I take it you're referencing Godel's theorems here, but "consistent" and "complete" have rather technical (and somewhat limited) meanings within that context, so it's not clear to me how they'd usefully map onto the potential relationship between QM and GR?

eouwt··on Teams are becoming smaller
1) [citation needed]

2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying in our 30s and have things like running water?

eouwt··on Childhoods of Exceptional People
> The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.

The majority of societies that have tried anything different were/are significantly worse for the average person. That seems like more than a little substantiation.

eouwt··on How inevitable is the concept of numbers? (2021)
> Europeans have maybe a few words or even just one word to describe snow

Really? In common use: snow, sleet, hail, flurry, frost, hoar, ice, rime, (snow)drift, powder, slush. Less commonly: firn, neve, sastrugi, suncups, ...

eouwt··on How inevitable is the concept of numbers? (2021)
> a literal manifestation of two-ness in front of him

Did he though? Are there two gloves, or 100 wool threads, or a 10^23 atoms? Would a different mind see the same thing?

eouwt··on Does mathematics need a philosophy?
Repasting the quote without addressing the response does not do much to bolster your position - perhaps the opposite!
eouwt··on Trove of spices from around the world on sunken fifteenth-century Norse ship
> we don't particularly use a lot of them and even when we do, the taste is better, but not extremely so

Speak for yourself!

eouwt··on The high cost of expensive housing and how Auckland fixed it
>> "how Auckland fixed it"

Anyone who lives in Auckland: bahahahahhaha

eouwt··on A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face
Technically yes, but in practice I think the victims and survivors of extinction events might beg to differ
eouwt··on An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
>> Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly

Really? In every country I've live in, politicians write laws, judges set precedents, and lawyers only get to make arguments. True, the first two are often & always former lawyers, but that seems as reasonable as how doctors get to determine best medical practice.

eouwt··on Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
"LLM and AGI"

Feels like the three letters A-G-I are doing a lot of heavy lifting there

eouwt··on Tetris is capable of universal computation
Agreed...if you have to introduce an "agent" to make it complete, is it Tetris that's complete or Tetris + an agent?
eouwt··on Tetris is capable of universal computation
Imho the fact that a Turing machine is capable of universal computation is surprising/insightful. I'm not sure the fact that other simple systems are then also complete adds much more surprise/insight, even if it's difficult to predict which ones will be.

What I think people often miss is the difference between computational completeness and computational "power". Yes rule 110 is complete, but what that means in practice is that you've shifted most of the work (for solving a real problem) onto specifying the initial conditions.

Maybe Tetris is Turing complete but it's still a lot easier to compute 2+2 on a pocket calculator.

eouwt··on Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer
It's not uncommon for the T&Cs of tickets and such to require photo ID...in which case?
eouwt··on What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?
"just"
eouwt··on This Week's Hype
Searle's Chinese room is one of those things it's obvious most people talk about without ever having bothered to actually read. Searle does not say computers will never think. Early in the paper he even says - obviously machines can think because we are precisely examples of such machines. His point is that maybe it takes a certain kind of processing to yield what we call consciousness, and that may be a subset of the processes that yield outwardly similar behaviour.
eouwt··on The First Naked Kiss on Camera: Eadweard Muybridge, Sex and Murder
Perhaps that's true of some portion of Victorian society, but one sentence can't capture a whole society's understanding.

I can think of contradicting evidence, e.g., the novel Fanny Hill (pre Victorian but still English)

eouwt··on The world is run by people no smarter than you
I think it was Einstein who said "I probably didn't say this"