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I think we can't trust our emotions. Evolutionary speaking it was probably a good idea for the brain to send a signal for us to be with the group so that we don't stray off alone, and as such this manifested in some brain function that sends the signal of loneliness like the OP describes from his school days.

However I think the issue is that we think these emotions tell us something grander about our lives but I don't think they do. I think they are like when you put your hand on a hot stove, the neurons fire and you feel pain. Loneliness as described in the blog post is just as fleeting and biological/instant as this.

I think even a person who is surrounded by people all the time can suddenly get this emotion of loneliness if he suddenly finds himself alone and everyone else is out to a party. Even more evidence that it is probably just a fleeting biological response like any other. It's in _combination_ with analytical skills and abstract reasoning that this biological response takes root and becomes something more than it actually was evolutionary, and thus becomes a bigger deal than it actually is.

It is a lack of bigger goals and short-medium term goals / meaning that excaserbates the analyzing of the loneliness response. And that's the great sadness of human life imo, we basically have a bunch of primal emotional responses + an abstract story telling and meaning driven neocortex which aren't really compatible with each other directly and do not communicate with each other in the same language when they are actually 2 separate physical systems.

One must not takes ones emotions seriously but rather always analyze in the abstract and then come to some sort of peace with the life one has and also plan for the future and look into the past. Emotions like loneliness should be seen as mere guides and not tadpoles imo.

I love this! I'm exactly like the author except a little less organized.

Some of my insights just to add to this: 1) I started curating existing collections to delete/cut down size. So I have a tv shows folder and I made a _cut folder and moved every show that I wasn't sure if I liked or if it was something I wanted to keep. This left the main folder with only my _absolute favorite_ shows.

2) I use sqlite for movie/tv/music/game/bookmarks databases and i try to combine data from different sources so like I combine imdb and boxofficemojo data in one sqlite db so that I know how many theaters every movie opened in and the rest of the info like actors/director/etc.

3) I make websites with lists and/or "collections" of the movies/things I like the most, and my personal stuff like code. That way I have to select and curate all of the items so that they are organized and accessible. Making a website is like publishing so can't publish drafts or half-finished stuff. Making a website for something really helps finishing the organization and collating all the disparate info.

4) Scraping info for all new movies/games/tv shows into the sqlite db's. Website for searching/browsing based on genre/whatever, and having the info locally (no third party).

5) Only publishing working code without any cruft to github. Makes it so I know every single commit in the commit history works and there is no need to organize everything since it was already organized and "fixed" when commiting. Also is essentially ALL code that I care to keep (I have a lot more "work in progress" code locally but that doesn't matter, only the published finished code matters), and of course local clone of all the repos.

6) I have a text file with all my command line one liners, tweaks and tricks for linux and/or website things but this is the one area where I am less organized. I don't externalize all the things I "know" as much, but I want to. I use my own memory for most things like that but would be nice to have a knowledge graph of some kind - looking into Obsidian.

Anyway great post.

If everyone is unmasked and the Omicron variant seems to burn through the vaccines in terms of infection but not serious illness, does that mean that it can lead to more mutations and more _bad_ mutations if so many people get it? What's the "mutation rate" in a person who has mild or no symptoms and how infectious are they?

It just seems if one sick person creates a bad variant that is more infectious or even more deadly (and burn through the vaccines like Omicron) and everyone is unmasked/etc at the same time then such a variant could spread wide without immediate detection. I have no idea if any of this is true so take it with a grain of salt...

The way I read it was that Matt saw that WP needed to evolve to compete with everything else that exists, and that the volunteer release lead model that they used before could never lead to anything like Gutenberg in such a short time.

All Matt has done and said makes me believe he loves OSS, freedom of the user and democratization of publishing. Why would he ruin his own creation by looking for an exit when WP is already hugely popular and more importantly why abandon what seems to be his principles around freedom/OS. I will eat my words in 5-10 years if it isn't true but I think everyone will see he will focus just as much on wp.org and freedom as he does Automattic (ie keeping as much as possible open, free alternatives (like jetpack), etc)

ALso Gutenberg is not nearly as bad as those reviews say. It is much better even only in the last few months, though a lot of UX development is needed it is a powerful editor.

CREATE TABLE if not exists boxoffice (title ANY, theaters ANY, release_date ANY, year ANY) STRICT;

One thing I think is interesting about the paper is how complex systems (like the brain) change over _time_ rather than at fixed points, and if those changes are computable in any meaningful way.

Like if we created an AI 100 years ago, could the AI 100 years later learn how to use an ipad or understand what twitter is or what a meme is? What if brain changes from cultural (environmental) change are both complex and thus creating mathematical models that would change the intelligence of the AI in the way the brain changes is impossible. Like physical changes in the circuits in the brain that are so distributed, interconnected and complicated and subtle yet very specifically "tailored" to the complex system so as to make them virtually impossible to abstract or model in any way, and thus changes the "mathematical model" of the brain that is sort of "virtualized" at a fixed point in time.

Edit: Well to put it a little more explicitly: What if the real reason brains are intelligent is not because of the brain alone, but also because of the underlying physical systems like molecules, maybe even going all the way down to quantum mechanics and that those lower levels cause changes over time that fundamentally alters the function of the brain but still has the evolutionary potential of the lower level physical stuff.

If you have 2 levels: 1) the brain 2) the underlying physical stuff below neurons

1 is a virtualized fixed point in time that we can model and 2 is part of a complex system that alters 1 but importantly in a way that cannot be computed without simulating that stuff at the lower level. I feel like this is sort of implied in the article because either intelligence can be abstracted completely accurately or there will (as the paper claims) always be lower level physical changes that alters the intelligence in a way that cannot be computed at the brain/intelligence level. I don't know if this is true though tbh

Great list thanks, I love LGR.

If you don't mind my asking - do you know any channels or places that do full longplays of games on original hardware with no emulation? I try my best to find walkthroughs on games on youtube but they very rarely specify that it is using the original hardware. And Xbox og/360 longplays are the easiest because they haven't been emulated properly so almost all videos are on the hardware afaik.

Looking for 1997-2006 PC gaming and PS1/PS2. I guess I just like videos that aren't emulated and people like LGR only provide clips:P

Yours is a possibility but I personally think the opposite is true - if all thoughts were made public everyone would understand each other much better (100% empathy if ALL thoughts were known), and thus there would be no monsters or mentally ill people left.

I think Blogger is still the best and most flexible platform.

Pros of blogger: 1) Extremely free speech and very little moderation (as long as it's legal)

2) Allows adult content

3) Can have ads for free

4) Unlimited photos (for images under 2000px, but even those over that are resized and don't count to storage quota)

5)You can do a lot with posts, pages, themes and editing HTML (can make complex web sites with a lot of sections and styling)

I've had a Blogger blog for 13 years and a gazillion posts and images and dump everything of interest on there and it's great. I do hope it lasts.

Wordpress.com has a better editor and better themes, but lacks editing html and deep customization, umlimited uploads, free ads and so on so it's not really an alternative for someone like me.

I know nothing about this so excuse any potential ignorance:

They say: >COVID-19 mRNA vaccines give instructions for our cells to make a harmless piece of what is called the “spike protein.” The spike protein is found on the surface of the virus that causes COVID-19.

So from what I understand the vaccine itself does not contain the spike protein but is simply RNA that is injected into the cell and then the cell goes through its usual process to translates* the RNA to amino acids which then gets churned into protein (the spike protein)?

My first question is how did they make the RNA? Is it the exact same RNA as in the coronavirus or is it artificially generated by them? Does it do the exact same thing that the RNA in coronavirus does and is the spike protein the exact same spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus or is it different (even if subtly so?)

Can anything go wrong at any point in this process (can the body misuse the RNA, or the spike protein, or anything else) and if so what?

*edited

some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong:

>I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin, whether I can see that as a positive or a negative, and whether I agree with Dalio that governments would (or could) take action to prevent it.

I don't think they could control it at all, as I will get into in the next post

>The enforcement of debt and the ability to track money seem, to me, like some of its most important properties

I don't think you could track money at all, because I think in a world where bitcoin is dominant, you can bet that you would have many other cryptocurrencies as well. And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from.

Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course

>I’m also interested in what a world with a fixed amount of currency really looks like.

It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists and each currency and inflation would have to be determined individually and you would have booms and crashes based on just how individual markets supply/demand progresses (i think?)

Regarding the "tragic" part of the post... It feels like there are more people learning Python and other things like that than there were 10 years ago. Linux is built into Windows, there is a lot of github activity, is all of this a sign that there will be more tinkerers in the future? That tinkering will be more for everyone rather than a few experts?

Also since you have a lot of computer science majors, and coding is a thing everyone knows about (?), it seems like there will always be a sizable portion that will need proper computers and a proper OS that isn't just a "device". I mean without programmers and technical people in the future the companies themselves will not be able to run so there must always be proper options for those who want it

I don't think I've been paying enough attention but how does this work? The FBI, Police, and some congress members afaik have been talking about the going dark problem for years and now suddenly they pass a bill that explicitly protects companies from liability if they implement end to end encryption etc? Huh?! And why is EFF so wrong about this if that is correct?

Maybe it has something to do with "Notwithstanding paragraph (6)"

Just fyi, the google chrome plugin "Suspicious Site Reporter" reverts the url back to how it always was, with http:// and www and everything else. It's very lightweight and you can just leave it on, don't have to report anything or do anything with it.

Hopefully it remains this way _forever_, even with these newer changes as well.

I think the devil is in the details when it comes to this argument. Some philosophy speculation ahead.

1) It's unclear which parts of our perception reflects the real world and which don't, and also how to measure how accurate they are. We obviously see objects as much more than what the photons representing them that hit our retina tells us. The brain creates all kinds of backstory and assumptions based on its model of the world, however, I would argue that the basic shapes we see are accurate.

So basically the geometry/shape of a face, of a chair, of <pick any object> is real, while the extended cultural, practical and personal associations the brain attaches to those are "not real" (or rather, we see a chair as a utility we can sit on, so we see both the shape of a chair but also potential uses for it, so it becomes an extended model of ourselves+chair, but that doesn't mean the shape isn't real). Also even though we can change our extended model of objects, we don't normally change our base perception, e.g. a chair always looks the same shape even though we may see different uses for it in different contexts. I would argue we really see the shape of the chair. This then leads to difficulty knowing how to define what is real/accurate and what isn't.

2) It's unclear whether the extended models we have are reflective of the real world or not, and if so how much. Just because I see a chair as a utility I can sit on, doesn't mean that it doesn't reflect reality. In fact you could say the model reflects a more abstract truth about how my body fits into a chair, so it becomes a more encompassing truth about bodies+chairs. Hell you could even include that it includes some information about how my muscles tire and need rest and so on.

3) I think the basic idea is true and interesting. We clearly do not see the world like a camera does, but I wouldn't go as far as saying it doesn't reflect reality at all. I haven't looked at this authors papers, but I saw an interview where he mentioned some statistical measurement of how organisms who saw the world as it actually was had a lower survival rate than those who do, and I'd be curious on how sound that argument is. The devil is in the details again and it sounds to me like such an argument could be interpreted several ways.

Interesting speech by William Barr:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?464971-3/attorney-general-barr...

"Only two ways to protect society ... 1) Ability to detect and apprehend criminals .. 2) Regiment society as a whole"

"Our ability to protect the public from criminal threats is rapidly deteriorating"

"Status quo is exceptionally dangerous"

Yeah good point, I shouldn't have mentioned gaming. I guess what I'm looking for is the general desktop workstation situation 10-20 years down the line, rather than gaming specifically. A workstation for visual arts, music, streaming, linux, programming, whatever, and especially if there will be a point in the 2020s or 30s where you'll have long pauses between cpu releases if they don't improve as fast etc.

Can someone here talk about what desktop CPU's might look like for the consumer in 2029?

Like, I'm a gamer in 2029 and I'm looking for the equivalent of todays Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen. How much faster will it be? How different will it be from today? Etc.

As far as I can tell it doesn't even help the big players, Google has said it is economically impossible to be compliant with article 11 https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/12/2045240/youtube-ceo...

There's a big difference between a DMCA system where the content host has the responsibility to take down copyrighted content in a reasonable time frame, while having safe harbor protection in cases where content gets through, versus a "non-safe harbor" law where you literally cannot allow any copyrighted content _on upload_, or you can be held liable. It would be impossible to decide who owns what, even for Google, and so they would need to have some other system that is not user generated content (who knows what).

User-generated content is the life blood of the web, it's why everyone can communicate and we have this new world, we simply need it I think. I really disagree with others who try to frame this as if Google and Reddit are simply another company trying to defend their turf. This is a real blunder for the EU and completely misinformed IMO

> but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'

All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become:

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.

Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.

I really think (and hope) that VR will be the medium for watching 3D movies. They don't solve the IPD issue, but when I have found 3d bluray movies that work for me without issue, the comfort level is great, the immersion is great. Once VR hmd's get really high resolution and start to look very sharp, it'll be a next level experience i think and everyone will want movies in 3D (hopefully)

I agree, but I think human knowledge can be represented as either a graph, hierarchy or network of patterns. Like my knowledge of the letter 'A' is a network of connections to patterns 'language', 'english', 'alphabet', whatever else, and if the computer can do the same, it can use that knowledge of that network (as a whole separate entity) to make a decision, so to speak.

Consciousness does come into it since we have a pretty visceral sense of it, and especially when we mentally trawl through our patterns to make some story, but really understanding should just be creating new patterns from existing patterns and the ability to utilize them as distinct entities in some way (rather than being emergent in the system implicitly and only being utilized by accident, say as emergent behavior randomly occurring because of local constraints)

> But, one's ability to buy things seems to be improved...

It's only improved if there is a lot of investment and new / more products coming out. deflationary currency promotes holding on to your money so that it goes up in value, but if everyone does that there will be less products / services and the value of the currency will ultimately go down. If currency has some inflation, then it's used as a transaction currency so that you want goods rather than currency, so the product becomes the important thing. If you have too much inflation however you get way too much money for the amount of products, so you want stable inflation.

Yeah the problem is where would you put in the command to maximize paperclips? Even though deep learning is very powerful, it doesn't contain a utility function. The utility function to maximize paperclips would be some kind of module separate from a set of deep learning nets that would coordinate and read inputs from all the nets and then somehow give commands to some actuators somewhere (which it would also need intelligence about). All those deep learning networks would have to already be tuned to be very accurate in their own right before they are hooked up to any kind of controller.

That was my point that, AI has been confused with the deep learning gains in the past years, even though, the hard part about how to coordinate all those inputs and also give the right commands to actuators is still not near to solved, much less a completely virtual superintelligence that has its own "virtual" goals and virtual simulations of both its inputs and potential actuators in the real world. This would be akin to a kind of intelligence algorithm, and not deep learning vector algorithms that reveal structures in data.

> 2. The claims by the Bostrom/Yudkowsky/etc. crowd that an AI intelligence explosion will cause the extinction of humanity

Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I have a hard time understanding what /any/ "utility function" would be, that the super ai people talk about. It can't be a passive deep learning network that parses information and gives an output, it has to be some kind of complex perception / action loop of many neural nets and actuators in the real world that somehow leads to an intelligent self improving behavior? I guess you could make a deep learning controller for self driving cars say, and if an input to many cars is wrong, all the cars crash and create a big cascading mess of wrong input values, but that kind of accident is a far cry from an intelligent chain of events where every link in the chain is an intelligent decision but the ultimate goal is bad.

And, do we even know any way to chain many deep learning networks together that accurately give correct output values, that we then can hook up to a controller to give a utility function, which can then lead to a cascade of intelligent decisions across domains?

> I'd argue that we see lots of decentralization on the web.

Youtube, Paypal, Facebook, Steam, Reddit, Medium, Github, hell even hackernews - I think the big success story of the internet in the past decade has been the centralization. Decentralization is usually popular because of illegal intents (like bittorrent). I agree with you though, they could exist in a hybrid state and there will always be markets for decentralized systems. But a global economic system run that way is on a totally different scale and stake.

> I'd say that money should definitely be decentralized.

Depending on how it's done, it very well should, but a lot of things come into question like governance and consumer protection, and actually moving the world forward and helping those who aren't computer savvy. Unless you're a libertarian, the economy is really a means to an end and not and end in itself, and another big success story over the past decades has been the huge global economy that has been created and enabled everyone from the poor to the old to people who aren't as savvy to work and live relatively safe lives. You can't just dump the bitcoin software on everyone and say, "here it is! your life savings, your paycheck, your everything, just make sure you don't fry the hard drive that it's stored on and make backups!"

Decentralization is for the most part, an enthusiast endeavour. The centralization aspect is powerful because it offloads all the technical details so that 5 hours per day of brainpower on the whole globe isn't wasted on just trying to do something as simple as recovering 5 bucks in an emergency. And this applies to almost any decentralized service and applies even more strongly to things that are of survival importance like money. I'm not disregarding the idea or making a prediction, it's just there's a lot here to think about I think

Sort of anecdotally, I think the big difference is whether it's voluntary or involuntary aloneness. Even the difference between 1 person and 0 persons to just call/talk to is huge

> if anything it finds out just how ill defined the world actually is.

Yeah I hear this but it seems only half-true to me. While for most intents and purposes the world is ill-defined, in another sense the world itself is "100% signal" and no noise. If we "zoom out" and take a grand view, imagining that we have a supercomputer and a huge database, and the algorithms are solved, I think every 'thing' in the universe has some unique features, and if you start to have them all in a database you may be able to uniquely identify any thing, at least those important to us. Everything one has excludes something else, but it also includes that specific thing. Every thing adds context to one thing and removes context from another. If you can draw a map of it, it seems to me like deep learning can, hypothetically, automatically differentiate it. Deep learning isn't just about one vector or one hierarchy of features, it's about how the world is ALL vectors like this, even if right now, the CS around it is pretty limited. It seems to me intuitively true at least. At the bare minimum, seeing as us humans are absurd about categorizing everything into objects, and it actually works very well functionally (we can manipulate, create and predict in the world)

Yeah that's why I called it philosophical, because the idea is a little more involved, shall we say. I'm not a god of this, so speculation ahead bewarned. In cases that aren't clear cut, you would also need contextual data like bigger actual physical area, or over time dimension, really any data point that can help narrow down what the thing is. It wouldn't just be pure deep learning stuff, it would be some kind of memory and data store of already classified objects and contexts. In the ultimate end, ALL of it would be sparse, but classify perfectly just that one thing it is built to classify. And if that doesn't work, several sparse things combined would result in one unique thing. On the sparsity matrix wikipedia page there is an example of balls with a string through them, this would correspond to the data being the balls and the systems we build (or alternatively unsupervised learning methods for finding new strings), whatever they may be, would be the strings (assuming all the strings are actual informational and correct to natural world). But you need the balls to begin with etc. Since all of this information should be in the natural world by its own, and also accessible to us

Nah. There is a difference in my mind between creating a 'map' of the natural world, and deciding which actions to perform in that world, and this is all theoretical/philosophical. If one were to do a pure AI type programming language it would have to come from the AI itself, and it would need some reason to create that language and who knows where/what all those rules would be and why (think of human programmers who make new languages).