The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which could only represent emotion through character combinations and thus were lame rather than complete.
975 karma · joined December 11, 2015
We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.
Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside of these constraints.
That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and we don't actually know what that capacity is.
Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept that at some future point, they might be right, but it is always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's not a hypnosis. It's just life.
Cartographers in the 18th centuries were "basically done" mapping out the Earth. In the 20th century we were able to use satellite imagery to get the "full picture". Does that mean we have perfect knowledge of the Earth? Absolutely not. There is never a final frontier of knowledge.
A googolplex is "too big to be contained" in our universe yet here we are talking about it. We can perform operations on this number, compare it to other numbers, and even come up with mathematical proofs showing that it's too big to exist. There are an infinite amount of numbers larger than a googolplex and we could have an infinite amount of conversations about them. The material limit of the universe does not limit our ability to create information, to learn things.
There isn't enough space in the universe for an infinite series, either, yet we can (and do) still use them, we reason about them, we learn from them. We can even reduce some infinite series to a finite number. The material bounds of the universe are not a limit of knowledge.
Is the optimal move in an a given chess board considered knowledge? If so, can't we create entirely new sets of knowledge from the emergent properties of an arbitrary set of rules called a "game"? If we can create an infinite set of arbitrary combinations of rules and states (games), then knowledge should be infinite. Maybe not all knowledge is scientifically applicable, but we have learned a great deal about science and engineering from studying chess. In fact, we are starting to learn more about learning as a process and not as some magical thing that human beings can do, just from studying the best way to make decisions in this totally-contrived and scientifically-useless game.
Taking this a step further, let's look at the animal kingdom. If learning about the intricacies of the mating habits of birds can help an arbitrary bird increase its impact on the future gene pool, is that knowledge not worth something to the bird? To bird society? Are the things we learn about ourselves knowledge? They certainly have utility. Is there any limit to what we can learn about ourselves, about the stochastic process of life? Is life not part of the universe?
Is computer science even knowledge? It seems if we're more directly concerned with the physical nature of the universe, we ought not to care about what the system of a computer actually does; we only need to care about what it is, about its physical structure. Except, that's not actually how we pursue knowledge or science at all.
In my view, Asimov's sentiment can be reduced to a complete tautology: we're at the point where we know almost everything there is to know about the things we think we can know.
The limit of y = e^x is infinity. You can keep increasing x and y will increase exponentially. So you plot the function, let's say with the x axis going up to 10 and the y axis going up to e^10. The graph shows very clearly that, while there was progress before, we have even more progress now. Exponentially more, even! What came before is dwarfed by what we have now; if you look at the range of y for x values 9-10 you can see how little of a difference all those others values (1-8) had between one another, compared to the changes we have now. The rate of change is so high that we're basically in an era of semi-complete knowledge. We must be at some kind of inflection point, this is truly a unique era of understanding.
Then you repeat. Set the x axis to 100, and the y axis up to e^100. Oh wait, it's the same graph. That's because it's always the same graph. It's scale-invariant. The slope at every point is always whatever y is.
We're always at right at the limit of explaining the "essential nature" of the universe because the "essential nature" of the universe can only be (to us) what we can understand it to be. We chose e^10 as the limit of the y-axis in our first exercise because that's all the knowledge we knew about. We chose e^100 as the limit of the y-axis in our second exercise because that, too, was all the knowledge we knew about. Choosing these random values as the limits of our function (i.e. the limit of the "essential nature of the universe") leaks information into the visualization that will always paint a picture showing that we're at the most transformative time there ever was.
When we do it that way, we will always come to the same _wrong_ conclusion. We will always dwarf what came before and be dwarfed by what comes after. To think that we're actually living in an inflection point is hubris, it's wishful thinking, it's the sour grapes of mortality.
To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own.
To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them.
edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand.
I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.
There are many artists in my family and all of them have day jobs to support their creative passions. Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. If requiring a day job makes you give up art, you probably didn't have the drive to create anything people really wanted. For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons. Everyone tries to make money on their art, but again, even without AI the vast majority of artists fail to do so.
We're seeing the same thing with the actors and writers striking. Sorry folks, if you're making me choose between embracing neoluddism or living with some artsy folks not having their dream job, I'm going to pick you being out of a job. I do not care that background actors are going to be replaced by AI and I do not care that AI is going to let 1 writer do the work of 5. Background acting is not anyone's passion and writing predictable soapy sitcom stories is probably not anyone's passion, either.
AI is going to give us better creative work not because AI will become super creative, but because people who actually have creative thoughts worth expressing will just do that instead of being crowded out by humans chasing the lowest common denominator. Now we have computers chasing the lowest common denominator, something they are very good at, and we have humans who will create when they feel compelled to create, not because they want to make money but because their creativity compels them to act, make, and do.
If a songwriter is being replaced by an AI, their skills are not something we're going to miss. Sorry, not sorry. Artistic sensibilities have arguable never been the driver of what music is popular and I don't see the issue in having AI replace the bubblegum rubberstamp dime-a-dozen trash that the modal artists must produce to make money. Again, now you are totally outmatched by the AI and you can actually focus on creating an authentically human work without being distracted by the needs of industry. If there is no market for that then it is not because of AI but because of our own preferences.
The "human spirit" is just a story we tell ourselves to justify our dominion over everything we see. I'd be more than happy to see it die. Humanism is great if you're a human, but life is moving in other directions and we can either adapt to the notion that our primate brains aren't magical engines of wonder or die alongside our brittle egos.
If anything, this link shows that operating effectively within a hierarchy has clear advantages to survival.
Maybe it didn't take millions of people to build those things, but it did take millions of people to create an environment in which building those things could be considered a productive use of time.
The people who built Linux and Wikipedia didn't build it just for themselves, and indeed neither Linux nor Wikipedia would survive (in their current form) if they were not useful to millions of people.
Think of the neural complexity required for an amoeba to navigate with flagella vs a fly to navigate with wings. Even the fly's complexity is dwarfed by, say, the neural complexity of an elephant's control of his trunk. And that pales in comparison to the neural complexity required to get a spacecraft into orbit.
Complex behavior requires complex systems and complex systems require the simplicity that hierarchies provide.
Most animals don't have digits they can use to manipulate things with the precision we do. That doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.
There are dogs that have learned to ride public bus and metro systems. They know how to act to be accepted in these scenarios when other animals would not be. They have a sense of where they will be going and what the purpose of the vehicle is. They can use their noses to detect things that we cannot even with our fancy tools, and we even rely on them for their noses when our human tech fails.
If intelligence is the domain of humanity then I'm not so interested in intelligence. I'm interested in whatever it is that allows sentient beings to understand, operate within, and adapt to their environments.
How can a breeder, who is incentivized to create a stream of puppies to sell, be compatible with a society that is trying to reduce euthanasia for animals? Breeders already have to deal with puppies and kitties "aging out" of profitability, an organization like this just subsidizes their cost of dumping unwanted stock.
I think it's great to try to connect people with animals they want to take care of. It's not going to make overcrowded shelters any less crowded. There is certainly some unused shelter capacity that your organization can fill up, that is true. However, that capacity is not infinite, and once you have reached it you'll have all the same problems.
There is only one solution: subsidized spay/neuter programs and a crackdown on any animal-breeding operation. Otherwise, you're just giving a blood transfusion to a patient with a gushing wound.
From the perspective of an average user, subscribing to a big sub and using the default moderation view, nothing is changing. The only difference is that there are other moderator views created by different teams using the same content source.
When it comes to tricker cases, like with political content, some people have different preferences and those preferences are just that: a preference. If I want to view into a subreddit downstream of a politically-minded set of moderators, I should be able to do that without locking other people into the same view. Right? It doesn't mean that teams aren't all going to universally remove spam.
There are removals for ToS/legal reasons, which can be fairly universally applied. I see that as traditional moderation.
However, there are also community-specific removal paradigms based on what a moderator team sees as the vision for a space. This is much more "curation" than it is moderation.
So, assuming we will always need category 1 moderation, why do we marry only one set of category 2 moderation (curation) to a dataset of user-submitted posts and comments? What's the harm in allowing me a moderated but uncurated feed, and allowing me to apply my own filters? This would allow topic-specific items to congregate in one place with different curation paradigms present based on what users want. This solves many of the problems I see in the federated-reddit world.
Clearly there are some things that dang needs to remove for legal reasons. And the same goes for Reddit, some things just can't be hosted.
But when it comes to curation, which is the subjective judgment that a post or comment is either fit or not fit to be posted, do we need a singular moderator (or group of moderators) to enforce this? Is there any real issue with allowing multiple sets of curators for the same dataset? If we're trying to escape the fiefdoms of Reddit, I think we also need to escape the "law" that moderator teams and communities must be one to one.