jjaredsimpson

If the best defense of some piece of writing that an author can muster is that the writing "isn't illegal," then what value have you added to the community of readers/consumers.

I'm tired of having to ignore racists, trolls, etc. Why should I have to constantly filter trash from my input. I'll be happy when spam filters are omnipresent and upgraded to "content quality" filters.

This is why I don't use Facebook as a primary online presence. I don't give them all my data, and locations, and relationships, and baby pictures, etc.

Author is just making a play at getting special treatment if her whiny article goes viral.

Don't depend on things you don't control.

Abstractly your program is a tree rooted at main. In a language like C you concentrate on building trees knowing that you are going to touch every node. So you are trying to design small trees that have good execution semantics as well as being correct in the problem solving domain. You have to address the problem at 2 levels. Because C is strict every function you call will be evaluated before it can return some result.

Haskell is different you can build any tree you like because a node will only be evaluated if its result is required for the current context. You are free to work with models of data like "the integers" or "all possible game states".

Concretely in C if you wanted to find the smallest positive integer that satisfies some property P you would write something like

    for (int i=1; ; i++) if (P(i)) return i;

In contrast in Haskell you might do something like

    find P [1..]

Applying this simple example, in Haskell you aren't concern with limiting the shape of your program's tree. You build the correct model for your program regardless of constraints like infinite lists or terminating searches early. You just allow non-strict evaluation to process your input data because you will never have to strictly generate an infinite integer list before scanning it.

At root non-strict semantics is just a reversal of the order of reduction of expressions.

The return always seems faster.

    DoSomething(thing, logging: true);

The other side is a person who is capable of rationalizing theft because it is a minor theft.

The theft isn't of an object, it is theft of compensation due to a creator. Duplication isn't the issue.

Destruction isn't the point. The point is that something paid with public money isn't available for the public's use. You have no rights to any object just because you pay taxes.

A government levies taxes and through appropriation spends that money. If a park is built, then fine use it. If a tank is built, then too bad that's not your tank.

You can't dig up roads, take library books, or drive cop cars.

American police forces deliberately gorge on the excess of 750,000 marijuana-related arrests every year in order to profit from quotas, grants, and civil forfeiture while allowing hundreds of thousands of rape kits to sit untested for years in police warehouses. Only 4% of all American police arrests are for crimes considered “violent” by the FBI, even though those crimes are offered as the justification for enormous public expenditures, wholesale Orwellian surveillance, and every violent aspect of modern policing.

    int fib(int n)
    {
    	return (n <= 1) ? n : fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
    }

I wish this would stop being repeated. The argument for a solar system tiling smiley face machine has been thoroughly refuted.

The few who make novel contributions are not representative.

People working in groups building on the success and knowledge of others make the vast majority of meaningful contributions in all fields.

Any person on the street could kill me for no reason whatsoever. But I don't live my life like that is a possibility.

I also don't think about future superintelligences in that way either. I don't worry that they will be holocaust machines teetering on the brink of genocide.

>The reason I say that I don’t worry about AI turning evil is the same reason I don’t worry about overpopulation on Mars.

I think a technological singularity is a rational proposition and even consider it possible within this century. But I have no fear of a Terminator/Matrix/etc outcome. He seems to think the possibility is just too far away to even consider it. But I agree for a different reason. I don't worry because I don't think I (or any human) can accurately assess what a superintelligence would do. And to assume absolute destruction of all humans seems ridiculous.

> In universe two you have one organization, maybe Carnegie Mellon or Google, that invents a self-driving car and bam! You have self-driving cars. It wasn’t available Tuesday but it’s on sale on Wednesday.

>I’m in universe one.

I am strongly in universe one. I have no faith in the basement dwelling loner making significant contributions to AI.

Or a joke about Snowden being a hero and deserving to be president.