kadonoishi

Used to live in Yokohama. This is relaxing, to listen to the quiet traffic, thanks.

Note Elon said he'd destroy the Republicans for their budget vote last June:

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1lojll9/if_its_th...

[0] A summary on ACX of a debate between nuclear and solar proponents; and

[1] The video of the debate itself.

I thought solar won.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-stu...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbypyd7HFPE

> Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.

A dramatic line. I made a note of it.

To detect a presence, a real brain takes in sensory input and compares it to expectations, and stays calm or registers surprise, and from time to time issues predictions to guide the organism.

To detect an absence, the brain cannot rely on sensory input, by definition. To be surprised if sensory evidence is _not_ there requires a model of the world strong enough to register surprise if the expectation is not there, without a sensory prompt.

It seems to me detecting an absence is a strictly higher-order neurological task than processing sensory input.

If LLMs can't do this strictly higher-order neurological task, is that not a capability currently unique to living things?

Gah, that would be hard to dig out. It was over 30 years ago.

edit: Ok that wasn't too hard, it was in a box. It's

"Fields on the Hoof: Nexus of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism" by Robert B. Ekvall, 1968, 1983.

Thanks for making me go find that, the notebook for the class is interesting to look at again.

I once read a small book for an anthropology class, and got more and more puzzled, and rather incensed. It was covering its subject well but with this bizarre hodgepodge of different anthropological framings, some of them quite anachronistic, some current, jumping around with jarring inconsistency.

I got to the end (it was a small book, only maybe 110pp) wondering what in the heck this thing was, and flipped to look at the author at the back. And it was a missionary! Instantly my attitude flipped; I was in awe that a missionary could do such good anthropology, and the inconsistencies in framing made perfect sense.

This author has good psychological insights, but her theoretical framings are somewhat mis-specified, inconsistent, sometimes out-of-date by psychological standards, to my eye. But it's very good stuff.

artist : psychologist :: missionary : anthropologist

Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.

To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.

Ok, so, try dividing time into a view of it repeating, and progressing.

Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.

Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.

It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.

Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely

H psi = ih d/dt psi

H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.

The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.

Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.

To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.

So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WPA1L9uJqo

Here's another answer to the Fermi Paradox, that while life is normal and abundant, there are lots of random possibilities for destruction such as a primordial black hole coming by.

The apparent rarity of intelligent life might be a statistical matter of there being lots of opportunities for such life to arise, but also lots of hazards of random destruction.

... on reflection, while this might be intellectually satisfying, it's not particularly nice to contemplate.

Peter Jenkins did his Walk Across America in the 1980s.

Oh, is that why Tolkien had Frodo throw the Ring in the Fire on March 25? And then King Elessar made that day the first day of the New Year. And the tradition held on until the 18th century. Huh.

I'd really like to know if menstrual synchronization is real, because there's a straightforward explanation: temporal herding. In the ancestral environment, it drew predators, so under the normal dynamics of prey and predators it pays to herd together. Herding in space is easy to see; herding in time, as of oak trees tending to produce acorns in the same year, is also easy to note after awhile. So if our ancestors evolved to all menstruate at the same time as a defense against predation, it seems perfectly straightforward. But all I hear is anecdotes that are promptly attacked, so, is this a real physical phenomenon?

I spent some years doing computer simulations of cancer screening. The confusion between the output of the simulation, which is not evidence, and real evidence, led me into a nightmare of the Hall of Mirrors, where everything I attempted to learn about cancer screening turned out to be merely a reflection of my own assumptions. Everywhere I turned it was another funhouse mirror, where the computer warped my own ideas because the code I wrote was not a perfect flat reflection of what I meant, because my code introduced distortions, which took immense rigor to avoid.

The confusion between real evidence, and the output of my computer simulation which was not evidence but I _confused_ it with evidence, led me down a dark path lost in a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors of my own construction.

Listen to pdonis, people.

Yeah, I was getting my Japanese visa and noticed the office wasn't that far from Shinagawa Station, so I decided to walk. Everyone thought it was super-weird I would walk that, where any Tokyo native would take the bus. It was 2km, so, there's a data point on what's considered an excessive walk in Tokyo.

But I'm a person who would take a whole Saturday and spend 8hr walking through San Francisco or Seattle or NYC for fun, so, biased data point.

Yeah, I was getting my Japanese visa and noticed the office wasn't that far from Shinagawa Station, so I decided to walk. Everyone thought it was super-weird I would walk that, where any Tokyo native would take the bus. It was 2km, so, there's a data point on what's considered an excessive walk in Tokyo.

But I'm a person who would take a whole Saturday and spend 8hr walking through San Francisco or Seattle or NYC for fun.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consc...

builtwith.com gives a lot of information, although the results page comes back with a "Misleading Technology Profile Warning".

Yeah. I'd note the need for a centralized fuel supplier, as you don't want hundreds of little municipal nuclear plants trying independently to dispose of the waste. Have a centralized "library" of nuclear fuel, where the plants "check out" the fuel and then turn it in when spent. The centralized authority can concentrate expertise on the issues of sourcing uranium, tracking where it is, then disposing of it safely. The small plants are then freed to focus on running the actual plant and providing reliable electricity to their cities.

> There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it.

"Cowardice"? From an old version of the Wikipedia article, "Fear and excessive self-concern lead one to not do things of benefit to oneself and one's group" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowardice

Tidal would rely on orbital energy.

Is evolution not brute-force?

People have put in further thought about this and had good insights. A couple examples would be Rao's essay on The Gervais Principle [0] and, much heavier, Bob Jackall's 1988 book "Moral Mazes." [1]

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes

Appreciate the careful space after "We ".

Oh right, I didn't mean this as an offer of employment but I see now that it sounds like that.

How about, connect it to vacation destinations? If people like the smell of the air at the moment, and could connect that with where the air mass originated, and if you put ads for vacation destinations matched to results pages, that sounds like a plausible business.

Hmm, maybe I should write this myself.

I wonder if there could be conscious life inside neutron stars, organized through nuclear reactions not chemical and therefore going much faster.

Elon Musk will get turned into art and will be the main thing remembered from this time. He's going to succeed in building his city on Mars, and multiplanetary life will be the basic reality of people in 500 years. They'll wonder how their reality started, and it'll be perfectly clear it was Elon and his singular genius.

Elon is such a weird person that it's ridiculously easy to turn him into a character in a story, which people do all the time already, right now, with great abandon, even though Elon's a contemporary figure where you can go to one of his talks and see him in person if you want. People in 500 years will have fully turned him into a fantasy hero out of stories, especially if he dies in some way that will complete the pattern in people's heads of the self-sacrificing powerful slave (really really hope that doesn't happen to him).

Lots of his talks are up on Youtube, and he's amazingly transparent, he puts it right out there what he's doing and then delivers mind-bending tech. The Tesla Battery Day presentation in 2020 blew my freakin' mind, stuff like rearrangement of basic industrial processes like nickel refining, or the laser focus on scalability, capital requirements, speed, automation, the correctly-chosen goal of reaching a scale that can alter climate change.

Then people immediately make enormously confident statements about him that are the opposite of true, because they ignorantly think he's a joke because he's such a weird guy plus an actual well-meaning person.

I've never spotted Elon Musk telling a lie, and the stuff he says is consistently seriously insightful and on-point. In fact Elon seems to me to be the only person on Earth who's acting fully rationally. The stuff he does makes sense _all the way down_, where somebody like Barack was acting very rationally but was hemmed-in by the nature of his position as president, where his power to do the right thing was constrained by e.g. the Senate. Elon consistently goes along doing the right thing, not "the right thing" in the usual sense where the person's doing the best they can considering their circumstances, but objectively The Right Thing.

I had never seen or heard tell of anything like Elon Musk before I started noticing him in about 2014, and I'm 50, well-read, traveled, overeducated, keep a sharp eye on current events, try all the time to understand the world around me. I bitterly regret not going down to Texas for the Starship presentation in 2019. Turned out it was de facto open to the public because Boca Chica Village residents could come. It would've been awesome to be there on that windy night on the coast of Texas, with a small group of people listening to Elon, with a mockup Starship right behind him, and Tim Dodd got a cool little interview afterward. Fortunately it's all up on Youtube; but I prefer to go be at historic events in person whenever possible.

It's an interesting art to spot important things unfolding and get there in time, a real-world substantive sport. Predicting what art will be remembered in 500 years is interesting; judging what art from the past was significant is interesting; but judging reality in realtime well enough to show up yourself in person in time to be in on a historic event, to meet a person who is right now doing the significant thing, that I would say is the most interesting of all. Short of, of course, _being_ the person doing the historically-significant thing.

You could use word2vec [0] to process bodies of text in those languages, then use your C++ to build cool visualizations. The geometrical shapes that the processing finds in the languages might give you interesting insights.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERibwqs9p38

He doesn't practice any of his speeches ahead of time. Too busy. When you hear it that's the first time he's said it, generated right there in realtime. Often he'll repeat something he said in another talk, but when it's the same idea that's hard/pointless to avoid.

Could be part of Canada's national defense posture. According to the experts, https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/7xnulz/canadas_..., they have "cultural WMDs".