karpierz

> I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).

I would 100% take you up on this bet.

> People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy.

I think that painting-and-photography is the wrong analogy; stuff like DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up.

The earth is round, until it isn't?

> Contrast this with if I had alpha-gal syndrome and someone me offered me a steak. In that case, I could truthfully say "I can't eat that".

If the person said: "eat this steak and I'll give you a billion dollars or don't, and I'll kill everyone on this planet in the most painful way imaginable, including you", I doubt your response would be "I can't eat that".

Where is lobbying illegal?

If you only had one programming language, this problem would turn into an issue of too many frameworks. The problem isn't that there are too many programming languages; the issue is that there are many ways to structure code around a problem. Different problems incentivize different structures and so you end up with different languages.

> 90% of my old college teachers (engineering) could talk about and explain in depth many many topics out of their field (philosophy, history, geography and what not).

How do you know they could explain it in depth?

I've heard a lot of people who think they know history/philosophy/economics (especially on HN), but what they really know is pop history/philosophy/economics.

The issue with this kind of meta analysis is that, as the author, you get to decide what the groupings are. No two studies will be identical, so you can invent bucketing strategies until you find that some buckets have the results you want and focus on those.

In addition, they don't seem to have shown that the technique they're applying actually works for modelling the distributions that they're analyzing.

By this same logic, fraud shouldn't be a crime. People will always find a way to profit by misleading people, and the most careful ones will reap the rewards and get away with it.

Is this your definition of consciousness?

> What I mean by "soul" or "consciousness" is the common usage of the term. Essentially, this person would be claiming that he can move a participant's essence or frame of view (with memories, personality, etc.) from a human body to a digital one. At least, that's how I would interpret it, and I don't think the average person would be that far off.

If so, the issue is that you've defined the unknown term ("consciousness"), in terms of other unknown terms ("essence", "frame of view", etc.), which doesn't actually resolve the problem of grounding the word "consciousness".

For example, to some Catholics, the "essence" of a person is their soul, which is tied to the body granted to them by God. And so, the salesman in your original question is obviously lying, because by definition, their "essence" is tied to their physical body.

The only reason the question is difficult to answer is because it's a metaphysical question. There is no physical definition of consciousness, or frame of view. So whether or not your "consciousness" shifts when you use this machine entirely depends on how your metaphysical beliefs define "consciousness".

Are you claiming that it's not possible to define consciousness?

It's undefined terms all the way down.

"Soul", "consciousness", "essence", "frame of view", "personality", "memories" are all undefined terms. The question you really want unambiguously answered is "what the essence of a person?"

For example, if you define "essence" as "the manner in which an agent interacts with the outside world", then provided you interact with people entirely via text chat, your "essence" could be uploaded (with a sufficiently advanced simulation).

If you define "essence" as the "continuity of bodily processes that keep a human alive", then no, as your digital replica is not continuing your bodily functions.

If you define "consciousness" as a "subjective" experience, then the question is unanswerable, precisely because you've left the measure of "consciousness" up to the "subject". In addition, your definition of "subject" becomes circular, because "subject X" is the agent with "consciousness X" and "consciousness X" is the experience that "subject X" goes through. So really, when you say "consciousness" is subjective, what you're doing is punting on how you tell what a "subject" is.

> But in the US the history of unions often ended up with ties to organized crime.

Organized crime takes root in groups that don't benefit from government protection. Do you think that unions would've turned to organized crime if the authorities and privatized security groups didn't regularly attack them without any intervention by the US government to protect them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

Your question isn't answerable in its current state due to some undefined terms. Can you describe what you mean by "soul"/"consciousness"?

No, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32109419

I suspect that your experience comes from working at EA in a leadership capacity, whereas the toxicity complaints come from the front-line workers (IE, SWE, QA).

This return policy is true regardless of whether it has DRM or whether you knew.

You can return any Steam game, for any reason, provided you've played it fewer than two hours and purchased it within the last two weeks.

The market isn't pricing whether Elon will improve Twitter. The market is pricing in the fact that if the acquisition goes through, each stock you hold gets converted into 52.40$, regardless of what happens to Twitter after it's acquired.

> Ownership remains decentralized because the recovery address cannot make a transfer that the custody address does not approve.

This isn't true though?

If I go out camping for a week and the recovery address transfers my identity, I won't be asked to approve; it'll simply go through after waiting 3 days.

A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions. And a personal subscription model.

Again, what settlement would Russia accept and leave Ukraine safe from further Russian invasion?

Because the only one on the table simply has Ukraine remove its ability to defend itself, and create a Russian client state that Russia will continue to use to wage proxy war on Ukraine until they're entirely within Russia's control.

> 2. we believed our leaders would have the sense to settle with Russia instead of destroying our country.

What settlement could Ukraine have with Russia that wouldn't be the end of Ukraine? Russia is demanding that Ukraine allow part of its territory to secede and form "independent" nations, as well as have Ukraine avoid bolstering its ability to protect itself from its neighbours. Do you think those countries won't try to take more territory from Ukraine, with Russian backing? Do you think Russia will really stop invading Ukraine, after having already done it twice?

You're assuming your conclusion in your premise.

The question is "should monkeys be available for research?"

You state that "we should use the best models available", therefore we should use monkeys for research. But this assumes that monkeys are available in the first place! It doesn't show that we should experiment on monkeys, just that we currently do.

> trials are not about who's willing to partecipate, but about the best model available.

Wait, then why aren't we using humans? Humans are the best model available for human biology, no?

> principles of all men being created equal, along with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Unless you're black. Or female. Or Asian. etc.

Why does this founding myth persist?

> Russia demanded payment on their terms only after they were kicked out of SWIFT and their reserves frozen by foreign banks.

If only there was something Russia could do to stay in SWIFT and not be hit by sanctions....

They took the black character off of the main movie poster, and created a separate poster just for him?

> Risky? Yes, substantially.

Then why not park the money in existing financial instruments which have a larger risk profile than savings accounts? CCC bonds offer >14.7% yearly returns. Argentina's 10 year bonds have ~50% yearly return.

> Question for you, though: how would "existing financial services" arbitrage it away?

If you think the annual returns are priced appropriately due to risk of default, then they can't. I only brought this up because you compared it the returns on a savings account.

Otherwise, they could just offer a 5% savings account, deposit the money into the crypto market you're talking about, and make an easy 6% return.

> Early last year I was getting 2% per month on USDC/DAI and about 1% per month on USDC/EURS. Even today one can get a lot more than you'd get on a savings account.

Ask yourself how risky this investment is, and why existing financial services aren't arbitraging it away. 1% a month is ~12% per year, which is comparable to CCC+ corporate bonds.

I've been learning Rust for the past few weeks and have been enjoying it a lot.

- The community is very helpful on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/rust-lang-community).

- The package ecosystem (crates.io) makes it very easy to find and import things, and they're consistently documented.

- There's a path to compiling on web via WebAssembly (https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/)

In a few weeks of learning the language, I managed to put together this visualization: https://twitter.com/admiralakk/status/1542560489091350529

But realistically, either Go or Rust will be fine. You should pick the one you're more likely to stick with and learn, even when it gets tough. I've found the community aspect to be very helpful, because then at least I know I'm not the only idiot out there.

> there was a general concern of the fact that the data collected might be used against be in some unknown way in the future

I think this is a reasonable concern. But I think this is where it differs from the concern people have with sharing abortion data.

In the NSA case, the concern is in a possible future, the information they've gathered could be used against you in some way.

In the current abortion data case, the concern is:

1. That there are states with laws on the books that would punish you if this information came to light.

2. There are companies with this information in hand that have no legal obligation to keep it private.

3. These companies refuse to make any sort of agreement or promise to keep this data away from those that would use it against you, or destroy the data.

4. These companies are within the legal jurisdiction of the aforementioned states.

The threat here is much more concrete.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that the mass collection of data by the NSA is harmless. Rather, I understand why people are more concerned about the abortion data collection, because the threat is more concrete. The full consequence that NSA data collection poses haven't actualized, but depending on how things go, could be much, much worse than this.