leroy-is-here

I tried to do this when LinkedIn forced me to upload an ID. It didn't work unfortunately. I see the good in this but I know it will be abused. I want to run away but I don't foresee any way that the powers-that-be will let the common person use the Internet without an approved ID in the future.

Which ones are you going to? 90% of what is in a grocery store is pre-packaged processed food. In fact, many grocery stores are starting to sell clothes. The produce sections are small compared to the aisles and aisles of boxed foods, frozen foods, soda, alcohol, and candy. I've never been into a major grocery store in any state that wasn't like this.

We eventually believe the words we speak about ourselves.

The problem is taxes. Different items can be taxed differently. Itemized receipts are a must from the get-go unless you want to explain to the government that you underpaid them because you charge within a 10% error-margin.

Yeah, the model only makes sense with an infinite length tape. I only mention it because many commenters get stuck on the word 'infinite' without realizing how inconsequential it is.

To your point, Turing's paper 'On Computable Numbers' doesn't even mention the length of the tape. He doesn't specify that it must be infinite at all.

There was a time when source code was shared in magazines and someone had to manually write the source by copying from the magazine.

Everything is monolithic by accident. Source code used to be able to be shared and compiled directly with little effort. Now we have created tools to create entire systems dedicated to running source code. We have literally codified a poorly designed, middle-manager riddled organization into our current systems.

I think you missed the point.

Firefox shows literal advertisements in the “new tab” window. I recently started using Firefox again because I was told I was being “ridiculous” when I said Firefox shows me literal advertisements. And then I get this pop-up on a window which hadn’t been refreshed in several hours.

It depends on the books I am reading. I get the most out of philosophy and learning books when I actively engage with the text with responses in kind. But when I am reading mind candy? No, I don’t write back.

Reality does not need to be peer-reviewed to be true.

Observation changes the thing being observed. Having a measurement of it allows you to find the measure lacking.

Yeah, that’s probably true. I only use 3 levels of headers on my website.

> You either end up with insufficient distinction, or grossly excessive variation.

That’s the point of scales — to provide structure to any scale of values so there’s distinction without excessive variation.

When on an iPhone and viewing a “live photo”, you can hold down on the screen and the image turns into a short video leading up to the moment of the photo.

People don’t know what they are like at equilibrium, so when something affects them they do not know the source. By constantly filling your self, you cannot be sure of the source. When filling yourself of podcasts, of food, of low-entropy words, of wine, of cheap books, of easy sights, of leisure, of wine, of coffee, etc. — when filling yourself of all these different things, it’s hard to know your literal self, because it’s being fluctuated nearly every second of the day.

I agree, I came off a tad harsh. Sorry about that

Not dubious, I just read your comment and it felt like I was reading satire. Even the cadence of your words felt funny.

Anyway, I’m not surprised. It’s a new market, everyone’s in on it.

If this comment performative comedy? Are these real technologies ?

There’s no difference between hardware and software when it comes to running a program, really. They are both machines at the end of the day.

I was talking about attempts such as expert systems. We attempted to symbolically encode things as sums of their parts in plain terms, e.g. a bicycle is two wheels, an axle, a chain, some peddles, etc. but in more detail than that. The problem is the level of detail required for general knowledge: firstly it is hard to codify, secondly as it grows computation becomes exponentially more expensive.

We as humans have the intelligence to simply see for fractions of a second and then just know — we can know the answers to math problems and how a person is feeling. The symbolic AI programming was an attempt to codify what symbols we are seeing but they are so diverse and nuanced it became apparent this was an ineffective scientific route.

Alignment doesn’t matter. Humanity is attempting to build artificial intelligence and so it will be done.

My point is that a superintelligence will require specialized equipment. I specifically mentioned it because there is a thought that a superintelligence can just replicate itself onto your phone, as you mentioned.

But this replication must follow the physical laws we have. It must also follow the laws we attempt to enforce in our networks.

But you are correct, if a superintelligence were to somehow convince a human to rid itself of agency, sure.

Humanity.

A “superhuman” AI is just a machine, a very expensive one. It can be turned off and we control the outputs it has. Why would an AI have the ability to launch nuclear weapons unless we gave it a button? A “superhuman” intelligence is without a body, so we control any interfaces it has access to. The Internet could be accessed, but any attempt to “hack” through the Internet is met by routine packet defenses. The AI is still governed by physical laws and would only have so much “free” computation power to do things like script a hack. Perhaps it could do that kind of thing more efficiently.

Maybe in the far, far future when we have androids which can house an AI we will have to worry. But designing a body is one problem. Designing an intelligence is another.

We attempted the symbolic route of AI programming and it didn’t work because it is explosive in computation time and exhaustive to model in code.

We can’t program our AI “models” now because they are based on chains of probabilities. Therefore they can run in real time. They don’t have any real logic that we specifically programmed, only what the model was able to infer and then encode.

Perhaps there should be a marriage between these two attempts of AI.

Arithmetic is separate from mathematics and should be taught as such. The spirit of mathematics should be kept because it is part of the human spirit, not because of any entitlement.

A developer does more than just write text and that’s all these AI programs can do: generate text. There’s not a single AI that can generate source, attempt to compile it, fix any source errors like the infamous missing semi-colon, and then produce a binary.

Anyway, I think advancement of technologies which generate text can make an individual developer’s task more efficient, e.g. the compiler. But, because of this efficiency on the individual, then more individuals will now be able to take part which means more jobs will be created.

To restate, I don’t think “AI” will make people more productive, it just makes doing the task more productive. This seems like a ridiculous statement, but consider the cotton-gin. Because of the tool, we could throw more and more people at the problem of gathering cotton.

That’s what the development of new tools gets us, more work with the tool that does the job.

I think the generalization is more minute than that. Take mathematics for example, we can write that down and so we have. A lot of people “hate” math because they understand math as the shuffling of symbols. They hear “math” and think “arithmetic”. Math appears a lot like some puzzle-game because when they read textbooks they see these symbols being shuffled around which produce exact answers, like 4.8473. But mathematics is about expressing ideas which can produce answers for specific problems, not specific answers in general.

It’s the allegory of the cave all over again, mathematics has become a shadow of itself in many people’s minds. Instead of a tool in which to express ideas, it just became stuffy definitions and arcane symbols which produce hard yes/no answers. Why? Because when those ideas are expressed by writing down the mathematics in textbooks, they are expressed in arcane symbols and stuffy definitions which have exercises that have hard yes/no answers.