manifestsilence

Pygame is still alive and great. It even has built-in support for game controllers, and nice stuff for managing sound effects.

Yes! There's a quote that resonated with me:

"Some people do the dishes to make them clean. Some people do the dishes to do the dishes."

Valuing the experience that is happening, whatever it may be, has power.

Awesome, thank you for clarifying!

I'm not either, but I think it depends on which system you're working from within. There's the ugly, beautiful thing from Godel's second incompleteness theorem saying a formal system cannot prove its own consistency from within.

With set theory, it looks like there was some reformulating of the fundamental terms to prevent paradox, but I'm not quite clear on whether that leaves us with a consistent formal system in the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t...

Wow, this could eventually enable some pretty amazing stuff. I'm just a hobbyist, but this makes me think about how machine search through the space of possible theorems butts up against the halting problem and/or Godel's theorems (though one could argue that human searching of the space is subject to the same limitations if our minds on some level represent formal systems as Hofstadter thinks).

And I wonder about whether certain mathematical truths will be inherently difficult to locate because they are far away from the space of other existing problems, and thus subject to problems of a search algorithm getting stuck in a local maximum.

In any case, an accelerated search through this space sounds really promising and exciting!

Great phrase, "fall into the scissor". I think the brilliance of this story is not whether it represents a truly plausible scenario, but that it creates a meme that is anti-divisive. These kinds of things have real power. I hope your phrase about not falling into the scissor catches on. It would do a lot of forum discussions a lot of good.

Funny how this story is itself a scissor. I loved it and thought that, although exaggerated, it did a really good job of being a piece of hard science fiction. Relatively plausible but somewhat future technology (better RNN implementations that have been forthcoming in response to the story) and its somewhat exaggerated implications to show off the danger to society of that general direction of technology.

Yeah, I think the more general problem is people can only get so enraged if they realize it's a bot. So the sentences have to be good enough to pass a perfunctory Turing test. The math is only one of several tells in these.

Funny thing though - I could see that statement being particularly enraging once a large enough and random enough group got behind debating it. These statements don't have to make logical sense, they only have to trigger people into instinctive camps.

"The math doesn't even make sense, and is making my point, that there's no problem here"

"You're saying there's not a problem? Believe me, there's a problem..."

etc.

I don't have git installed here, if anyone else wants to put in a PR for this one. :)

Ah, fair enough. I guess it's just that the Matrix became popular with a much wider crowd who had never heard of Neuromancer and so weren't aware of the genre's existence or origins and thought it was more out of the blue than it really was.

Interesting about the connection to Blade Runner, too.

Yeah, that's how I'm doing them. Agreed, great narration.

Yeah, the computer stuff in it is pretty hand-wavey but it does an awesome job of creating memorable visuals out of totally abstract AI and network stuff. And definitely notable as the seemingly uncredited inspiration for the Matrix.

I would add: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. Premise is a software engineer is killed by a car on his first day of retirement and wakes up 300 years in the future as an AI consciousness. It has absolutely loving attention to detail regarding both software and physics sci-fi concerns.

I'd also honorable mention Foucault's Pendulum by Uberto Eco, which has very little comp-sci stuff in it overall, but notably also has the search for permutations of the names of God mentioned in the article, complete with a BASIC program to do it in the text!

A lot of people focus on the creepy factor, but I'd argue that this is vegan and a lot of people have health needs that aren't easily met without eating meat. Plus the article emphasizes the eco-friendly ramifications of this. Sounds like lab meat won't consume the massive quantities of water and produce the insane amount of methane that growing cattle does.

I'm not a mathematician, but I'd say that it's one of the simplest and most elegant instances of its kind, and that in general we don't seem to have good ways of dealing with iterative processes that can both lengthen and shorten (or increase and decrease) the size of the output in relation to the input. A generalization of the proof of this might be quite illuminating for a lot of hard problems in number or complexity theory.

Bing has issues with not scraping dynamic content very well if at all. We had to eliminate libraries that render important content after page load with javascript because they'd show up on Google but not Bing.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Yep. Often when people take the time to have a more thoughtful argument where they seek common ground instead of "winning", they quickly find that the differences are not in the logic and semantic games they were playing, but were a difference in either values or assessment of some fuzzy probability or heuristic. They find that one of them didn't think a certain outcome was either A. likely, or B. important, and the other differed on that. If it's about the odds, common ground can be reached by comparing experience and knowledge. If it's about values, that's harder, unless those values are based on further assumptions that can be picked apart, like saying seat belts are good because they save lives. That can be verified statistically. If they say cherry ice cream is the best, it's a case of agree to disagree...

Yeah, I agree with the sense of mystery you talk about. To me the two great, and linked, mysteries are why matter, space, time, etc. exists at all, and why some part of it experiences it in a self-aware way. They're both meta-questions to me, that probably can't be answered from within the universe by observing it, just like how one of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems says arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from within. I know that's playing fast and loose with math metaphors, but it's an analogy not a rigorous proof.

Yes! The hard realization, which pulled me into more normal programming despite a passion for games, was that game development is a passion career. I already had enough dealings with that with considering being an orchestral performer. Anything in entertainment is always highly boom or bust, and highly intense and stressful even for those who make it.

Edit: of course that doesn't justify the terrible conditions or the way people leverage the situation because they know these people would do this kind of work for free if they had to. I think the answer, as musicians always bring up, is friends don't let friends work for free. It's not okay to work for less than your talent is worth just because you love it.

Sure, but in assessing risk, it pays to not overestimate our ability to predict the world. Some model subjects, such as the stock market and the weather, exhibit chaotic behavior. Those who try to ignore that fact get burned.

But in the case of the potato and apple, one has the ability to unplug the nose and tell the difference. If no one had any senses that could distinguish them under any circumstances, then it would be different.

This comes down to something akin to Einstein's problem with quantum physics, that it didn't make aesthetic sense to have something be fundamentally random. That it is the same, and philosophically preferable, to say that something is fixed, but cannot be measured, than to say it is actually random.

Now, I hear that with quantum stuff they somehow have proved it to be fundamentally random, but the point is that if you really can't tell in any way, the difference doesn't matter at all. At least to a reductionist viewpoint. I feel that philosophies about "what if reality is a simulation or a dream?" are dumb for the same reason. Unless there's a way to wake up, who cares?

The only sane and productive model of consciousness I've encountered (and I've been around a bunch through growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement) has been the one described in Hofstadter's works, such as Godel, Escher, Bach.

He talks about consciousness as an epiphenomenon, where the pattern itself is what makes something conscious, rather than some magical property that some matter has and other matter doesn't. With mathematical precision, he describes how consciousness relates to the ability to self-reference and how this relates to fundamental paradoxes in various fields such as the Halting Problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Russel's Paradox, and the works of Escher and Bach.

This line of thinking brings up some very interesting moral questions: What is it about life that makes us want to value it? Why do we have the notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms and value some species more highly than others? If we created a sufficiently advanced AI, that gave all the appearances of having feelings, a sense of self preservation, an identity, and desires, would it be immoral to unplug it or control its freedoms? What if it felt and understood even more than a human? Would its needs supersede our own?

Anyway, I highly recommend that book, GEB. It has made most other philosophizing about consciousness seem flat to me.

The problem isn't even one of over-simplification; it's that logic does not inherently possess values. Logic can only tell you whether a conclusion follows from premises, not whether those premises are correct. It can tell you whether an idea is consistent but not whether it is good.

I think money is one of the few things that really does approach a zero sum game. If you have more money, even if you printed it yourself, it deflates the value of everyone else's money when you spend it.

What is not zero sum are the actual goods bought with the money, in cases where cooperation could result in better productivity and more actual goods produced.

That makes me think prairie may compete well with forests in effectiveness. Many prairie plants have 10' roots or more, and the root systems are dense. Over time they do quite a bit for the soil and sequester a lot of biomass.

That's an important point - where those trees go when they die is part of the puzzle. Systems thinking is important. When a tree decays, I wonder how much carbon goes into the soil vs. into the air. What about when a forest fire goes through? More frequent controlled burns help prevent catastrophic forest fires, but do they cause a smaller or larger overall co2 release? On the one hand, a firestorm causes entire trees to explode that would otherwise survive with little damage. On the other hand, frequent burns might burn material that would otherwise decay into soil...

Then the problem instead becomes what is a valid comment, and a valid commenter (identity). Otherwise the vast majority of comments will be: WaNt A BiGgEr SoMeThInG? Go tO wWw.S0mEgR0$$sItE.cOm

This is interesting and compelling. I wonder about spambots though, when authorizing a service exposed to the web. Doesn't it get expensive pretty quickly when a bot decides to scan the site and floods it with requests that all exception?