mathematically

Emergency Skin - N. K. Jemisin

Google search quality will continue to deteriorate as long as their underlying business model is based on advertising. There is an art project demonstrating very cleverly why this is the case: https://paolocirio.net/work/gwei/.

A lot of what they're saying sounds a lot like parts of "Industrial Society and Its Future":

> If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machine off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

My point is that VR combined with body tracking provides an immersive experience that is not possible otherwise. Classrooms are the obvious use cases but there are industrial and medical ones as well. The point is that there are plenty of use cases for remote presence technologies like VR but realizing those benefits is not easy so most applications are focused on entertainment.

I haven't tried it. I tried using an RDP client once but it wasn't a good experience. Now that I know this exists I might give it a try.

One use case I can imagine is virtual classrooms where VR is used to provide a more immersive lecturing experience. Most of the technology for doing so already exists and Facebook (Facebook Reality Labs) I think is working on this and trying to commercialize it. That's why a lot of their recent research is about body tracking: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/hand-tracking-deep-neural-netwo.... I think they're working their way towards virtual and immersive office productivity tools but any technology that can be used in office settings can also be used in university lecture halls.

The way things are going we are locked into 2C+ degrees of warming so there is no point in mentioning the 1.5C degree marker that was determined to avoid most of the catastrophic consequences of global warming. The question now is whether we manage to maintain it below 3C and the way things are going that's also looking less and less viable. People are still arguing about whether they should continue to eat beef or not when it has been determined that cultivation of cattle for beef production is one of the more carbon intensive practices of industrial societies. More generally, factory farming is a large contributor of greenhouse gas emissions: https://www.iatp.org/blog/201904/latest-agriculture-emission....

Dell XPS 17. With WSL and 64GB of RAM it's basically unbeatable as a dev laptop.

In category theory this is called an initial algebra for a signature. It is the minimal structure that satisfies some specification and maps uniquely to every other structure that satisfies the same specification but it's not clear if that's what you're looking for: http://tunes.org/wiki/initiality_20and_20finality.html.

The same can be said for caffeine and nicotine. Adderall/Ritalin users are no worse than caffeine and nicotine users.

There is a firefox extension called containers (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers) that can be used to isolate different accounts. So if you want isolated accounts then containers for different accounts will help you do that.

My point is if you're concerned about an existential crisis then worrying about the birth rate in one specific country doesn't really make any logical sense. Global warming is a global problem and nationalistic thinking is not how this problem is going to get solved. Getting atmospheric CO2 concentration down to a safe level is going to require transnational cooperation and coordination. Countries with sensible immigration policies and support programs are going to fare better than the ones that lock up their borders (as is now being evidenced in Britain with their empty gas stations and store shelves because there aren't enough truck drivers to deliver fuel and food to all those gas stations and stores: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/after-brexit-thousands-fo...).

That's definitely part of the problem.

You're correct so I'll explain what I was trying to get at.

At the moment, focusing on dwindling birth rates is nonsensical because the world population is projected to be 10B people by 2050. So the issue isn't lack of people, it's the inability of various nations to properly coordinate a response to an existential crisis (global warming and increasing volume of CO2 in the atmosphere: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-re...). Dwindling birth rates in Britain should be the last thing anyone is worried about if their real concern is not having enough people in the future. I mean if they're really concerned about lack of Brits then I guess it makes sense, but globally, on a planetary scale, worrying about local birth rates is not really something to be concerned about.

Technology for doing so does not exist. Before we can terraform other planets we'll have to learn how to terraform this one. Global warming is actually a great challenge and overcoming it would mean developing the technology that would help colonize other planets, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/myco-architecture.

What do you suppose is the root cause of global warming?

Social media is here to stay so these efforts are kinda silly. It is much better to recommend reasonable legal policies for regulating Facebook and social media in general, e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interopera..., https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/interoperability-and-p.... [1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28822961

"All that's missing are some batteries."

Are there designs that combine laser and magnetic confinement?

It would not because comments are not what prevents people from writing good code.

Well, someone obviously must understand how the algorithms work otherwise they couldn't have implemented it. I actually don't think the algorithms are that complicated and have been thinking about writing a toy simulation to demonstrate how reinforcement learning can be used to re-order the sequence of interactions in a social media sandbox in order to keep users engaged for as long as possible.

I just wanted to know if there was prior work on this that I could use before I went ahead and did the work because if someone has already done this then it would save me a lot of hassle. But it doesn't look like the question will get an answer on cs.stackexchange so I'll probably have to do the work myself.

The book is pretty interesting even if somewhat dramatic: "...he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world."

Solar still requires energy storage and when that's factored in it is not at parity. Batteries are not cheap.

Interviewing.io might be worth a shot.

Cory Doctorow has a good proposal for how to properly regulate social media companies by enforcing interoperability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/interoperability-and-p....