nova

> ch, ll, ñ, and rr are all considered separate letters

In Spanish "rr" has never been considered as a single letter. "Ch" and "ll" used to be, but not anymore. Ñ is, of course.

> it's probably a byproduct of making an intelligence that can reason about itself and its environment.

See Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis. Even if it's most likely a mistaken theory it's still interesting as a distinction between intelligence and consciousness.

To check if I understand the argument: I'm guessing you're talking about the internal logic or language of some category, in contrast to the external one used to talk about that category.

Mushoku Tensei (Unemployment reincarnation)

There's a very interesting discussion in Scott Aaronson's "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" (http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf).

Briefly (as far as I understand), a lot of philosophical thought has been dedicated to computability, not enough to computational complexity, i.e., the resources needed for computation. A naive "lookup table" implementation of the Chinese room simply wouldn't fit in the Universe. You'd need to throw in a great amount of compression, and then you get something that could possibly be considered "intelligent" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize)

> He's also excited about the prospect of most math papers publishing machine-checked proofs.

Apparently the feels he can't be sure of the correctness of his own papers without machine checked proofs anymore, and he's a Fields medal winner:

I now do my mathematics with a proof assistant and do not have to worry all the time about mistakes in my arguments or about how to convince others that my arguments are correct.

But I think that the sense of urgency that pushed me to hurry with the program remains. Sooner or later computer proof assistants will become the norm, but the longer this process takes the more misery associated with mistakes and with unnecessary self-verification the practitioners of the field will have to endure

(from this http://www.math.ias.edu/~vladimir/Site3/Univalent_Foundation...)

There is "Introduction to 64 Bit Intel Assembly Language Programming for Linux", 2nd Ed, by Ray Seyfarth. It's pretty good for beginners with some C experience, I think.

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

― G.K. Chesterton

I don't get this issue. Let the robots have all the jobs.

So let's keep making it more complicated, then.

Try teaching to kids or nursing.

>> And then we can do what /u/murbard2 is alluding to, and go for "hardcore mode" on Bayesianism: Objective Informative Bayesianism (better referred to as Algorithmic Bayesianism).

This sounds very interesting but there are no hits on these terms other than your post. Any references?

> Understanding distributed systems means being aware of a much larger state space and how things like special relativity impact it (I'm being a bit flippant, but not actually inaccurate—message latency is not poorly modeled by special relativity).

This sound really interesting. Any recommendations to learn more about it?

> Perhaps I'm missing something due to having read through the article too quickly. Please educate me.

The point I got out of this fine article is that we are under/misusing types.

Types encode logical propositions. The compiler, besides producing binary code, is also a proof checker. We should let it help us reason about the program instead of trying to do everything informally in our heads.

The great thing about this hypothesis, even if it happens to be false for homo sapiens, is that it separates the concepts of "intelligence" and "consciousness". Jaynes shows that it is at least logically possible for a being to be intelligent, but not conscious.

I think this has clear implications to AI.

Funny how patents are supposed to encourage innovation and they're doing exactly the opposite.

> Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.

To prevent that is what patents are for.

> "Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." -- HJPEV

Except libertarians most people do, as long as they're "their" bureaucrats.

Spain has three layers of malfunctioning uncoordinated and corrupt big governments, incredible amounts of red tape and taxes and a slow-as-molasses and politicized judicial system. Not big on free markets either.

On the other side it is cheap, reasonably free-as-in-freedom and not a police state yet. Also good weather.

So, semantics and rhetoric aside, what is _really_ this thing called "intellectual property"? In the real world, in actuality.

A big game of Who Has The Best Lawyers.

Nothing less, nothing more. An expensive game, normally better played by big corporations, sometimes by small optimized "companies" (trolls), completely uncorrelated with any notion of fairness or economic sense. Another thing that exists not necessarily because is a good idea, but because of enormous inertia, like many other things we do "because that's how things are", even if they are completely stupid. A legal meme.

(As an aside, I'm personally totally OK with trade secrets; I'd accept a sane, limited version of copyright as useful; and I think patents should be abolished. All of them. Software patents are just the most aggressive and vicious strain)

Exactly. What makes up the identity of a person is not the physical substrate but the pattern of information stored.

But this is a tough bullet to bite, even for computer professionals.

> You invest in a promise that may or may not be reality

With religion I can be quite sure it won't be a reality, as there is no trace of actual gods anywhere I look, but a lot of good evidence of it being just a social and cultural phenomenon.

Cryonics depends on the adequacy to preserve neural information of the currently used methods, of which I am uncertain but at least is in the realm of actual science.

Cryonics?

From mutual agreement in exchange of goods and services, or by force. Not the same. Only thieves and governments do the latter.

I think the problem is what to do with that money once collected. With taxes in general.

Currently we just let politicians spend it as they see fit.

Well, they only have to say it's "to protect intellectual property" and the other governments would be happy to help.

A great book, whose only downside is using AT&T syntax.

> News flash for everyone, death is inevitable

As far as we know there is nothing in the laws of physics about death (or life). It's all about fields and particles. Or maybe strings or loops or something else, but vitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism) is over.

So death "is" inevitable only because we don't know how to prevent it.

> How many more years must humanity be shackled to superstition and death fear before we fucking get over it and move on to the important work of getting off of this planet?

I'm totally okay with space colonization but conquering death (with science, I mean) seems like a more pressing issue. After all, even if we already had space colonies people would still die.

> They make every attempt to reduce costs and increase development speed, and it's possible that in the long run, things are better.

My point is that research companies should focus on discovering how the human body works and reacts to different substances, not how to create the drug efficiently. Their output should be scientific knowledge (and we would pay them for that), not industrial processes. That can be left to manufacturing companies, operating in a mostly-free market (but with quality regulations) and all that.

> Also, if research is publicly funded, it would probably tend to focus on whatever the public is more aware of. Public awareness of diseases doesn't do correlate well to the severity of the problem.

True. But profitability isn't really the same as the severity or "ethical" importance either, and that's how things are today. Directly funding research is how things are done with particle physics for example.