philhartmanonic

My thing is the symbols. Stopped studying math in college, and every time I've tried to get back into it, seems like my options are either starting over from 4th grade or make sense of a formula that appears to be written in some form of ancient hieroglyphics. I think I can grasp the concepts if I could understand the syntax, but the best source I've found is the Wikipedia page on math symbols, which is little more than a list (and quite a few have a good half a dozen meanings).

It'd be cool if there was a good book focused on just understanding the symbols in as plain english as the concepts allow, and teaching you what context you need to look for when the symbols have multiple potential meanings. Maybe there is a book like that (and if so, please let me know, as that would be super exciting).

The problems with Congress isn't stupidity (not that they aren't stupid), it's corruption. There's no quiz for that.

Beyond that, considering the history of tests as a precondition for participation in American politics...funny that it comes up as often as it does. Plus, if there was a test, isn't that something that'd quite possibly be on it?

I've gotten a lot of those errors while using the AWS CLI for S3, but it was intermittent. I was using the sync command, so I just kept kicking it back off again as soon as it finished, and eventually got everything up there.

I think it's honest in the same sense as a poll with an inadvertently skewed sample. It's honest, but the scope of conclusions that can be justifiably drawn from it is limited.

Without the internet, opportunities to be simultaneously social and anonymous are few and far between. Situations where you're also unencumbered by hard-wired social instincts (e.g. being able to say something without any reflexive responses to body language or the sound of someone's voice) are practically non-existent.

Having the ability to socially express yourself with such a degree is good and bad, but it certainly isn't natural. One could say that this shows who we "really" are, but I don't know how anyone could argue that our social behavior while isolated from society is the truest definition of the character or the individual. Maybe you could, but absent a convincing argument I'm certainly not taking it as assumed.

That's fascinating, I've never heard of that before. Is it your throat that gets itchy?

Great, and how do you quantify the value of the freedom to live your life the way you want to?

Soa decrease in deaths of cirrhosis is beneficial, presumably as it extends lives. Is the extension of life an inherent benefit? If you lived for 10,000 years in abject misery would that be better than dying in 6 months? Clearly, it's conditional.

Life is complex, every life is unique, so you can safely assume you aren't going to make things better when you try to violently protect people from themselves. If you were arguing about the drop in domestic abuse that'd be one thing, but cirrhosis from alcohol consumption is self-inflicted. Universally falls squarely in the "mind your own business, jack" space.

For real. Any time I hear popular macroeconomic metrics, I become deeply skeptical of whether there's gonna be anything worth listening to.

It's like taking your temperature. Sure, it could mean you're going to die. Could also mean you've got a healthy immune system fighting off a disease. Could mean it's time to stop wanking in the sauna.

I don't know about that. The whole idea of "having a soul" is so nebulous that it's hard to build a view on top of it. Do we have souls? If yes, is it possible to mechanically replicate a soul? If not, why not? What's a soul?

If instead you define art as the communication of things that can't be fully expressed by direct sterile language, that's something I can get behind. Going that route, I think that getting AI to create real art has some pretty clear challenges, but there are also ways whers I could see it being better than humans.

Depending on how the AI learns and analyzes it has a chance to have a unique perspective on human communication. From there, it can find new and innovative ways of identifying gaps between primal human experiences and sterile human communication - and with a unique understanding of human communication could come up with fascinating ways of bridging those gaps.

This is all spitballing, but I think AI could eventually be the main new frontier in art.