placebo

> It’s a miracle it works at all.

I agree. In fact with what seems to be an exponential growth in complexity of software ecosystems, what's keeping it all from eventually getting to a "tower of Babel" catastrophe? Of course, this does not only apply to software, but it is a good example.

This is evidence that self-conscious beings can stop being self-conscious or that the content of what they are conscious of can change when the stuff that enables self-consciousness to occur is manipulated. It does not prove that consciousness is an emergent phenomena. Suggestions that consciousness is prior to physicalism (and in general prior to the whole division into subjective and objective realities made by a rational self-conscious agent) are not something new and are worth exploring.

>How do you pay for these servers?

For probably much of cybercrime you don't pay for these servers. Many are usually security compromised servers that were put up for legit business and left some config file out in the open or some other silly mistake. In the case of phishing, they are hijacked and by the time anyone notices, enough emails have been sent to create a lot of damage for the good guys, and a decent profit for the bad guys.

As always, something will only be done to fix the unbearable lightness of committing a cybercrime when there is a realization that the price being paid for those that have the power make a difference outweighs their benefits.

I understand where you're coming from, but I'm curious to know when do you think anthropomorphism or personification of an AI would be justified, and if the answer is never then what is the reasoning behind it?

There are quite a few out there. I played with gecode as well as https://choco-solver.org/ which I found intuitive and fun to use.

I also find it amazing that human societies survive at all. it would be interesting to find the answer to what is the minimum inefficiency required for a complex system to stop functioning. Of course, this question itself needs more precision, but you get the idea. For example, I've been in traffic jams in some cities with terrible infrastructure. Seems like a total hopeless chaotic mess, and yet at the end of the day everyone gets to their destination.

I wonder if Wittgenstein's knew about the Buddha's Raft Parable...

Thanks. Initial test:

main.exe -m ggml-model-q4_0.bin -t 8 -n 128 -p "The Drake equation is nonsense because"

The Drake equation is nonsense because it takes parameters that can only be known AFTER the conclusion is reached. It would be like saying "I'm going to prove a theorem by starting from the conclusion, then making up the proof. The Drake equation uses the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence as the conclusion and then making up the parameters. It is nonsense.

>If you want to know what a person is really like, watch how they treat the staff in a restaurant. Power reveals the true character of those who hold it.

This is the only part of the article I am in total agreement with.

The rest is just another variant of the Chinese room argument (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room).

My own take on this is that people are searching for the magical in the wrong place ("we are so special") rather than seeing things are magical by their very existence

Also, what is the relative sea level for this map - is it the same as the current one or what it will be like after the ice melts

Refreshingly thought-provoking suggestions. Hilarious relevant cartoons too.

TLDR: When the means become the end, things start going downhill fast.

Is this TLDR too efficient?

I never really understood the advantage of a mind map tool over a good tree-oriented note taking/task organizing tool. In fact I prefer the use of screen real-estate in a simple tree than a mind-map. Is this just a matter of personal taste or is there some functionality/concept am I overlooking?

Agree in general, though I have read about cases where a neural network was reverse engineered to create a solution that did not require one.

The thing that is missing in Asimov's claim is that is no scale to understand just how relatively wrong we are at any point, so we can only feel smug about how relatively wrong previous understandings are but to someone from a far more advanced civilization our most modern theories might seem like flat earth seems to us

that's gone too :)

relevant: https://youtu.be/WqoYoXY-RC0?t=114

The crony belief that people aught to be more well off and happier should be addressed separately. Claiming it as a true statement is of course problematic (especially "aught to"), but I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this statement which an HN comment is too small to contain ;)

Kidding aside, as I mentioned earlier I suggest the antidote to crony or any other false beliefs is an uncompromising and unrelenting skepticism in every belief. This neti-neti approach can continue until what remains is not a belief anymore, but a recognition of something that is prior to any belief.

> If I believe that "it is good to reduce net human suffering so others can live fulfilling lives" I'm not sure what evidence there is to give to refute

I think that if an argument is clear, one can always think of counter-evidence or construct at least a hypothetical experiment which can test it.

Ultimately though, my (probably controversial) answer to increasingly abstract ethical questions would be that when the goal is to find what is True then reducing suffering (human or other) as well as other ethical endeavors becomes a necessary by-product.

First, not all crony beliefs have to be necessarily false :)

But seriously - if you are presented with evidence that when not all citizens have human rights then everyone is more well-off and happier than when all citizens have human rights, and after finding no errors in the data or logic, will you automatically dismiss it or reassess your belief?

If you would reassess your belief then it's not a crony belief. Of course, you might never need to reassess it, but being open to the possibility that it might need rethinking is what keeps it from being a crony belief

I'd suggest the following method to those who have the courage to remove crony beliefs:

First, ask yourself "Can I clearly articulate and convey my belief, both to myself and to others?"

Continue to the next step only after you can answer the above with definite "Yes".

Next, ask yourself: "What evidence would make me change my mind about this belief?"

If the answer is "practically none" then you have discovered a crony belief.

If the evidence shows up and as a result you just move the goalposts to keep the original belief, then you are still infected...

We all need to model reality to survive. The problems begin when we worship the model instead of the reality it is meant to approximate. Any belief is a model that we are invested in and can have various levels of "staying power". A Zen (or other spiritual practitioner) would tell you that strongest of those and the one we usually are most invested in is the belief of a believer...

The best antidote to crony or otherwise any false beliefs is deciding the benefit of uncovering of what is True is more important than any other benefit.

All the above of course is a belief as well, which I will gladly change given a good counter argument/evidence :)

Isn't abiogenesis just a fancy way of saying that somehow life began from organic compounds that were created by inorganic means? To my understanding the somehow part is exactly the reason why we don't have enough information to make any intelligent guess on the probability of it happening elsewhere.

Both parts you mentioned are derived from the Wikipedia formulation which is that "no matter what value of n, the sequence will always reach 1", but the subject of possible non trivial loops is an interesting one to contemplate from the coin toss perspective.

The equivalence I made is to a truly random coin toss where heads means the number will be divided by two, and tails means the number will be multiplied by 1.5 and then 0.5 added to the result.

If the coin toss is truly random, it stands to reason there will be no loop (following the same intuition that entropy always increases). Any permanent loop will contradict the randomness of the coin toss.

Whether or not the reasoning above gives valid intuition to the conjecture being true depends upon the degree to which the Collatz mathematical procedure can be treated as generating a truly random process, and this is the point where I presented the main flaw in the intuition.

At some point I gave the Collatz conjecture some thought and understood the probabilistic intuition of why it should be the case. Although I obviously couldn't prove it, I decided to write my thoughts on why it is intuitively obvious [1]. A few months later I received a comment mentioning that a proof has been submitted based on the same intuition [2].

[1] http://nocurve.com/virtual-lab/contemplating-the-collatz-con...

[2] http://nocurve.com/about/

In an authoritarian regime with large masses of human and technological resources determined to have control over its population, nothing is really secure. Sending a message that can't be read by a third party? You're suspect. Have an illegal app installed on your registered "report to big brother" phone? Expect an unfriendly visit by big brother police. Don't have a "big brother" phone? There are various ways of sniffing you out. The bottom line is that while technology can help in the process, technology can't bring freedom from oppressing regimes. That is only achieved when a synchronised, large enough collection of people feel that they are willing to change things even at great personal risk. Authoritarian regimes know this, and thus put a lot of effort into using fear of consequences to suppress any hint of such development.

Emergence is a concept or model, concepts/models are made possible by thought, thoughts are themselves an emergent phenomena

Round and round and round it goes where it stops nobody knows...

I wonder how beating procrastination can be bootstrapped. A professional procrastinator will also procrastinate reading this article even though they know it's exactly what they need. For example, I clicked the "how to be ultra spiritual" video in that article and was then curious about other videos made by the same person and pretty soon found myself in the usual procrastinator's state, forgetting the article or the fact that I got to this article in the first place by procrastinating implementing an algorithm that I've been wanting to complete for a couple of weeks and instead checking what's new on HN ... I guess one needs to get to a certain point of being determined enough to make a strategic change in one's productivity, and the incentives required for such a change are probably specific to each person

Love of life is not the same as fear of death. If the latter is what drives the search for longevity then it will never be enough. So long as longevity isn't used to find peace with life and death, and transcend our limited perspective on life then I see it as just a frantic attempt to delay the inevitable. Resisting death at 150 will be just as painful as resisting it at any other age. If on the other hand it will give people more time to gain wisdom and perspective on what life is about then that's a whole different story.

Interesting, thank you - I'll do some research.

You are absolutely correct and I even deleted an entire section in my original post how things are never just black or white but it got too long. Thanks for bringing it up.