procgen

A gun wants to be used. Let's let it simmer a few more decades and see what happens.

"A lot of poor people need to carry a gun for protection"

How utterly dystopian.

I recommend Peter Hiesinger's 'The Self-Assembling Brain' if you're interested in a neurobiologist's perspective on this problem and its importance to AI.

Amoebas are intelligent. All living things are intelligent.

What is "traditional morality"?

Atrocious. I've never used replit, and now I never will.

I think it's less about any societal reaction and more about the organism's experience.

It would be more useful to perform similar genetic experiments on human beings, in any case. But I imagine that you would be opposed to that?

Tat tvam asi

This scene from The Sopranos addresses this idea beautifully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDq985HvPk

"Everything is everything."

A koan is a tool intended to be wielded by a teacher. I've never found it helpful to read them, anyway - it seems to miss the point. Language only obscures the fundamental truth.

Sociopathy.

One percent of one third of 328 million is 1.09 million. So more than a million, and those mortality and infection rates seem optimistic?

Do you have any sense of what the simplest conscious system looks like? Can we construct one from legos in an aircraft hangar?

Is anyone but you conscious? If so, how can you be certain?

Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory provides just such a framework for determining where consciousness 'most prominently manifests itself': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

I'm running https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker on a Digital Ocean instance. You can mount a volume where it will maintain all of your tiddlers as separate files - no downloading required (and since your config options are saved as tiddlers, those are persisted as well). For backups, I run a daily cron job to git add/commit/push from that volume to a private repo.

Seconded! I've been looking around, but nothing seems to press both of these buttons. It's a deal-breaker for me, as I often think by sketching. In my notes, doodles are first-class citizens.

He also extolled the wisdom-widening effect of writing in E-Prime, a subset of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb 'to be': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

>YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line

Perhaps they will, but there should still be a line. There will continue to be political mechanisms in place to shift it.

You might be interested in David Ackley's work on robust-first, best-effort computing. Here's a relevant paper: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos11/tech/final_file...

He's working on a pertinent hardware project called the T2 Tile and is documenting it all on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A

This is the so-called 'superultimate question', whose answer defies inquiry: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

I was surprised to find that they support the Steam controller when using the Steam Link app.

It was a peculiar aside - you shouldn't be surprised that you were asked about it.

Is the implication that pigs don’t experience pain, or that we shouldn’t care?

'The Mind Illuminated' by John Yates. Meditate!

I'll also add Ecclesiastes - there's perennial wisdom in that old book, and it doesn't demand a lick of faith.