shhehebehdh

They can’t run this program on a societal level because it would cost too much (>100B a year in the US alone, which is surely more than the value they derive from it). So we really only need to be concerned about whether this hurts the individuals involved, and whether Facebook plans to do anything unethical with the data.

See, I felt like it was not a great comparison because a body part is a very different thing from web traffic. Since Facebook does not stand to gain anything from inflicting material harm on you, the expected value of giving them your data is at worst very slightly negative. They’re likely not even recording most of it. (What would they do with it?) The same can emphatically not be said of a mission critical singly-redundant organ.

Military is an exception to all sorts of constitutional rights.

And they would have won none at all if deepmind had worked on the problem for one more year before showcasing it, even with this limitation. I don’t think it really matters.

It’s not that they literally must work. It’s that they can be fired for not showing up despite going without pay. Any private employer could also try this, although it’s questionable whether or how long people would put up with it. When the government is the employer, there’s some level of confidence that at least you’ll get paid in the future, whereas with a private employer once they stop paying on time they usually are going to continue to have trouble making payroll until they fold.

> but now we know that RoundUp in large quantities clearly causes cancer.

I don’t think we do know that. Unless Wikipedia editors and European regulatory agencies are Monsanto shills. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

While I appreciate the note of contradiction, it would be super helpful to those of us less familiar with the research if you would specify what parts are wrong or pseudoscience. I must admit the article seemed somewhat convincing to me, although my prior was strongly in favor of sunscreen so it hasn’t flipped me all the way to bathing in the noon sun for five hours without any protection.

> The actual meaning is in my opinion that at some point, when you can pay your bills easily and do not need to worry about money every day, increasing your income doesn't make you happier.

That’s not actually true though. There’s pretty robust research to show that happiness is correlated with log money. It’s not a function that becomes flat after a certain point, at least not as far as any research I’ve read says. Although the correlation or causation question remains: do happier people make more money, or does more money make people happier, or is there some underlying third variable that affects both? But the fact that lottery winners do end up becoming happier suggests that there is a causal element in the money->happiness direction.

They have the resources to test that configuration. They just don’t have the resources to fix the driver bugs the tests found.

Obviously it’s not that Google doesn’t have the resources. They have enough resources to fund whole new OSes. Of course they could fund testing.

Chrome team, on the other hand, does not have the resources. Which is to say that this is not the thing they believe is most important to work on at the margin, and given the amount of engineers Google will fund for the project.

I hope I am still able to joke. The older folks in my life seem to manage some equinanimity about their situation, even though to me it seems less than ideal.

That’s a pretty charitable interpretation. I would suggest that we’d be in more or less exactly the same spot whether or not kurzweil published these predictions. He didn’t do it to advance the state of the art. Or if he did he’s totally deluded. He was just wrong.

In theory, but NYCs rarely go that fast. This is changing though. I saw a news article recently about how they are lifting the speed limits on some sections of track as repaired signals come online.

The main thing to stop it is that we don’t know what genes to target to make super humans. If we did, someone would probably try. As perhaps they should, under some ethical systems.

So? Should we not have cars, planes, antibiotics, computers, etc. because some cannot afford them?

Looking forward to seeing this posted in 2021 and 2023 with the hypothesized massive drop in google’s valuation having failed to materialize.

If he meant that word, he should have used that word. Even if he meant “sucks,” I don’t think he’s right. I use VS Code professionally. It’s far better than Sublime Text or notepad++, despite making different trade offs on the native vs electron UI front. To say something sucks is a wholistic statements that isn’t supported by the evidence he gives. It’s far more accurate to say “it’s unfortunate that electron has these drawbacks.” That’s true but also kind of vacuous.

The article is interesting food for thought, but there’s a fundamental error. In the toy algorithmic problems, having the wrong big O solution is wrong because it doesn’t finish in a satisfactory amount of time. From this he seems to infer that anything that takes longer than another alternative is “wrong.” But the thing that made the toy solution wrong does not transfer to the other example problems! An editor dropping frames clearly isn’t sufficient to render it unusable for a significant slice of the target audience (proof by existence).

Doubt it.

For whatever reason, it seems like the way of thinking required for even simple programming doesn’t come naturally to most people. I saw this with a bunch of kids I went through nearly CS classes with. People who could not wrap their heads around pointers or reference semantics. People who didn’t get polymorphism and seemingly couldn’t no matter how many times you went through it with them. People who couldn’t seem to write programs, even very simple ones, despite being clever in most other ways that can be measured by academe. To be sure, it could be the slice I saw was not representative of typical people, but that would require typical people to be better suited to programming than those admitted to a high tier university. Maybe they are, but it doesn’t seem especially likely.