troops_h8r

This is really cool, I gave it a try this morning at work. Unfortunately, as much as I like it, I can't see myself using this regularly precisely because it's a webapp. I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there that would love it though.

Perhaps it's just a personal preference, but I'm just reticent to fall into the habit of using something which requires an internet connection, you know?

You might like the scifi novel of the same name by Peter Watts

Ah, the bottom right corner of the prisoner's dilemma rears it's ugly face again. The bane of capitalism.

Hard agree. I'm really trying to figure out how to inject this idea into my friends' heads effectively. The main struggle I'm facing is how to convey the danger behind it. Why can it be deadly exactly? What can a program actually do to harm people, to the level where it's a risk of extinction or societal collapse?

Personally I didn't need to imagine a specific scenario to understand that there's risk, but I think it would help me convince other folks if I did.

I don't think I see enough discussion about what this means for privacy. There was some protection in the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to get someone to listen to every single one of our phonecalls/read all our emails/etc.

Worrying that this will no longer be the case.

Ah but then you'd have to explain how God started, and the problem is that whatever explanation you concoct here might as well be used to explain the very thing you invoked God to explain in the first place

I disagree, and I think you should take a longer view. As automation approaches total replacement of labor, capitalism will cease to work at all. This view is best summarized in this (probably apocryphal) exchange between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther (United Autoworkers Union leader), as they toured a new, highly automated car factory:

> Ford: Gee, how are you going to get all these robots to pay union dues? > Reuther: How are you going to get them to buy your cars?

You say there will be less need for labor? Then who exactly will businesses sell their goods and services to, if everyone is out of a job? The development of AI would be qualitatively different from the previous developments of labor-saving machines: a switchboard operator who's job became obsolete could go get another job. Machines that can do anything a person can would mean there is no other job.

I don't know what's in store for us, but it will probably be as drastic a shift as pre/post the agricultural/industrial revolutions. And there's no reason to think it should be for the better. I think we all ought to be very nervous and worried about this.

I agree and really empathize with you on this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get people to care, I've even had someone throw McLuhan's tetrad at me, as if this is the equivalent of the introduction of phone apps.

We're racing into a fundamentally deep and irreversible societal shift, at least the same order of magnitude as the agricultural or industrial revolution. Maybe even many orders of magnitude deeper. Society will change so profoundly, it will be at least as unrecognizable as our lives would look to the average person from the Bronze age. There's absolutely no reason to assume this will be a good change. If it's not something I personally will have to live with, my descendants most certainly will.

I'll admit, I also draw a blank when I try to imagine what the consequences of all this will be, but it's a blank as in "staring into a pitch black room and having no idea what's in it" - not ignoring the darkness altogether. Mass psychosis is a good term for this, I think.

The collective blindspot failing to understand that there's NOTHING that says we're gonna 'make it'.

There's no divine being out there watching out for us. This isn't a fucking fairy tale, you can't assume that things will always 'work out'. Obviously they've always worked out until now because we're able to have this conversation, but that does NOT mean that things will work out indefinitely into the future.

Baseless conjecture: I think we are biased towards irrational optimism because it's an adaptive trait. Thinking everything will work out is better than not, because it means you're more likely to attempt escaping a predator or whatever despite a minuscule chance of success (which is better than not trying at all). It's another entry into the list of instincts we've inherited from our ancestors which bite us in the ass today (like being omnivorous, liking sweets, tribalism, urge to reproduce, etc).

You seem like you've given this a bunch of thought, and I wanna chat more about this and pick your brain about a few things. Have you ever thought about whether this intersects with the Fermi paradox somehow?

Drop me a line here: l7byzw6ao at mozmail dot com

Heads up, it's failing to let me subscribe ('failed to send magic link email')

Hey look I'm really trying to engage earnestly here. I did provide specific examples, but they were in the wiki article I linked and you didn't look at them (which is fair, no one likes being tossed a link like that). Let me summarize COINTELPRO:

# Covert & 'illegal' projects by FBI aimed at infiltrating, influencing, disrupting, and discrediting various political organizations

# Existence of the program was discovered after activists stole documents from an FBI office and leaked them to media

# Targets included: antiwar activists, feminist organizations, civil rights activists (ie MLK), environmentalists, animal rights activists, communist party, KKK, American Indian activists, far right groups

# Methods included:

* Breaking into homes, violent beatings, vandalism

* Assassination

* Smear campaigns

* Fabricating evidence, false testimony (leading to wrongful imprisonment and activist intimidation)

* Fabricating letters to discredit/humiliate people or erode their relationships, or cause conflict (leading to death in many cases)

I don't actually need to talk about hypotheticals, the US government has already abused these things to squish people or ideas it didn't like. The point about creeping authoritarianism is a secondary argument. My point is that sometimes it's better for certain tools/institutions not to exist at all.

I think we ought to treat surveillance technologies with the same type of reverence we treat nuclear tech (though maybe not to the same magnitude). Nuclear technology isn't intrinsically a bad thing: the problem is that, combined with human tendencies (tribalism, territorialism, etc), a conflict that previously would've resulted in a mere x deaths could now result in x^y deaths, or even total annihilation.

You agree that creeping authoritarianism is a general problem. Do you think it might just be in the nature of human societies? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to carefully consider what tools and institutions we leave lying around, in case the worst happens? We all accept this with nukes - there was some kind of effort at nuclear disarmament (though not enough). We should do the same for surveillance.

I'm only trying to convince you that we need to be very cautious, skeptical, and distrustful of things like the NSA, because the US govt cannot be trusted with it now, and it might get even worse in the future. What hypothetical evidence would someone have to show you, to change your mind?

No. I'm just pointing out that the free-market isn't perfect. I think we should be open to improvement.

Let me ask you something: do you think this is how we're going to run things for the rest of time? Feudalism came and went, mercantilism came and went. Probably we'll come up with something better than what we have now, some day. I admit it's hard to imagine what, though

That's my point. It doesn't necessarily mean it is in their best interest - the free market doesn't optimize for people's best interests, it optimizes for people's perception of their best interest (which is usually fine but it's not always the same thing)

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Naively, one might say "ah but that ended in 1971!" - but let me put it this way: if you spotted a cockroach in your house, you'd be a fool to think that was the only one.

Also: the oversight/limits you're protected by could disappear some day, they're imaginary and socially constructed. Sure, you trust our current government to handle these powers responsibly, (though you really shouldn't, see above), but why are you so confident you can trust _tomorrow's_ government?

Note that customer satisfaction != customer well being (i.e. heroin)

So you're saying the only thing keeping the economy together is the fact that not too many people have decided to strike? Considering that strikes are acts of desperation, I guess that means we should hope, for the sake of the system, that we don't come across too much desperation any time soon.

Speaking of prisoner"s dilemmas, I wonder how employers manage to agree on how much employee desperation they can get away with...

metabolism is just a means to self-sustaining

>We don't even really have an agreed-upon definition of life, so the question is basically non-sensical.

I disagree. The most common definition used by working astrobiologists goes along the line of "chemical system that can self-sustain and can undergo darwinian evolution". Our definition of life is intricately tied with our theories about life's origins, and the counter-examples to that definition are fictional and their premise falls apart on closer examination.

Let's take the self-aware computer you mentioned. How would such a computer come to being, exactly? It could have been built by something that does satisfy the above definition (in which case you could consider the computer not alive, but a biosignature). Or it could have been built through some darwinian process, and you're still firmly within the above definition.

Steve Benner has a nice paper about this. DOI: 10.1089/ast.2010.0524

The article doesn't actually address the problems with the 'evolutionary definition', probably because it would mean trying to chip away at a theory that a lot of people spent a lot of time trying to disprove.

> Alive are the things we say are alive, which is mostly stuff like us: some type of metabolism, growth, response to stimuli. By that definition we would certainly recognize it, at least up close.

What about fire?

Good point, I was only thinking of myself. Might end up picking this up for a friend :))

Yup, runs Anki. It does have a camera, fingerprint sensor, and SD card slot. It's a decently capable Android device: haven't ran into any stutter or lag. The only issue is the occasional UI glitch with apps that aren't designed for small screen sizes, but I haven't ran into any show-stoppers yet. Still worth it to me

I was concerned by the battery at first, but turns out it's more than enough to last a day or two since I'm no longer constantly pulling up twitter at every free moment.

Honestly? I'm a fan of this company. It seems like they just make phones that break the universal "palm-sized glass rectangle" meta that's completely subsumed all designs. I remember when I was a kid, there was so much diversity in phone designs! Sliding keyboards, folding screens, the little trackball on blackberries, etc. Now, it feels like the only variation available is size/OS/camera/CPU.

I'm currently using their Jelly 2, which is a smartphone that's just exactly tiny enough to do all the things I need and no more. The screen is 3", and the tiny form factor is still enough for what I want to use my phone for: messaging, calls, all my music apps, all my podcast/audiobook apps, maps/transit schedules, checking email. What the tiny screen is NOT enough for is content consumption - and that's the point. Such a simple idea, but it's worked wonders for my phone addiction. I just do all that on an actual computer now, where it's much more manageable and not constantly in my pocket.

Anyways, the 22,000 mAh phone looks like a miss to me, but I really respect that they're trying to do something different.

I played this game once at a friend's house and I've adopted it into a version I play with my chemistry students before I hand them an assignment about experiment design.

It's very elegant and I think it leaves a mark on them, you get to watch all our little cognitive biases bubble up realtime

This is much easier to say if you're not living in any of its victim states, or under the boots of any of the vicious autocrats the US props up.

Also, it's not like nuclear proliferation is solved. It's still breathing down our necks, we just don't talk about it anymore

Duolingo is very gamified yes, but really the main idea here is spaced repetition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

My friends that are in med school all use spaced-repetition to cram information into their memory banks, and the app they use (Anki) lets users share flashcard packs. Incidentally, aside from medschool-related packs, there's also packs for learning most languages. I don't think you can ever learn a language through spaced repetition, but it's certainly useful for expanding your vocabulary (learning new words). I started out with Duolingo but switched to Anki because I'm learning a tonal language which doesn't quite sound right with Duolingo's TTS (and the Anki card packs are accompanied with recordings of real speakers).

..and yet I still pop into Duolingo every day though to get my good-boy points :)))

I was recommended the therapist by a friend. We both struggled with depression. The therapist engages in alot of research on psylocibin-assisted therapy, and unfortunately the only way they're able to legally do the trip-sitting thing is in the context of the research. However, after a few months of sessions, I decided to just do it myself.

I ate 4.5g and laid on my couch with a notebook and relaxing music on. I had a list of issues that I needed to work through (obtained through the therapy), and I just sat there and ruminated on it for 6-7 hrs. It was difficult, but cathartic.

I noted my thoughts/conclusions and discussed the whole thing with my therapist afterwards, and while I can't say my depression is cured, it's much much MUCH better.

Maybe there's someone who does psilocybin research in your area? Or, remote to another area? While I'm sure literally having your therapist right there is very effective, I'm of the opinion that therapy + shrooms in general is really effective too.

Just popping in to say that psilocybin shrooms + therapy permanently changed my life for the better and I STRONGLY recommend it to pretty much everyone if their therapist specializes in that kind of thing

I agree of course, it's not a violation of any laws. I just thought you were asking for some moral principle to justify pressing a developer to make an API available

The same principle behind antitrust laws: dismantling monopolies is good for the public and good for innovation

This is unfortunate to hear, I'm still crawling through a chemistry PhD and I was hoping I'd be able to transition into software and get as far away from touching any more glass as possible.

Do you think the situation is different in more specialized niches (i.e. would I be able to reasonably compete with a CS grad for a job at a biotech firm?)

To balance out some of the negative testimony about psychedelics in this thread, let me say that they've helped me resolve deeply entrenched emotional issues and helped me crawl out of depression.

I've only done a handful of large doses, and even my therapist recommended it (and showed me some convincing experimental data). It's not a regular habit for me: maybe once or twice a year. Last year, I did a large amount of shrooms and just sat there and thought about things and ended up untying a really ugly knot of self hatred.

I think it's a good way to internalize therapy