dan_mctree

7 ms·

1.
by dan_mctree 1mo ago
Imo the podcast and the video are better served as background material for some other task. The low bandwidth becomes an advantage because it's often ok if you miss out on some parts due to lack of attention. Indeed it's often a w
2.
by dan_mctree 7mo ago
>So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence. This doesn't seem to follow at all let alone obviously? Humans are able to reason through code without having to become a completely dis
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by dan_mctree 7mo ago
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we prob
4.
by dan_mctree 8mo ago
Well you see that take over and over because that's what people actually believe in and feel and it's almost weird it has to be repeated over and over. Most protestors are not solidarity protestors. Most protestors show up when th
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by dan_mctree 1y ago
Advanced intelligence may have evolve multiple times, but wouldn't the origins of simpler intelligence lie much deeper in the evolutionary tree? If Octopi use neurons too, it seems obvious to me that rudimentary intelligence must have
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
If all the wealthy would band together to spend their money on convincing every farmer to write software instead, then we'd all starve
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
You probably also need at least: - Y does not appear when X does not - We need an overwhelming sample size containing examples of both X and not X - The experiment and data collection and trivially repeatable (so that we don't need to
8.
by dan_mctree 2y ago
And even if you do know there's causality (eg: the input variable X is part of software that provides some output Y), the exact nature of the causality can be too complex to analyze due to emergent and chaotic effects. It's seldom
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
Why are bananas the funniest food? Even Claude seems to have caught on
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
I'm curious if we'll see a world where computers could solve math problems so easily, that we'll be overwhelmed by all the results and stop caring. The role of humans might change to asking the computer interesting questions
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
I'd like to recommend the author mentioned briefly in the article on this topic: Joel Mokyr. Unlike how this article paints him, Joel doesn't really point to a sole cause for the industrial revolution, but highlights a broad range
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
Pretty sure you wouldn't find many circles containing galaxies all at a similar approximate distance There might be some, so it could be lucky and just random chance, but the stats seem to say that it's very unlikely
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
There's so much ambiguous context that goes into your average '=', even when just talking about your standard functions on real numbers. You'll see it being used for anything from: - We've found these to be equal -
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
I wonder if there'd be any good way to confirm or rule out an ancient Martian civilization. Would Martian surface structures be able to last a few billion years? Or would Martian processes be able to make all of them disappear? And how
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
Possibly if language use fingerprinting ever becomes reliable enough to be able to connect multiple online pseudonyms together. That'd be a fun time
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by dan_mctree 2y ago
It's just a preference thing, I loathe the small program chaining style and cannot work with it at all. Give me a python script and I'm good though. I can't for the life of me imagine why people would want to do pseudo progra
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
To my untrained eye, the eastern United States and Uruguay + surroundings also seem like great places for civilizations to thrive. But for some reason those areas did not seem to have particularly large civilizations before the colonization
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
The Pledge of Allegiance?
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
The scans used for the grand prize look like this : https://scrollprize.org/img/grandprize/scroll1.mp4 It's a cut through the scroll, with the time dimension in this video representing the location of the cu
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
We need supermarkets to provide places where people can donate or sell their excess reusable shopping so other people can pick them up and use. That should put a big dent in the necessity for people to make use of new bags if they didn&#x27
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
>but the catastrophist discourse that there's a deep slowdown in productivity compared to the previous decades and that today we're mostly relying on things we already did in the past maps pretty well with my perception. Mine t
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
There are various things that go into inflation, and wages are only a small part of it. Wage price spirals are very unlikely and have not been demonstrated. Wages are not 100% of the cost of products, so even if companies directly increase
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
Or not at all. If the 45% are exactly on the mark with inflation, then the average would be significantly below inflation. The 45% would have to significantly exceed inflation for it to be spot on. And of course even then it's little s
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
Nor do I get what the plan is to stop good but overoptimistic actors developing AI that spirals out of their control I feel these kind of statements by Mozilla reflect exactly that lack of caution that may end us
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
Why do you assume a tabula rasa person would assume that consciousness ceases to continue on death? I don't think there's anything obvious that would suggest this goes one way or the other and that different people could end up se
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
Is it just me or does this require background knowledge that isn't widely available? I couldn't get through it as it never seemed to really explain what Aliases or Alias structures are, how determining those aliasing structures wo
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
The beatitudes are much more difficult, with some of them unlikely to be prescriptive (blessed are those who are persecuted), some of them being unclear (blessed be the meek) and others that are difficult to translate to actions (blessed be
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
Those who log issues are the hardcore users crowd that are bothered by something small, whereas new potential users that bounce because of something important generally don't bother making issues. You may be missing out on a lot of cri
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
It's so awkward that these truly fantastic tools for fast numerical computation (NumPy and JAX) have to be accessed through Python, which is a truly terrible language for fast numerical computation. Is anyone making any serious progres
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by dan_mctree 3y ago
That's right, it's usually been theorized that gravity would affect antimatter the same way as regular matter, but it's been hard to confirm as it's a serious challenge to obtain a significant mass of antimatter

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