pyrois

5 ms·

1.
by pyrois 11y ago
Why is knowing how to open an IDE or set up a mail server a prerequisite for good governance?
2.
by pyrois 11y ago
People really like to trash Freud, but you have to put him into context. Before Freud, we had a few branches of psychology: philosophical psychology in England arguing about empiricism vs. nativism, Wundtian psychology in Germany sitting ar
3.
by pyrois 11y ago
Well, it sounds like they maybe shouldn't be: > “Uber and Lyft can survive classifying drivers as employees,” she says. “It might cost them a little more, but it’s a successful concept. It’s not going to go away because we are tryin
4.
by pyrois 11y ago
I'm not sure how easily one could leave a small town in, say, feudal Europe. Most serfs lacked travel rights, and while one could escape from their lord's land and move to a city (depending on the country), the cost was prohibitiv
5.
by pyrois 11y ago
Compared to...? Because, compared to, you know, actual 5 star hotels, they kinda suck.
6.
by pyrois 11y ago
Yeah, that's the author's guess as well. > And when I say "people" I mean mostly "algorithms," which are faster and more literal than humans.
7.
by pyrois 11y ago
That looks fine to me. He's talking about reducing a matrix to reduced row echelon form, and gives a pretty clear example. If you're giving yourself 4 pages on linear algebra, there's not much better you can do. That said, yo
8.
by pyrois 12y ago
Sure, they are commensurate at some point. I'd pick one nanosecond of torture over the dust-motes, for instance. But I'm not certain that I would ever choose the 50 years of torture over the dust motes for any number of dust-moted
9.
by pyrois 12y ago
He's assuming linearity, which at the very least needs justification. He's assuming that the function that maps from the pair (number of people, type of torture) to suffering is linear in the number of people, and also linear in t
10.
by pyrois 12y ago
Yes, I agree, I would take the risk, but those are two entirely different things. It's not the same argument framed in a different way at all. In Yudkowsky's argument, it's the option between one person _absolutely guaranteed
11.
by pyrois 12y ago
Fair enough. I should have said "the model fails to accurately reflect my sense of morality".
12.
by pyrois 12y ago
I'll give it a shot, but first, a list of disclaimers: Yudkowsky gets a ton of unjustified internet hate and scorn, and I disagree with a lot of it. I read a number of the sequences, and quite enjoyed them. I also think his reaction to
13.
by pyrois 12y ago
I quite liked his introduction! Be aware, however, that he dramatically overstates some things. For example, he claims that the many-worlds interpretation is obviously correct. This is basically wrong: it may be correct, but it certainly is
14.
by pyrois 12y ago
The linked paper does not suggest that Martians built nuclear reactors on Mars, which then melted down. The paper suggests that there were "large fireballs in the atmosphere such as Tunguska-like events , with mid-air explosions, but o
15.
by pyrois 12y ago
How is that a real patent? As far as I can tell (and I'm not a lawyer), they're patenting mixing protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water in specific ratios to make a meat substitute. Why isn't every veggie burger ever prior a
16.
by pyrois 12y ago
I just donated $30. If there is nothing to stop large companies completely ignoring the GPL then what good is it?
17.
by pyrois 12y ago
True, but even "Chess lite" in 672 bytes is mind-blowing.
18.
by pyrois 12y ago
"Memory" means RAM, here. As for why the size of the executable matters, you needed to have the entire executable in RAM before you could actually execute it. That's not so true these days, but it was back in the good ol&#x27
19.
by pyrois 12y ago
Fight over parking spaces. It's Boston's favorite winter pastime.
20.
by pyrois 12y ago
It is certainly more complex than that, but I think that a back-of-the-envelope calculation like the one above is more than enough to strongly suggest that getting a solid object to remain in place when the moon is above it and not when the
21.
by pyrois 12y ago
I did, thanks!
22.
by pyrois 12y ago
Probably not. The moon has a mass of about 7.34e22 kg, the minimum distance from the moon to the surface of the earth is about 363,104 km, or 363,104,000 meters, and the constant of proportionality for gravity is G = 6.673e-11 N m^2/kg
23.
by pyrois 12y ago
I think you're conflating several issues. I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a stand
24.
by pyrois 12y ago
I mean, absolutely, that would morally and, hopefully, legally wrong. Moreover, there are many ways to evaluate "intelligence", and it's not even clear that such criteria are the correct ways to judge whether a creature is a
25.
by pyrois 12y ago
> There are lots of things we can't know, but it's like toothpaste; if we posit certain things as fixed, if our observations mean anything, something else has to vary. ...how is that like toothpaste? I don't disagree with
26.
by pyrois 12y ago
He was the first to prove that a finite bound exists. This is a huge, huge deal, since taking the answer from immensely large but finite to 2 is much easier than establishing a finite bound in the first place (as evidenced by the rapid decl
27.
by pyrois 12y ago
> Without going into detail, if you look underneath thin, shiny, white veneers of people with exploitative, corrupt histories, you'll find worse in their present day actions. I would be more likely to believe you if you did go into
28.
by pyrois 12y ago
> The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD. I've never really understood the objection that people have with regards to the Fed printing USD (for instance
29.
by pyrois 12y ago
Any suggestions? I'm also looking for some resources on those topics.
30.
by pyrois 12y ago
Good point! For me, I think the question here isn't so much "performance gains" as "interoperability, near-ubiquity, and staying power". For "interoperability", I'm just going to quote myself: "I

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