csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

How do these IEMs with their passive seal compare to active noise cancelling headphones for the purposes of unwanted noise attenuation

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?

csee

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I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers.

This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Your comparison fails a test of facts. Yandex actively censors any perspective not approved by the Kremlin. Google does not do anything comparable to this.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

It'll be as falsifiable as many other questions that historians grapple with (e.g. did famine X lead to conflict/instability Y?), but only once the warming has happened and we're looking retrospectively. The best we can do now is an educated guess that large amounts warming will lead to migration away from hotter countries which will lead to some instability.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

It's not just on the apps. Evolutionary psychologists have a bunch of empirical studies that tease this out. We also see this in our genetic lineage, more female ancestors than male ancestors. The evolutionary theory behind it is pretty well worked out and supported by a lot of data.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

> I can also assure you perpetual futures would not be allowed to trade on any exchange inside the legitimate financial system.

I don't disagree that the point of perpetual futures on crypto exchanges is primarily to facilitate speculation and gambling, but they're just delta 1 derivatives (track the underlying 1:1) in the form of a CFD, different in mechanism but no different in use case to regular futures, which themselves are traded widely on traditional exchanges. And these perps are quite useful to temporarily hedge holdings, even more convenient than regular futures since you don't have to bother with rollover. The instrument itself is really cool. The criticism should be directed to the high amounts of leverage which is only ever useful in a gambling context, and the marketing + gamification aspects which are clearly targeted at encouraging gambling behavior. If Binance got rid of their perpetual futures, users could still gamble all the same using Binance's regular futures contracts.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

It's happening, though, so it's not impossible.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israel-cyprus...

csee

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> For short term storage (hours/days) batteries are far more efficient.

Is that expected/known to be true even as the tech gets cheaper in 5-10 years? What's the level of confidence of this statement?

csee

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The alternative is the way things were 15 years ago, where people found mates via their physical networks, work, family, hobbies, religion, and day to day life.

The criticism is similar in nature to the criticism of Twitter and Facebook. These apps play to and encourage the worst side of humans in the way that their social dynamics are designed, which distorts relations between people for the worse.

In the case of dating apps, it's because the "first meeting" is viewing someone's curated digital profile instead of getting to know their full self in the real world, they strongly encourage selection based on trivialities like height, hip to waist ratio, income and other signals. You also encourage the same narcissistic performance games that Instagram encourages. It's also the sheer deluge of profiles. Like, our dopamine system isn't designed for that, and nor is it a fully free choice when the app has exploited that evolved system to hook users. And what's going to be the impact of designing a system that makes it easy for people to self select into opposing political tribes?

Of course most of this stuff happened to an extent 15 years ago too. But as with Facebook and their tendency to stoke outrage and division, the problem is how the app has turbocharged our worse tendencies while also creating dilemma like incentives that make it tricky to opt out from.

My point about low status men is that they often aren't bad mates. They're low status through the prism of hyper gamified dating apps that magnify the importance of trivialities. There's no question that there's people who've had it worse in this regard in the pre-dating app era (various low-caste/untouchables types in different societies), my point isn't that we are at rock bottom, just that dating apps are a pretty large step in the wrong direction.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

That is the only way out on a local, personal level, since that's all we have much control over. But how is it not the app's fault? When Twitter and Facebook create social dynamics that encourage outrage and division, I blame them (or at least I blame the incentives and systems that cause them to do this). Ditto for the impact that these dating apps are having.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

You give good advice but I was commenting on the well documented asymmetry and inequality in outcomes that cut across gender lines which are likely magnified by these dating apps. It's not bitterness to point out objective facts that are highly relevant to the topic of conversation. "Improve yourself" is always the healthiest mindset on a personal level but that's not exactly deep analysis on the impact that these apps are having on our society or the lives of lower ranked men.

csee

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Maybe not that extreme but it's a super well documented phenomenon across evolutionary psych and studies of dating app stats.

csee

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For the top few percent of men.

csee

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You make a good point about discarding the source of random noise that the one-time pad is being applied to, and just focusing on the thing that's generating that one-time pad.

But I still don't know where to draw the line and how to justify it.

If that source of random noise mapped to a Turing machine running consciousness.exe for a short period of time by sheer chance without a one-time pad being applied to it by an external observer, would that classify? If we observed that this mapping held true by sheer chance as we observed additional bits in this random noise source, what about then? Does it make a difference that it's a random noise source that happens to be corresponding to a Turing machine for a period of time, and not an "actual" computer? And if that matters, what about the point that actual computers aren't perfectly deterministic, either?

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

If the observable universe is too small, what about the observable universe sampled at multiple points in time? Or just an iron bar that's repeatedly sampled along a time interval, with the desired encoding changing between each sample such that the object doesn't need to undergo much change it state in order to map to distinct things. Each sample increases the number of physical states that we can create a mapping from. If we still don't have enough states, we can draw more samples over more points in time to create a longer string of bits for the mapping.

Or another way to do it would be to repeatedly sample the same object at the same point in time, and simply change the desired encoding on each sampling, e.g. on a first pass we use F_0(x), on a second pass we use F_1(x), and we concatenate the output of F_0(x) and F_1(x) into a single large bit array.

The Boltzmann Brain says that our conscious experience at the current moment is a chance quantum event. It might not even involve the whole universe, it could be a local quantum phenomenon. That seems distinct to the argument in the article, which is that physical states (quantum or otherwise) can be mapped to an arbitrary string of bits with the encoding chosen by the person doing the mapping, and the output of this mapping (which is itself a string of bits) can correspond to a computation on a Turing machine, therefore inanimate objects with sufficiently large numbers of physical states could be said to be running a proposed consciousness.exe, which leads us to an absurd/extreme form of panpsychism.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

What about the arguments outlined in the article? You first dismissed the arguments because an iron bar couldn't have enough physical states. But we both accept that there are physical objects which do have enough physical states, even if we have to use the entire observable universe as the object that the mapping draws from (and that's not related to the Boltzmann Brain). So the arguments in the article seems to be either ignored or misunderstood.

Also, materialism =!= substrate independence and invariance to speed of computation. Consciousness can have a materialist explanation yet also be substrate dependent to an extent.

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

  "To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe"

But the observable universe exists. So why can't the observable universe appropriately substitute for the iron bar in his argument?

  "As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious"

Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as it is performing the same computation as a brain?

csee

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Why do you think it's absurd? If we do eventually create an AGI that is significantly smarter than us in most domains, why is it that we should expect to be able to keep it under control and doing what we want it to?

Submissions

Ask HN: Where can I find info about the 2nd round of negoations?

Treatment reduces drinking in monkeys by 50%

1.5M-year-old fossil rewrites 'Out of Africa' theory

David Epstein talking to Malcolm Gladwell about his book Range

The Lab Leak Fiasco

Moderna's mRNA Vaccine Pipeline

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