otakucode · HackerTrans

otakucode

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2 か月前議論

I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.

2 か月前議論

That was my immediate first thought. "Oh, is Bitlocker Not Safe Anymore?"

6 年前議論

Are we going to simply give up when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of complexity? Why do multi-component systems undergo phase changes, why does it occur at the points at which they do, how could we design simple systems which, in sufficient quantity, exhibit useful properties upon phase shift? What techniques can be used to predict or derive macro-scale emergent phenomenon from micro-scale complex interactions? Why, exactly and with the same precision as quantum mechanics achieves, is more different?

6 年前議論

When I had to come up with a company name back when I was doing freelancing, I chose Entropy Fueled Productions on a rationale quite similar to what was expressed in this article. Then I got to find out very few people know the word 'entropy' much less know how to spell it, and 'fueled' always gets mangled over the phone...

6 年前議論

Years ago, Chrome included an experimental vertical side tabs feature. It was great. Worked perfectly. But, it disappeared one day. People created a bug on the tracker to get it restored. It got thousands of stars. It kept getting closed and re-opened and kept accumulating more and more stars. Eventually, someone at Google stepped in and said "we don't like how it looks. We have no other solution. But, we don't like how vertical side tabs look, so we will never permit them in Chrome." and ever since, if you want to open more than half a dozen tabs in Chrome you either need a monitor that's 9 feet wide or you use Firefox with the magnificent TabTree extension which is the correct solution to the problem.

6 年前議論

There also might be an issue that recipes themselves can not be copyrighted. Article content and writing alongside the recipe can be copyrighted, but the recipe itself is not eligible for copyright protection at all. So if you're trying to make money off of a site, if it only had recipes, there is no protection whatsoever from someone setting up an identical copy and monetizing it themselves.

6 年前議論

You would be atypical if you were less productive by normal standards. Most studies I have seen on the topic usually show a marked increase in worker productivity in working from home. There is a bit of a confounding variable, however... Homes are not open floor plan for the most part. And we know from over 1,000 studies that open floor plan offices massacre productivity to a huge degree. So it might just be the benefit of not having all of the kneecapping and hamstringing taken away that is usually inflicted by business on their workers through open floor plans.

6 年前議論

What I didn't see mentioned that concerns me (although I admit it might be a concern born purely out of ignorance): No mention of whether employees would be provided with a minimum of 2 weeks paid sick leave should they show symptoms of COVID-19. Any employee who has a reasonable chance of becoming ill with COVID-19 at their work, and who does not also have a minimum of 2 weeks paid leave, should, by all logic I can think of, refuse to return to work. In a situation with no paid sick leave or less than 2 weeks of paid sick leave, the options are mostly reduced to 2: First, return to work, get sick, then get fired for absence while off sick. Or, second, remain home and get fired for absence while remaining healthy. I suppose there is the third options, the danger-face economic kamikaze model that most Americans will likely be expected to endure - go to work, hope you don't get sick, get sick anyway, get fired for absence. Then you can't even file for unemployment. There is no winning play.

6 年前議論

>also offers a glimpse into a potential future where companies of all sorts, not just auto insurers

No, not companies of "all" sorts. Just insurance companies. Other companies are regulated by Congress as part of antitrust regulations which would prevent them from doing this kind of thing. Insurance companies, however, are not regulated by antitrust laws. Insurance is declared to be "not commerce" and therefore not answerable to antitrust laws. They are permitted to break any antitrust law they please. This is why medical insurance companies, for instance, hold national meetings every few years to decide what price they are willing to pay for medical goods and services. This is price-fixing, and it is illegal in absolutely any industry - except insurance. In insurance, they can do it publicly because there literally is no law against it. There's a law PROTECTING it. It was called the McCarran-Ferguson Act. The plan was to repeal it as part of the Affordable Care Act. It was the clause that enabled the ACA to survive the entire revision process... and was then promptly removed from the bill immediately before its passage. This is why the insurers have never really fought very hard against the ACA. If it ever gets repealed, the McCarran-Ferguson act, that is, insurance companies will fall under antitrust regulation and have to change almost every business practice they follow. They will have to compete against one another on price, compete against each other on what prices they pay, etc. It would destroy their profit margins and probably result in the majority of them going out of business quite quickly. Don't hold your breath. It's why the insurance industry spends so much on lobbying and every lobbyist for every single industry will fight its repeal. In other words, it will NEVER happen. The law has been in place since 1945.

6 年前議論

That idea of a critical period we're unaware even exists scares me. We know of several critical periods, like an infant with their eyes covered for the first two months of their life will never master binocular vision, a child born deaf can be given normal hearing with a cochlear implant if placed before or around age 2 with effectiveness falling off the later it is implanted, etc. What if there IS a critical period for learning how to develop deep and meaningful personal relationships? Everything about modern child life is designed to pervert and destroy any ability for a child to form such relationships. I have similar concerns about autonomy. Autonomy is a very strong need in all animals, so it would only make sense for this to be true of humans as well and we see plenty of indication of it throughout history and into modern times... but we continue to subject young people to almost total suspension of their autonomy during all of their formative years. What impact should we expect that to have on the kids later in life? The disturbing thing about critical periods is that even knowing you've missed one doesn't help, you just missed it and the most you can do is compensate.

6 年前議論

It often surprises me when I hear about parents who are considering job-hopping and moving when they have children that are in the critical 11 - 15 age range. I had read ages ago, back in the late 90s I believe, that the chance of suicide skyrockets if an early adolescent is separated from their friend group. In my later reading and reflecting on my own experiences and whatnot I've come to believe that prior to the advent of agriculture, when most of humanity were nomadic hunter-gatherers (mostly gathering), when the single universally shared concept was of shared fatherhood, and when most children were raised in-common by the tribe, that friend group formed in early adolescence most likely functioned very much like your second family. First you get the tribe of adults, the family you're given, then you get to choose one and build it yourself. We spent the vast majority of human development at that stage, so it's a bit presumptive to think we can suppress it without significant consequence.

6 年前議論

This sort of stealthy manipulation reminds me of an idea I had while reading 'Linked: The New Science of Networks.' It's a dangerous idea, I think. The book discusses what would be necessary to take the network of film participants and effectively 'break' the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' game. Most would presume the way you'd go about it is by finding the nodes connected to the most people and remove them. That's wrong. Because of clustering, removing the most-connected nodes results in almost no change to the general connectivity of other nodes.

Nodes which are actually important are 'bridge' nodes that provide a means of moving between mostly-disconnected groups. I started wondering what these ideas looked like in an actual social graph, like society. What would 'bridge' nodes look like, and what would eliminating the connection to them look like and what effect would it have? I think a social bridge node would be something like a biker whose main social group is his motorcycle gang, but who also participates in his elderly aunts knitting circle once a month. He provides a means through which ideas and concepts and information can flow from biker gangs, and those connected to them, to a group of elderly ladies and those they are connected to. They are, almost by definition, tenuous links. Ones which, if someone had influence over the communication networks they were using, it might be very easy to disrupt. What consequences would there be to breaking those links on a large scale? In the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' situation, you can get the average number of links needed to get to Kevin Bacon up over a dozen by only removing a couple handfuls of bridge nodes.

I think doing such a thing on a real social graph could be very quiet, possibly undetectable (drop messages from rarely-connecting pairs of users... they rarely connect, so how many of them will go through the trouble to re-establish contact? Have bridge nodes have something go haywire and they have to be issued a new phone number, 'their facebook got hacked', etc). And the consequence would be to freeze most things in place, or at least radically slow down any kind of large-scale social change. Disruption of the status quo on the scale of regime change in a government, say, requires buy-in from large and very mostly-disconnected segments of the population. If only pockets of people are interested in change, it doesn't matter how intensely they want the change to happen, it only matters if they can join forces with very disparate compatriots. If you had high-level control of communication networks and a vested interest in guarding the status quo against large-scale social upheaval, you could probably do it very quietly and without really needing anything more than the metadata of connectivity. No need to find out what ideas are being spread, you could just make sure ALL ideas remain trapped in their own little bubbles or that their spread is greatly contained.

6 年前議論

What about making it so that the amount of latency added is dynamic? It could be set up so that frequency of visitation leads to greater and greater latency. Something like exponential growth of 1.5x every time the site is visited with an exponential decay function applied since the last time visited. This would encourage slowing down, and would most heavily penalize the most heavily used sites which seems coherent with the goal.

6 年前議論

Look into the case where a Christian film company fraudulently claimed a tons of videos on The Bible Reloaded YouTube channel. They went to court. They 'won'. Kinda. They ended up settling, but their case was as iron-clad and perfect as anyone could dream. They didn't include a single frame of the movie they were talking about in their video, didn't include a single nanosecond of audio from the film, but the company still filed a claim. But when they went into court, the company blamed the actual employee who filed the claims and for some reason the court just decided that the company can't be held responsible for the actions their employee took while doing the job they were hired to do. I would expect the same thing to happen in any similar case. They just throw the one person under the bus and move on.

6 年前議論

That's... not what the DMCA anti-circumvention clause means. At all. The anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA does not deal with the kind of technological measures they're talking about. It only forbids circumvention of technological measures that SPECIFICALLY protect copyrighted material. Not general access controls, not access throttling or user roles or anything general like that. It doesn't even protect against things like circumventing things and convincing Instagrams servers to send copyrighted data. It's meant to protect things like the CSS encoding/encryption on DVDs. It has been used (in RealNetworks v. Streambox, one of the first if not the first lawsuit involving the DMCA right after its passage) to prevent recording streamed content and a single totally undocumented bit ended up being ruled as an adequate 'protection mechanism' when 'circumvention' boiled down to "we didn't know what that bit did because no one would tell us, so we just ignored it". But that was specifically a transfer encoding of the content itself, it didn't have to do with user account control or anything. Courts are very displeased when companies try to use copyright law or the DMCA to facilitate other business goals - like protecting their ability to collect analytics, etc. It's obviously not copyright infringement to get images from Instagram, that's literally what it exists for you to do! Copyright protects copying. And absolutely nothing else.

6 年前議論

I suffer no illusions that I am myself immune to any of the common pitfalls of being human. I imagine if you shared where you live now, either your community has learned to resist the tendency I describe (which I am guessing you misunderstood, that may be mostly my fault as I didn't go very deeply into it) or else they simply express it in different areas, perhaps demonizing the microwaves of wifi or the evils of certain chemical compounds and their tendency to give people 'unearned' happiness, etc.

I am curious, though... how is saying that humans have a certain tendency an illustration of categorizing things in a binary manner?

I would suggest you make fewer assumptions about the people you're having discussions with. You don't seem to be skilled at sussing out at least my own background. And of course the world is 'less fully specified than [I] imagine' or how you believe I imagine it. That's one of the reasons I studied philosophy, and why I continue to study different cultures, history, and current events. Even the most primitive cultures center their thinking around categorizing things, and they begin with two categories, then split them from there. It's practically the essence of human reason and even pattern recognition.

6 年前議論

I think it is a confluence of factors, but primarily it has become much more visible due to the rise of social media. And by that I specifically mean that social media enabled far more people to actively contribute and communicate online to wider audiences than previously. Most of the people communicating undesirable ideas have not formed them recently. They have held them and repeated them very often, they simply haven't been accessible to others, searchable, indexable, etc. All of the various notions about requiring platforms to regulate speech online and similar will, at most, return us to that situation. That would not necessarily be a positive step. As an example, two sisters from the Westboro Baptist Church have left the organization expressly as the result of one of the sisters having her mostly deeply held beliefs questioned, challenged, and refuted on Twitter. Were that communication not able to flow, that group would still have two more members protesting funerals, spewing irrational hatred, and promoting a harmful ideology.

Human beings have a natural tendency to wish to categorize things in a binary manner, and they deal exceptionally poorly with situations that feature an abundance of both good and bad. They feel compelled, really compelled, to decide to pay attention to only one of the two possibilities and to minimize the other so that the opinion of the matter can be held onto more tightly. I personally think this is a tendency of deep biological origin (down to the actual functioning of the brain level) and it is something we must guard ourselves from buying into.

Another large factor is simply number and breadth of people communicating online. Children, adolescents, and young adults are very active online now. They are learning social skills and as our society totally and utterly abandons them in this regard outside of the Internet, it is the only location in the world where they can even have the possibility of interacting with other people as equals. Beyond the bounds of the Internet, they are treated and spoken of very poorly by all segments of society, and they bring their bitterness over that with them online. Human society has problems, and our desire to hide those problems should be resisted in preference to wishing to see those problems solved. Talking about it, and attempting to find successful means of solving those problems without compulsion but with education should be an actively pursued goal, IMO.

6 年前議論

Tech may not be entirely innocent, but at the end of the day it facilitates both the good and the bad behavior equally well, so users do bear the most of the blame. Helping the users such that they would not behave in such a manner would, of course, be a complex matter mostly outside the realm of technology-based tools, but I do not believe that is any reason to abandon the cause.

One thing we could do, which would not solve the problem but perhaps illuminate a better way forward, would be to work on communications technology. Not simply technology for data transfer, but for actual information and understanding transfer. Technologies and systems which facilitate the good behavior without facilitating the bad nearly as well. By that I mean things such as systems which enable presenting large volumes of nuanced information in ways accessible to more people, and systems which enable both constructing, sharing, and refining complex arguments.

As an increasingly large portion of humanity conducts themselves online, we must keep in mind that there is much of human behavior which is not admirable. The solutions to that behavior are not technological except in the most dystopian and (philosophically to me at least) disgusting scenarios. There has never been, nor ever will be, a happy, prosperous police state. Autonomy and free expression are not luxuries, they are necessary for human health. We must also always be vigilant that the systems we implement are flexible and permit society to change both within and through them. Take a thought experiment I came up with for example. Imagine that tomorrow morning 90% of the population of planet earth awoke to a realization that agitation over nudity was ludicrous. Would it be possible for our existing systems to accommodate this change, or would it actively thwart every single attempt by any individuals to live their life according to this newly adopted principle? Would it result in a global relaxation of pointless anxieties, or would it result in increased anxiety as people felt themselves isolated in their realization, 'judged' by their technology which would filter them, block them, and reject them at every stage?

At no point in history has any society, so far as we know, hit upon "The Correct Ideas" which represent unvarnished truth, eternal and unchanging. And we should be careful to consider that our current social ideas are not unwittingly treated as such, ossifying human culture.

In Eric Schmidt's book "The New Digital Age" he speaks about wishing to play a very active role in exactly this kind of cultural ossification, expressing an extremely elitist view that due to the fact Google is rich, they are Better and should therefore take steps to actively guide and mold society in the ways which Eric Schmidt believes are best. Those just so happen to be the social values of the late 1990s when Google was introduced and which facilitated their wealth-building. That is, to my mind, a dangerous game. Past history would suggest that attempts at "social engineering" which do not rely completely upon broad social consensus and upon society reaching its own conclusions and doing its own enforcement of its own ideals tends to backfire in spectacularly catastrophic and inevitably violent ways.

6 年前議論

This certainly applies for me personally. My theory is that it ties in with the sort of 'geographic' memory where when you think of something, you might not be able to remember exactly what it is, but you can remember pretty precisely that it's in the middle of a certain notebook, on a heavily marked-up page, in the bottom left corner. By tying things to a location which you can remember, placing it in a bit of a context, its easier to hold on to. I also find, and for this I have no explanation at all, that I can remember sequences of numbers and code very well, better than anything else. I couldn't tell you the date I started or left my job 2 employers ago, but I could rattle off my 7-digit numeric security code for the door no problem. The brain is weird.

6 年前議論

I'm not familiar with your product, so this question might be either overly simple or entire outside your wheelhouse, but does Sourcegraph have any integration with IDEs? Like if my organization had a module in a repository that did image compression (random example), could I hit a hotkey and search for it, then have the plugin pull the module out of a different project and insert it into what I'm working on?