>What is it about life that makes us want to value it?
That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.
However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness.
My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?
I'm impressed by how low the score of your comment is. I know computer scientists aren't "real" scientists but I thought the lack of rigor in this one was apparent and it was only upvoted only as a conversation starter. I guess I was wrong.
I feel like most of these experiments don't control for air temperature. I feel like cold air has a much more rejuvenating effect than just lowering CO2 levels. Not that they don't matter, but it's not like you'll instantly feel better.
I recently tried to book over AirBnB just for the convenience of it.
They requested government id and a new photo of me for verification. They also (indirectly and insidiously) asked for my permissions so sell all my personal data listed in the ID (biometrics, height, skin colour, ID number etc). Of course you'd have to read the privacy policy to know this, and many people don't. Also their facebook login asked for a list of all my friends as well as all my likes. What the hell does that have anything to do with them?
I just booked off their platform. It was easier and cheaper, and definitely more private. I also wouldn't recommend anyone to get vendor-locked so hard as to have their livelihood depended on this company's policies.
HN is right-biased and quite nationalist.I'm always amused to realize that some people actually believe that Facebook's "moderation efforts" are a good think, while WeChat's or VK's are not.
I mean, I get why an exec or a politician would have to say this in public, but come on, who actually buys this? Facebook is no less of a propaganda tool for an authoritarian elite than it's Chinese or Russian counterparts. And even if you're a nationalist American, don't forget that Facebook isn't really protecting your own interests.
This is a 2018 internet-connected app, not a 1985 GSM network.
1 billion 100 Byte messages sums up to an almost trivial 100GB. This might be a technical challenge for the neighborhood's web admin but not for any real company.
Looking back at this after the Huawei scandal, it seems very likely it was a preliminary step to create a negative impression regarding Chinese manufacturing. Bloomberg could have been lied to, or been chosen to deliver false stories for propaganda.
Of course it could be irrelevant (there were tensions regardless) but given how everything looks weird, it probably wasn't.
Because no matter what the audits say, this article caused a widespread feeling of mistrust towards Chinese-manufactured electronics.
Google is a jumbled mess of multiple pieces of software, and you get access to none of them, only a search service, and it is loosely defined. Also Google isn't particularly good at anything nowdays, except maybe NLP. Their ability to deliver good results is only a result of massive spying. Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data.
Imagine a pre-SaaS Google:
You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep.
They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.
Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.
To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software industry, which was much better for the end user imo.
Back then, software companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive piracy broke this model.
Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.
They have to choose one of the two, publish their decision, and act accordingly.
Honestly the real problem is that they pose as a raw communications medium while they are definitely not one. Facebook has political, cultural and financial interests according to which they filter your communications. Even if they say "we alter your data stream" somewhere in their ULA, they are still dishonest as they do it in a way that convinces you thay the effect is small while in fact it is not.
One more consideration: editorialized newspapers are fine, because all readers get the same paper and and work out the bias.
If the bias is extreme or blatant lies are circulated, public discourse will lead to consequences for the publisher.
With facebook, filtering is so pervasive, elegant and fleeting that you can't tell what's done on purpose and what isn't (a design goal imho).
So I'd say that even if Facebook publicly declared itself to be a heavily edutorialized publisher, without a way to know the bias, they shouldn't be allowed to operate on a personalized content basis, because unless they publish their feed algorithm and a way to verify it works as it's supposed to, there's no way to know if they are acting maliciously.
Exactly. Although facebook has the power to change mainstream politics on long timescales, claiming that all those protests are products of AI brainwashing is just wrong.
Even more so, instead of touching on why facebook should be a host of information but not a communications modulator, this article, like many others, insists that Facebook should brain-wash and manipulate people the way they like, not the way they do now, because that's the "right" thing.
In my opinion, the majority of useful work done by CERN is not in the domain of theoretical physics, but in that of engineering. A lot of really bizarre configurations are build (with respect to day-to-day engineering challenges), with extreme requirements that push materials and other forms of engineering forward. Personally I have discovered papers by CERN where they test things that are very useful to me, but if it wasn't for their massive budget, available tools and personnel, nobody else would be be able to, or bother testing and publishing.
The article actually argues against self-improvement.
There are issues with trying excessively too hard or sacrificing too much to reach certain goals, there are issues with trying the wrong way or towards the wrong goals, but arguing we should take a casual and passive stance towards fixing our problems and just let them be is really the most counter-productive, lazy piece of advice I've ever heard.
Last month I canceled my account application when I realized my new bank would not provide support to unathenticated users.
By this I mean you really couldn't get hold of anyone without providing a credit card number. Which is not only invading privacy and creating customers castes, but it's also stupid since I didn't have a credit/debit card yet.
After loudly swearing at the machine, either a quality control person or an emotion identification algorithm forwarded my call to a support worker. I simply hanged up and called the local branch, asking them to cancel my application.
I'm not going to support this kind of businesses. However in the case of monopolies and oligopolies legislation is needed to assure retail customers are treated the same regardless of the race, age, postal code and spending figures unless there are clear terms dictating that higher spenders get better support (ie, providing better support as a paid service and/or having clear rules about prioritization).
This article reads like the first step in a character assassination attempt. I don't like it.