Hmm. Maybe what "counts as an observer" is relative to your reference frame, and so is the concept of "superposition". And thus, though the cat is making observations within its environment, since the environment is sealed off, the cat is not "an observer" from our reference frame because there is no interaction between us and the cat. From the cat's reference frame it is probably not in a superposition - If it is observing anything, it is alive, and if it is dead, it is not observing anything. But if we observe the cat, the wave function is collapsed from our reference frame and the cat is in one or the other state.
My understanding of quantum mechanics is pretty shallow so take this with an ocean of salt.
I love your advice for beginners (last 3 paragraphs of your comment). It definitely rings true that the attainment of desirelessness can become a desire in itself, just another dragon to chase.
I like your comment so much I was tempted to share it with my FB friends. Would you be ok with that? No worries if not. If so, would you like to be mentioned by your username?
Sorry if this is not an appropriate thing to comment here. I would have messaged you privately but HN doesn't seem to provide a way to do that, and I don't see an email address for you. Cheers
> I mean, what data is going to get extracted? Your favorite color?
For instance, a log of every time I turn my lights on and off? Coupled with of course all kinds of fingerprinting info about my phone which is also tied to all my accounts. Others mentioned it could also scan the local network. Creepy.
So sick of apps being required for basic things. My ISP is trying to require one to admin my router...
For an article about privacy and not being snooped on, some HTTPS would be nice!
But then again, the author could understandably reply that TLS is an example of a system that has evolved to require "checking in" with a central authority - the opposite of what they want. So fair enough.
I can relate to the feeling of anxiety when the all-too-short weekend is drawing to a close. Glad you put this up! Hope it helps you feel a little more in control and able to do something creative. It makes sense that you chose to just get something out there without worrying about the details or polishing up the rough edges.
> you can choose what companies you interact with but you can't choose your government.
On the contrary, you can vote to change your government, but the corporations get to do what they want with 0 accountability. If they have a pseudo-monopoly (like several large tech companies do today), you can "choose" to use them or miss out on basic life services.
Off topic, but I really, really wish we could stop overloading the word "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrencies when it already is an abbreviation for cryptography. It's worse when we start saying things like "crypto networks", which is likely frequently misinterpreted/conflated with any kind of secure or encrypted network.
We owe it to ourselves to keep clear language available to talk about the concept of secure, private information storage and transmission. Blockchain is cool, but it's a very distinct concept from crypto.
I didn't read the article, and I know it's more about math than an actual plan, but as a tangent I wanted to say that there's a cost to preventing rain from reaching the earth - even if we eventually returned the water there and didn't pollute or reduce the water. I think by altering this age-old cycle, we would lose some of the impact on the soil, and plants, the way it rolls downwards into increasing rivers.
We've caused a lot of damage with pavement and structures. The benefit of the power generated would have to be weighed against this cost.
This seems really disingenuous, like you care more about dissing someone than understanding the pros and cons of using this tool that suddenly is one of the only ways to connect with people.
As others have mentioned a lot of this boils down to the wording of the 5th amendment. Specifically: "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...".
I recently found out that, for example, the Texas Bill of Rights [1] has stronger wording that addresses this. From section 10: "...He shall not be compelled to give evidence against himself...".
Seems like (1) is doable, as long as it's opt-in. But if it becomes the default behavior, existing applications would break when they do something against the type system. I'm not sure what (2) buys you.
Not OP, but read your comment and felt inspired to respond.
I understand your mindset - in a sense, the absence of growth implies death, all life needs growth, etc.
However, growth is not a purely-quantitative, 1-dimensional value. There are an infinite number of possible futures that all constitute growth relative to here and now. Which aspects will do most of the growth? Will there be more humans? more relationships? more industry? more data? more meaning? There are an infinite number of things that can grow, and even within a single vertical, multiple ways to grow.
Therefore, any specific growth we undergo has an "opportunity cost" of whatever other ways we could have grown. Not to mention, most kinds of growth require some destruction, so in addition to potential value, you lose the immediate value of whatever you destroy.
Therefore, in my view, the 2 ways we need to grow the most are:
- Get smarter in the ways that would enable us to accurately predict good ways to grow. This helps us do the following better:
- Build up the -potential- to grow, or at least remain alive, in dimensions that, right now, to us, seem good or necessary.
- Learn how to know when, and how, to unleash that -potential-.
Totally agree that wealth creation is a thing distinct from distribution, and that it matters.
However, I'm not aware of any metrics or markers for wealth creation - other than revenue / profit. So in other words, most of our attempts to study economics ignore this, just like the model in TFA. They look at successful businesses and growing GDP and infer that wealth must have been created.
Another related concept - similarly murky and unaccounted for - is wealth destruction. If wealth is defined, say, as the capacity for people to live a good life, then how often is this capacity destroyed in the pursuit of growing business? We similarly have no markers for this factor in most of our economic models that I'm aware of.
As an aside, I was surprised by the repeated use of "climate hawk" throughout the article as an identity that we might be interested in taking on. Could they have said e.g. "people concerned about climate change"? I may just not know the term's history.
So for example if the person receives false ashes, as in the article, and then the ceremony is performed in which the "dearly departed's ashes" are scattered, but it's really unmixed concrete - then does that falseness of that ceremony not count as damage to you?
I wonder how you'd feel about this then: If someone cut out your brain while you were sleeping, and put it into a sufficiently high-quality simulation world, while simultaneously doing the same to all the people in your life who would care about you and thus be aggrieved - would that be perfectly fine, as long as they pulled it off smoothly enough that no one ever noticed?
To me that would be violent; I'd prefer people not do that - to me or others - regardless of how smoothly they can pull it off.
Off-topic, but I came here to say that my long-standing fear just came true about the word "crypto"; namely, that I totally misread it in TFA as meaning "cryptography" - which is of course what the term always used to refer to - and honestly forgot that it might refer to "crypto-currency" until reading your comment.
I knew someday that would happen! I made up some story to myself that comments in TFA about "#cryptowinter" and "FUD in the community" might refer to communities losing confidence in cryptography techniques after too many companies getting hacked. Out of touch, I know, to not be aware of that hash-tag. O_o
I really hate that we have another meaning of "crypto" now so that misunderstandings like this can happen often. As programmers, we know how important naming is and how costly it is to create confusing collisions. Cryptography is too important of a concept in tech for us to not have a clean word for it. smh
Cool, I'll bite. I don't know some of your mathy terms like "putative extensive transduction" or "anisotropy" so go easy on me.
But I hear you say things like "Neural nets are nonlinear iterated function systems by construction.", and it resonates with me. I've often tried to draw a parallel between the recursive tree structure of a program with the matrix structure of a neural network, which as I understand it is mathematically still a graph of functional nodes feeding into one another - it's just that treating it like a matrix allows the programs to be much more performant by using low-level structures like numpy arrays.
In any case, I often think about the tree structure of programs, and we whether could get to a place of programs that can analyze, understand and evolve the abilities of other programs. This could be seen as the old-school "symbolic AI" mindset. And then, the similarities and differences of that with the matrix-based neural network revolution that's happened in the last years. I wonder about possible holomorphisms and interfaces between those two paradigms.
I don't doubt that I barely skimmed the surface of what you were actually saying. The very general and meta way you were talking about information processing is intriguing to me, and I'd love to understand more. Thanks for sharing!
My understanding of quantum mechanics is pretty shallow so take this with an ocean of salt.