curtainsforus

Strange, for you to say this in the age of transformers. They are obviously not there yet, but it seems inevitable to me that e.g. gpt 'understands' things better than a markov chain, and that future systems will understand more.

The french monarchy shot the rioters, and it worked. When they stopped murdering rioters, they got their heads cut off.

If you want logical separation, add sub-blocks to the function. You can see things as being a spectrum from fully inline code, to code blocks, to anon functions defined in the function, to true functions.

The argument continues to say that the 'clean code' version isn't actually cleaner/more legible/more understandable. I, for one, am royally sick of spending 5 minutes trying to figure out which virtual function implementation was actually called!

This is a fully general counterargument for why anything that is bad is actually good because it doesn't matter. "Places where air quality matters it is never sacrificed".

I think he bought in more people at one point, then sent them away again when he realized he wasn't able to keep the project on track with that many chefs making the soup. The problem with more people is that the project can very easily degenerate into design by committee.

If you read TFA, you'd know that the headline on the link isn't the headline of the article itself, which has no question mark. Presumably the mark was added here to assuage blue-tribe people.

You know a lot of children would be raped in those concentration camps, right?

Building capital and controlling things is good for individuals or families, but less so for large, uncoordinated organisations, especially governments. If I, an individual, own a shop, I'm incentivized to make it profitable- in this small town case, I'm incentivized to stock things people want to buy, to reduce waste, and so on. (Or to bail out and sell the premises if the economic conditions don't make sense anymore). Making the shop better makes me richer.

If I'm a wage-paid employee in a large shop (or any organization), then I'm looking to a) not get fired b) get a raise c) get a promotion. The bigger and more bureaucratic the organization, the more personnel decisions tend to become disconnected from ground truths and the more it becomes possible to rise through politics, whether or not the shop gets better. The people at the top, e.g. the owners of Walmart, want their shops to be more efficient, but if line worker #529 doesn't think he'll be paid more for making his local shop 5% more efficient, then he won't- and if there are more reliable ways up, he'll take those.

When a government owns/runs the shop, even the people at the top don't care about it making money- it's not their money to lose! The shop is probably useful as a political tool/division point, though. Imagine left-right debates about whether the government store should stock condoms, or meat, or whatever.

If I'm going to eat vegetables, I want to eat real vegetables, not an assortment of pea protein and flavorers slathered in preservatives that doesn't even taste as good as the thing it's imitating!

What about the site owner's water supply?

The disagreement here seems to over whether Cloudflare is more like a restaurant, or more like a utility company. Given the ubiquity of DDOS attacks online, (and the fact that KF seemingly can't stay online without DDOS mitigation), I think there's a good argument to be made that DDOS mitigation might be more like a utility.

The guy who made the nazi pug video might disagree.

Kiwifarms has editorial control, though. Posts advocating swatting or violence are removed, and their users banned.

Individuals have sued them repeatedly and lost; the case I remember best is a woman called Melinda Scott. Here's an explanatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iqkpN9a6q8

It's not a problem if one print shop declines to print your flyer; it is a problem if there's only three print shops in the world.

>Could I declare self defense against a police officer? Not according to contemporary american law, but you should be able to!

>How can that system be justified?

The 'bad guy' is whoever is the aggressor. Everyone has a right to life; if someone starts shooting at you, or swinging a bat at you, you have the right to defend yourself, and if you kill the aggressor in self-defence, so be it.

I've heard from an internet lawyer that it's possible in principle for two people attacking each other to both have grounds for self-defence, too, if both were in reasonable fear for their lives. Whether A kills B, or B kills A, either may be able to argue self-defence given the right (wrong) circumstances. But that's just some internet theorycrafting I heard.

There's usually more than one server per minigame. You could see it in the url you were redirected to; they had more servers running the more popular minigames. Each minigame has a player limit, so the maximum load on any given minigame server is known (within the bounds of the minecraft sub-superset that makes up that minigame- but usually the minigames are deliberately limited/bounded in how much computation they need, as opposed to vanilla Minecraft). Extra players get sent to the next available server. If there's consistent overflow, at that point you might turn on a whole new server, or change a server's gamemode (I don't know to what degree Hypixel actually did/does this, or how often it's actually necessary).

The game servers don't restart after the end of a round, though, do they? I'd imagine they kick the players back to the lobby, reset the in-server game, and then tell the lobby to send the next batch of players.

Biology kills us first, and in a manner that's contingent, not necessary; there are universes with physics similar to ours where life could continue forever. (Just add some rare non-energy-conserving interactions to be exploited).

Eventually, over 10^100 years of operation you get into interesting problems with the number of possible states a mind of a given size has being finite; but if you can continually add more matter via non-energy-conserving interactions, you could add more memory/processing up to fundamental physical limits: you can only fit so much information in a given volume before it collapses into a black hole; you can only communicate at c, so if you make your mind bigger, it has to parallelize or slow down; Given the expansion of space, at some scale, light signals from one end of your mind can't reach the other (the space inbetween expands faster than C), which would be the the fundamental limit... except that gravity counteracts the expansion of space, and I'm not sure what the expansion properties of a visible-universe-filled volume of just-barely-black-hole-subcritical computronium is. I imagine you're in a big crunch regime at that point, except... Isn't that the same thing as a black hole collapse? Nonetheless, there's presumably some balancing density that perfectly avoids both expansion and contraction, though it's presumably unstable. Ignoring the instability-difficulties, though, that means you can continue growing the amount of memory you have by slowing down your processing speed to one clock cycle every ~2*the diameter of your mind in light-years years. I'm not sure what the ultimate limiting factor is here, given infinite time; does the amount of computation of this system in infinite time go to infinity as your scale goes to infinity, or does it asymptotically approach some finite upper bound?

If you could figure out the distribution of universes, somehow, and figure out the distribution intelligences across them to a high enough fidelity to predict their actions (for example, by crunching numbers with a star-sized-computer, predicting what modal source code of some universe-spanning AI in a parallel universe looks like, and running it), you could in principle bargain in a cross-universe manner that leads to both parties/universes gaining value. Say you highly value diamond, and want to turn all matter in your lightcone to diamond; you've got 99% of it, but the last 1% is extremely expensive. Your counterparty values happy sentient life, and has dismantled 99% of the stars in their light-cone to make very long-lasting artificial habitable worlds, but the last 1% is the hardest to use- but would be easier to turn into diamonds than your last 1% of usable matter, and your last 1% of usable matter is easier to turn into living things than diamond. If you could somehow both predict with high confidence that a universe containing your counterparty exists, you could both gain value by using that last 1% to help the other, in a prisoner's dilemna sort-of-way.

(One possible avenue against defection is that if I can simulate you well enough, I know by definition whether you'll defect or not.)

This whole process is called 'timeless acausal trade', and it's pretty interesting.

That metaphor was originally used to justify criminalizing protesting wars.

There's a 'waterfall' effect of status signals. The upper class uses signal A to differentiate themselves from the middle class; the middle class catches on, and starts using signal A to imitate the upper class; the upper class moves on to signal B, to differentiate themselves from the middle class; the lower class use signal A to imitate the middle class; the middle class uses B to differentiate themselves from the lower class and imitate the upper class; from there, it cycles.

ABA->BAB->ABA

The upper class aren't worried about being mistaken for the lower class; that's why 'ghetto chic' exists, and why Zuckerberg wore hoodies. Conspicuous adoption of low-class signals can be a signal of high-class- for a while, till the rest of the culture catches up.

Usual caveats of 'this is a simplified model' etc.

I'm not religious, to be clear; I was just using religion as an example. I also went to a highly ranked university, for whatever it's worth.

> Hypothesize -> experiment -> measure -> conclude

With the replication crisis, it's become clear that these systems have serious problems determining truth once you're dealing with something less concrete than engineering. I put a lot of stock in what physicists say about physics; I don't believe there's as much rigor in political science (as scientific as the DPRK is democratic) or women's studies. I expect that as you move from physics through the social sciences, you get less and less attached to reality. "Publish or perish" and the increasing political repression on university campuses both cause perverse incentives that lead to me discounting the truth-value of most things I see coming out of universities.

>Tithes

Monetarily speaking, universities are a plague on the world- especially America. Imagine a world where you had to give 30,000+ dollars to the church in order to get a decent job. You might nominally learn something at the institution you go to, but learning is the ~3rd most important reason why anyone goes to university- they go for the piece of paper certifying they have an IQ above 90, so they can get a job; they go to party and meet new people, and because they were told they should go by society; and lastly, some want to learn things. You know that universities aren't actually selling knowledge because a) it's very rare for someone to sneak into Harvard to attend a lecture, and b) universities put their lectures up online for free!

>I certainly wouldn't trust them to write federal legal policy

Neither would I; in fact, they shouldn't, it adds more perverse incentives that corrupt the field. I don't want scientists directing government policy for the same reason- it adds an incentive for the power-hungry to be even more careerist. I assume you've heard the quip that the modern researcher spends half their time playing politics and filling out grant forms?

>so pastors probably have a net positive effect in this area.

>It wouldn't even surprise me if seminary school were to directly teach many topics academically or use academic methods and authority, but it's still done in the context of tithing and one truth (god exists) that is beyond critical examination, the yes is presupposed.

Sure, if you're an atheist religion's not for you. Similarly, if you're republican university's increasingly not for you; if the truth were to disagree too much with the political agenda, so much the worse for the truth- in a manner quite reminiscent of a church, actually!

>The megachurch person is to you, as you are to me.

Again, I'm not religious. And given your trust of modern academia, I'd say the same to you ;)

What you call over-explained magic, others call 'hard magic' (like 'hard sci-fi'). Mysterious magic can give that sense of wonder/ambience, but it's hard to use it in order to satisfactorily solve problems: because it isn't clear what the magic can and can't do, if you have Gandalf whip out magic to fix every issue that comes along, the plot devolves into a series deus ex machinae. This means the more mystic magic has to have a subtler influence on the plot.

It's not as annoying if vague magic causes, or can cause problems, though. Even The Lord of the Rings contains some hard magic: when Frodo puts on the ring, he turns invisible, but becomes more visible to shades. The useful effect is a pretty well-defined and discrete! The full extent of the costs and dangers are less clear, though- which gives you a great feeling of foreboding every time Frodo puts on the ring, or is in a situation where it might be needed.

Harder magic more often gives a character a toolkit, and it means you can have a them come up with a novel combination or application of the abilities they have available to them to solve a problem without it feeling like an ass-pull. It's like a murder mystery, where you can wonder at what the answer is ahead of time, try to pick up on clues.

I think there might be two different genres wearing the same face, here. I like "scientific fantasy" as much as "fantasy", but in general they might appeal to different people. In the fantasy book 'the misenchanted sword', the main character doesn't understand magic (he's just a scout), but when his sword ends up enchanted to 'protect him' (no other information given), he does what a real person might do- he tries to figure it out, see if it follows any rules! Along the way, he sometimes misunderstands or doesn't know enough, and consequently makes bad decisions. I really liked it, and I wouldn't have liked it as much if the main character hadn't been... doing science on his sword!

I agree that a lot of stories that incorporate harder magic systems also lack some poetry, but I don't think that's necessarily because of the hard magic. I think there's a selection effect going on, where the type of author most likely to write a story with discrete, well-defined powers is also more likely to have a discrete, well-defined, non-mysterious approach to the whole story. I recently read a story called 'Wander west, in shadow' that has characters with pretty discrete magical abilities (they can learn to use more of 'the Art', but they each only know a few tricks), but magic and the world in general feels mysterious and broad. You know what the characters can do, so when they cleverly improvise it feels earned, but you don't know exactly how big the world is, and the characters are continually coming across things they don't understand. I got a 'Tom Bombadil' or 'Elven tools aren't magic, or are they?' vibe from a few parts of the story, for example. I really recommend it.

Build nuclear reactors.

I find modern atheist people's investiture of authority in academics confusing. Did we go to the same university system? My professors certainly spent more time reading about the subjects they specialized in than the average person, but they weren't necessarily incentivized to believe true things about their fields.

A professor in a certain type of engineering, getting grant money by claiming it might be useful for e.g. future computing hardware, has an incentive to keep claiming so in order to get future grants.

I think I'd trust a pastor's word on their area of nominal expertise (life advice, christianity) about as much as a given professor's word about their area of specialization. (This doesn't apply to a pastor of one of those super-churches, for example; they're obvious scum. I wonder if there's an analogue in academia?)

If the whole world engages in witch-burning, and burn a lot of innocents along with the old women who poison wells, and you build a town and loudly declare it will have no witch-hunts, then you'll get people who want to live in that town- including a lot of witches.

HN, etc. really shouldn't be "platforms" moderated by a central entity, anyway. If I like Dang's moderation, I should be able to pick and choose it. Maybe there's another potential moderator out there whose sensibilities line up more neatly with my own; I should be able to choose their moderation, too.

Decentralized/splintered moderation, that's what we need.

(I've never been on Parler. Do they actually ban people for disagreeing with them?)

(Is it possible that rejecting people from society makes them more likely to be violent?)

In this case, the people claiming that the textually-approved course of action is killing the blasphemer are correct.

Do you think she cares? She's just catering to the common person.