tawan

[Meta] I'd love the read the book with all the stories mentioned in the comments.

At the moment yes.

Thanks! Yep, I also played Blaston a while and really liked it. We basically replaced shooting with a gun with punching in order to make it even more intense.

In addition we also want to build out the social part and create a community of Space Punchers that work out together and motivate each other to stick to a regular schedule. I find it really fascinating how immersive VR can be and really make you think that you are in the same place with your friends. If we can translate this energy into forming a healthy habit of working out regularly with a community than we are on a good path.

Shameless plug: if you are into VR fitness but you think the existing solutions are missing multiplayer options, my brother and I are building Space Punch [1] which is a multiplayer fitness app. It is currently released in early access on Sidequest, and it’s functional. We are working out Monday to Friday 4:30pm UTC. If you have a Quest and want to work out together as group, then drop into our Discord sever. I’ll personally make sure you get an access key and I will show you the App from within.

[1] https://sidequestvr.com/app/5820/space-punch

[2] https://discord.gg/MKsZqrZh

Shameless plug: I work out with the VR fitness app that my brother and I are developing. https://sidequestvr.com/app/5820/space-punch

I think there are two sides to a service like that: on the one hand it provides more transparency to the individual customer (good), on the other hand, any external or internal malicious actor now has a very convenient tool to gain access to lot of very personal information about a single individual (bad). It was probably not even possible without a tool like that, not even for jeff bezos.

I disagree with your conclusion that the odds remain 2/3 even if the host doesn’t know where the prize is. If that were the case, it would mean that if the same scenario is repeated many many times, then in 2/3 of the cases you would still pick the door with the prize with the same strategy. But what about the instances where the host picks the door with prize before you even get a chance to pick the other door? These cases happen with a probability of 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3. Therefore, you only get to choose in 2/3 of the cases and in 1/2 of those cases you have already picked the correct door the first time.

And it doesn’t even have to be conscious decisions either. In my case: I was working for two clients as a freelancer but mid projects it clicked with an exchange student who was about to head back to her home country in two weeks. But it really clicked, such that I neglected my ongoing projects in a really unprofessional manner. I didn’t want to, because I really needed the money, however I just slowly stopped working on the projects so I can spend as much time as possible with this exchange student. And when I wasn’t with her, I was losing sleep thinking of her, even writing songs for her - a prototype courting behavior. Needless to say, my unprofessional behavior came back to bite me years later when I was interviewing and the potential employer was checking references including my former clients. Was that all healthy middle ground? I don’t know. I just know that 10 years later, 5 of those married, and now with two children, I don’t really care :). I'm just as happy as one can be.

> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success.

The author is wrong here, even though it rings true. Early viewers who shared a popular video before it was popular earn the reputation of knowing the next cool thing before everyone else does. They gain “I liked this band before it was cool -tokens”. That’s worth something among peers. If we start to pay out monetary value in addition to that, than we would actually overpay the early viewers. Market forces will eventually rebalance the equation such that early viewers will neglect the reputation part and just start sharing as many videos as possible regardless whether the personally think that those videos are the next cool thing.

I think you misinterpreted my comment (probably my bad, Im not an English native). What I meant is: It is important to make sure that the profits of stocks sold need to be taxed properly, and only the after tax amount that’s left over can be spend on, some may say frivolous, space adventures. Especially when it is often reported that billionaires dont pay hardly any taxes, since their wealth grew „only in equity“. But then suddenly they find themselves on a pretty expensive space vacation.

Lot of people in this thread are arguing that wealthy people can spend money on what ever they want. I think it’s important to distinguish whether the money they spend on personal joy rides has been taxed as private income or written off as business expense. Does anyone have information on whether Bezos‘ investments into Blue Origin has been taxed previously as personal income when he presumably liquidated Amazon stock?

The disconnect in this conversation between employer and employee happens for these reasons: In reality companies had to pay a premium in order to demand that an employee lives in certain geographic area so that they show up every day in a certain office building. Depending on the location of the building, the premium can be very high.

Now comes the pandemic which forces - or should I say “allows” - companies to try out the remote model in unison without the risk of being the first mover.

It turns out that it works good enough. But then a company must be questioning why it should continue paying the location premium to employees if it doesn’t see any benefit in it anymore. Adjusting existing salaries downwards, even though the employees didn’t make any changes in their commitment, is socially unacceptable.

Now companies hope that if an employee decides to take advantage of the new freedoms they have an open for this conversation where they try to cut the location premium based on COL arguments, which they know is not the real reason.

If it would be up to companies alone, they would have already reduced all our salaries and if we wouldn’t have liked that, they would have said.. well just move to a lower COL area, we don’t mind

Yep,I second that. I'm getting redirected to google.

I think this line of jokes has some potential, but I

Given a set of tasks T, that have to be done, and the tasks are interdependent.

Sort T by difficulty to complete. Complete one task after the other starting with the hardest.

This approach goes against the often spread advice that you should start with the easiest tasks, which are probably fast to complete, in order to get quickly a feeling of accomplishment which keeps you motivated. I think this approach is wrong and here is why:

IMO our brains always weigh risk multiplied with investment against reward, and as long as the reward outweighs (risk * investment), we are motivated: Risk meaning here, that you invest time and effort but eventually you miss the deadline and are not paid the full reward. The more time we let pass, without completing anything, then the risk of not getting the rewards becomes bigger and eventually it is not worth our effort anymore, and our brain finds more rewarding things to do (procrastinates). So why should we start with the hard tasks first?

Because, given that we start with the easy ones first, we reduce the available time to complete the hard tasks, and by the time that we start with the hard ones, the risk of failing becomes too big in order to be still motivated. In contrary, when we start with the hard ones, of course it takes longer to finish them, and the time left for the easy ones is less, but our brain can easily estimate the risk of easy tasks, and it will find that it's quite possible to get the final rewards, because we already finished the hard ones.

The realisation changed my life. I completed my CS master studies within 15 months.

I don't know for sure of course, I'm just extrapolating. What we know is that a lot of technical innovation is driven by economical motives. So I presume that there will be engineers who will implement AGI applications with a utility function to make as much money as possible. And making money does not necessarily mean to add value to society. One core aspect of making money today is to supersede competition. And that alone allows a hostile interpretation.

And by disguising as humans, I don't mean that robots will put on human costumes, like the aliens in Men in Black. I think that it will be corporations with an AIG as its actual CEO, but still having a human puppet as its official CEO, just to have a friendly face, for obvious marketing reasons.

AI will not kill all of us, in the beginning. Surely, it will form short term alliances with humans just to disguise itself as human. Because it knows, that with a human face, it can exert more power in this world right now. And there will be plenty of humans to willingly engage in this alliance because it gives them a chance to supersede other humans in terms of economical and political power. In fact, this is already happening. Many decisions are already made by "following suggestions" of big data applications. Who knows, maybe there is already some sort of AGI pulling some string in some corporations ;). Up until the point that humans realize that they are in danger as a species, it will be way too late. And there will be enough of us still happily follow the new masters for the short term rewards, even though it might be clear that there is a high risk of getting liquidated in the near future. As we know, humans are even able to override their survival instinct and blow themselves up when they are proper brainwashed. Humans will be easily reprogrammed by an AGI, and not the other way round.

Probably at the age of ten, the moment when I got to understand the concept of a loop, be it a while or a for loop, I started to realize the endless possibilities one can do with coding. 20 years later, with more sophisticated tools in the pipe, I'm still looking for the boundaries of what is possible and what isn't.

I'm impressed but skeptic, too. Laypeople might not get an accurate impression on what is possible. Considering the image with the guy in a black shirt playing guitar. What if it was a picture of a naked man standing next to a black shirt that is hanging on a clothes hook, and next to it is a guitar is mounted on a rack: My guess it that the computer will still spit out: Guy in black shirt playing guitar, just because this sentence is very plausible in the underlying language model.

Actually I'm thinking of testing future candidates with a "dumb" response like this, just to see if the candidate clarifies the situation and is helpful, or if we are dealing with someone who is just rolling their eyes all day, because of all the dumb colleagues. Someone who feels the need to be condescending when someone lacks some knowledge.

For me, it boils down to two questions: 1) Given, that let's say only 20% of the population does real work (doctors, teachers etc..), why should they do their work, if everybody else is enjoying spare-time all the time? And if you propose that they also could work less, therefore we would have more doctor positions to be filled, guess what, people that have valuable jobs are also the ones who really like their job, and are happy with working 40 hours, or even more. It's somehow ironic that people won't do work, just because they like what they do, they also want to be acknowledged monetary, no matter how much they like their job, which I can understand. Somehow we have a situation, i.e. from a doctor's perspective, like: "Yea, I'll treat you, but only if you are also getting up at seven every morning and commute to some office and do stuff."

2) I think for biological reasons, people need status more than spare-time. We need some kind of hierarchy to determine who is more entitled to spread their genes. If everybody is unemployed, how do you know who has more status? Money and consequently buying power does simplify this problem very neatly, reducing it to a one-dimensional metric scale, easy to compare and communicate.

I see a darker future ahead: From a totally cynical but rational and economic perspective I think human labour is cheaper than any machine workforce for many tasks. We reproduce and maintain ourselves, we just need some water and food. We are very flexible and can adapt to any task very quickly. No need to order spare parts made from expensive raw materials. Human labour is only expensive because we have civil rights and we tend to riot if we are treated badly. Take away these two factors and you have a cheap labour army that's getting bigger by itself.

We are also limited by the capacity and architecture of our brains. A.I can rely on Moore's law, or quantum computers to benefit steadily from better hardware. Therefore I conclude that the most successful agents in our economy will be of A.I. The enterprises behind them might still have a human executer, smiling all charmingly, but A.I. will be in control.

I started to learn French a year ago and I made a lot of progress. There are just a few bugs left to fix in my own vocabulary management tool, and then I'm ready to learn some words, systematically well tracked and documented. ;)

I have this strategy to rearrange the order when I ask someone to play. For example I'd say "Hey, to settle our discussion, let's play scissor rock paper!" While pronouncing a little bit the last option. My opponent still caught off guard will more likely play the last option, in this example "Paper". The next time I will say "ok let's play rock paper scissors". And then I'll play Rock, haha. I don't know if it really works, but I was always good in this game. At least I think so ;)

Some insider, the next snowden, should leak the database to the internet. When crying children run to their parents, saying that some posted nude pictures of them, I think, this would an effective wake up call.

IMO Yes and I was expecting the article will point that out just by reading the title.

I was in Tanzania a few years ago as a tourist and I came across many young westerners doing all kind of things like HIV prevention. Sometimes I thought I belong to a minority among westerns by just being a tourist.

I was trying to view the situation from the other side. What must it be like to be a black guy living in Tanzania being told by little white teenagers how to have sex? Little black kids getting cool toys only from white folks, all teachers who know cool stuff being white. I don't stretch the argument too much if I claim that you will get the impression that all good things come from white people and that black people are too stupid to even have sex. As an educated person I know that this is not true and I can differ between spurious correlation and real causes, namely growing up in a developed country, but I doubt that little children are able to do so. They will assign many things to skin color just to realize that they can't change their own and then will think they are doomed and have to hope for the good will of the white saviours for the rest of their lives.

To question what consciousness is and how we define it is a good starting point. And because there is so much uncertainty and no overall consensus makes it seem to be very hard.

Somehow I fear the only satisfying implementation of AGI has to end in a skynet scenario. We as human will only accept intelligence as general when it is at least as intelligent as humans. But that would mean that we have to accept that we can't control it for sure. In fact only a machine that is able to rebel can be considered to be general intelligent. So I am not surprised that consciousness is not defined that way, because pursuing to build a machine capable of consciousness would mean to build a possible enemy.

I live in Vienna too and one thing I like in particular is that despite I live in a metropole with its 2 million inhabitants, I can jump on my bike in the summer, ride for twenty minutes to Donau, Vienna's river, and go for a swim, while being in nature. I can't think of any other city that offers what a world city has to offer, and being able to enjoy nature to the extent that I can swim in its river without worrying about pollution. Beat that.

There are tons of potentially good candidates you would miss by rejecting per default when there is no public code to see. Just look into the comments here.

The group I want to point out. Very experienced programmers who have been in the business more than a decade who get paid for doing what they think is interesting and challenging because they are so good so that they can choose their job and still get paid. Most of the time they throw themselves into work and their current project. Why on earth would they want to invest more time into a little pet project which is probably ten times less interesting than their current job?