Omnus

I think I'll have an alpha/beta testing period with interested volunteers. Then hopefully sell it. Then after some years and waning interest, probably open source it.

I am making a game. I use Vim (infinitely faster and more product than other text editors) and write a single command in my terminal to compile. Vim makes a lot of sense when you want to work fast and don't want bloated development toolchains to slow you down. There's nothing in modern IDEs that would increase my productivity that I can't add to Vim in about 5-20 minutes.

None of those criticisms apply to these vaccine studies. There are many issues that can arise in trials, of course. But the current batch of 3-phase mRNA-based vaccine trials have all been intensely scrutinized at every turn. I think it will be difficult for you to argue otherwise, but feel free to enlighten us about the data corruption conspiracy if you have some evidence.

No. The onus is on you to explain why experts who have devoted their entire lives to groundbreaking vaccine research are wrong. It's like arguing with a 5 year old.

I'm not going to explain how clinical trials work and why you should trust that process. Again, bad situations do not invalidate all work being done in a field.

"So much faith"? People are just following the science. Are you really arguing that because one bad situation has occurred involving pharmaceutical companies, we should assume every new drug or treatment is bogus or based on evil motives?

It'll be dead within 18-24 months.

That physical damage to the brain results in loss or impairment of consciousness, and that there is absolutely no evidence that total biological death would entail anything but the cessation of this consciousness.

[EDIT: I want to be clear - I am NOT saying that it could never be the case that some form of "being" exists outside of what appears to us as a finite biological existence, I am merely pointing out that we have no evidence of this kind of existence, aside from vague spiritual feelings and experiences which are difficult to evaluate, so the skeptical position is the most honest one for the time being.]

First of all, I don't "hypothesize" anything - I am just pointing out what seems to be the obvious answer to "what happens when you die?". When the brain is damaged or undergoes chemical changes, we know that consciousness seems to disappear. There is no strong evidence to think this is different upon the death of any organism.

Second, I find your puzzlement with the fear of nonexistence utterly incoherent. Humans are born with the desire to live. We don't want to stop existing. Stating the obvious truth that one can't experience things when they are dead is completely void of content - the point is that we fear our eternal end WHILE we are alive because we'd like to continue on and be healthy again.

Terrified is the wrong word. Western culture simply understands the reality of the situation. Sure, you can delude an entire society with fairy tales and they will feel better about dying...that's not a virtue though.

I'm skeptical that any of those things actually "prepare" people to face death in the first place. Feeling like you're "prepared" weeks, months, or years before the final hours of your self or a loved one does not necessarily translate to those final moments when you are actually going through it.

Exactly. Even if you try to make the decision ahead of time with a sound mind, where do you draw the line? And even if the line is drawn, what happens if you change your mind later but you're in the late stages? Which "you" gets precedence?

You know you're missing the point, right? There are some jobs that people just don't tend to enjoy or find meaningful. You can incentive people to do them by paying them lots of money, but that doesn't necessarily make people happy or fulfilled while doing the work, which was the original topic of this discussion.

You don't seem to understand the actual problems with screening. Try learning about the field before implying the FDA isn't doing their job: https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.h6080

There is a huge misconception about the value of screening in the general population. It doesn't do what most people think it does. Even with emotional adjustment it is entirely unclear that screening for things like cancer is ever good for the patient. Look at work by the oncologist Vinay Prasad: https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.h6080

People were fooled by hype, a usual occurrence with new "AI" technology. That says nothing about how "revolutionary" it is.

What on Earth are you talking about? The point was not that anything humans can do within 90 seconds is non-revolutionary when implemented in machines. An artist can create something unique and beautiful in 90 seconds, and a mathematician can explain a short yet difficult proof in 90 seconds. Those things would absolutely be revolutionary if implemented in machines. Who cares about the quantity of computation? As if that matters for how "revolutionary" a software technology is.

It is entirely unclear to me that a bot that might make simple reservations at small group of establishments that include only restaurants and hair salons is in any way revolutionary. Even if it worked 100% of the time, who is making daily hair and restaurant reservations that would benefit from the extra 90 seconds? It's silly the amount of hype this is eliciting. You have a very strange definition of "revolutionary".

It "feels revolutionary" to the author, but it is literally only capable of handling the simplest restaurant and hair salon reservations (the kind of thing you could do yourself in about 90 seconds). Seems like a silly headline, although the details are interesting.

Yes - the FDA is (surprisingly?) receptive and psilocybin (among others) could be approved in the next few years, maybe up to a decade depending on results. https://www.nature.com/news/psychedelic-compound-in-ecstasy-...

It is entirely unremarkable that people should put "feeling" in italics in order to emphasize it, because it is precisely the thing gets handwavy non-explanations (like yours) from people who refuse to acknowledge the deep mystery (or "puzzle", if you want).

What is remarkable, to the point of comedy, is the reliability with which this refusal is accompanied by one or two sentence explanations that imply a miraculous end to the long, complex philosophical exploration of the mind-body problem that humanity has struggled with for millennia.

"They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day" is one such meaningless explanation. You've answered nothing. You've done nothing. The problem of qualia? The unity problem? The knowledge problem?

The comparison with gravity was indeed unfair, but not in the way you think. It is unfair in that the problems of phenomenology and consciousness are much harder (see Knowledge Problem) because of their resistance to modeling (or any other kind of study that doesn't involve introspection).

To call "consciousness" and "feeling" folk terms and use that to dismiss incredibly simple and clear questions is the intellectual equivalent of tapping out. It's so simple: "what is the nature of the feelings themselves, apart from the dynamics of the system they are correlated with?"

There is no such "hidden assumption" - the question is just literally asking what the difference is between the non-conscious program and the conscious one (in your case).

People used to make this same argument about why things fall to the ground when you let go of them. "Is it really surprising? Why wouldn't they just fall down? What kind of answer do you want?". You have to allow yourself to be puzzled by things.

So yes, it is surprising. You don't seem to understand the most basic principles underlying the so-called hard problem. Nowhere in your description about "complex things" and "integrating" and "complicated external stimuli" and "communicating about its state" have you even attempted to point out why it actually DOES feel like something to be that system. Why does all this stuff actually lead to the feeling of pain, or intense grief, or pleasure, or anything at all. That is the fundamental mystery - why does it feel like anything at all when this "stuff" happens, and what is the nature of the feelings themselves. There are tons of mysteries here that you can't gloss over by saying "well why wouldn't it??".

Well it's not AI or ML really - it's hand-picked algorithmic composition with additional contributions from human composers.

The holy grail AI composer would be able to generate unique, creative, well-crafted material on demand. Almost every system that has existed thus far generates mostly nonsense, but the results are tweaked or hand-selected by humans. Those that don't hand-select are the ones that sound algorithmic and computer-generated to anyone with remote music ability. That's why the current state-of-the-art in on-demand music generation sounds like elevator music - and to a trained musician you can still tell there's something "off" about it (Jukedeck, etc.).

Sure it's well known. But that's not what he was asking. He was specifically asking about the number of cancers in people below 40. 140k is for all ages.

It's not "convincing" and there is no sense of "style change" at all - it's very clearly just awkwardly re-orchestrating the melody with some timbral changes. The tonality is often entirely lost (the Rihanna to Mozart example is the most egregious).

I really hate that we have to criticize these awful articles and press releases all the time, because this work is actually really cool, but because the researchers and article writers constantly go overboard with their claims and rhetoric, the level-headed people have to come along and say: "look, this is cool, but it's nowhere near the claims you're making". I'm really sick of this happening with every DeepMind/FAIR/Microsoft/IBM result that gets published. It's so tiring.

As a professional arranger and composer, I can confirm that this is indeed unconvincing and disappointing (although I will admit to being mildly impressed by some of the generated orchestra textures, but only because this is coming from a computer program, not because they are actually good).

Presumably the person you replied to is including the potential takeover of nuclear weapons by terrorist hackers, etc.

You are correct, it is not, and the book is not relevant in any way to the article, aside from both containing references to the work of Gödel.

You seem to miss the point with every response to your original comment. You keep saying things about the importance of things that can't be perceived. No one is suggesting that things don't "make a difference to us" if they aren't perceived. That's silly and doesn't even make sense - of course we care about certain things that we don't (or won't) perceive.

The point is that we experience time as flowing in a certain direction and can't experience it any other way. Knowing that we continue to exist in some tiny sliver of spacetime doesn't change that fact, and so it is not very comforting, for easily understandable reasons.

If you're on your deathbed, with your conscious experience about to flicker and die, no one in the room is going to be comforted by you saying "well look at it this way, my 2 year old self still exists somewhere that you can't ever access and that I'll never return to, and even if I did, none of us would have any idea that this conversation was going to happen in 90 years".

"We know our smartphones are making us unhappy." [link to an article describing a study that put people in a contrived, artificially distracting situation and then pointed out that they enjoyed their time less]

Is that the best evidence you have? Because it's crap.