age_bronze

Here's a real historical inconsistency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_years_%28Jewish_calend...

I dislike the framing of some inconsistencies as "conspiracy theory". Mistakes can and will happen, it's an argument of emotion to frame an inconsistency as a "conspiracy theory". Just because one possible explanation is that people colluded intentionally and conspiratorially doesn't rule out all the other more plausible explanations that something really is wrong.

It's also bad epistemology. Literally everything can be explained as a conspiracy, so the fact the the only explanation you can think of to an inconsistency is "people colluded" reflect more on you than on the problem. Historical records can and will be inaccurate.

Some people's epistemological metric goes haywire from those two words. People write inaccurate stuff all the time. It's literally just papers. Other civilizations are other clocks and there are very few historical evidence to synchronize those clocks, especially when the travel time of news and people in those times was extremely slow. Lack of international news also means loss of synchronization.

If the invocation of the words "conspiracy theory" in any way repels you from exploring inconsistencies with an open mind, the problem is with your emotional reasoning. If you believe this guy, something like the missing years could never have happened. It clearly happened, and I am sure there was no conspiracy behind it. Two words, "conspiracy theory", entirely shifted your internal model of the world emotionally, when epistemologically, it shouldn't change your opinion into either direction. The existence of an extremely unlikely explanation is completely equivalent to just no explanation. "Conspiracy theory" is purely an appeal to emotion. Someone claimed A, and a guy told you Conspiracy=>A therefore ~A. Only an emotional human would process this useless information in any way.

The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since.

Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.

Why is this legal? Why is it legal for Google to completely demolish a business with no human review, no due process and no excuse at all?

Why do we keep hearing this without a single developer going forward and suing the hell out of Google? Or Apple by the way.

Is ransom payment even considered "stolen" in the usual sense? You have willingly paid that, nobody took that from you without permission. I wouldn't be surprised if ransom has it's own different definition.

Forcing an innocent to hand over bitcoins they had no clue they were tainted will make everyone lose trust in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. What's the point of anonymity when trading when you're culpable for wherever that currency came from.

Because it would make houses an unattractive investment. Once you get rid of the cheap leverage, housing will never compete with other investments. You always need to pay for like 40% of the house to start a mortgage anyway, this will not change the fact you need a significant savings before you can buy a house.

I think mortgages as a concept are bad, and do more harm than good to the people who need to take them. I think gradually banning mortgages, by increasing the minimum required percentage of house price required to start a mortgage all the way to 100% (when you can't really take a mortage), will be a good thing.

The way house investors view mortgages is as a very cheap leverage. So investing in housing will always be fundamentally skewed, because every single person can so easily get cheap leveraged investment in a house, so housing as an investment can perform much more poorly compared to other investment as still beat them by far because of the mortgage. This is so skewed up that a house now has an extra value: as a 'token' to get a cheap loan. This extra value is paid by everyone buying a house.

The way the average family looking to buy a house is completely different: they are looking to compete in the housing market with other families with similar financial abilities, to purchase a house. When you offer all sides of the competition the ability to enter a cheap loan, the side that doesn't take the loan loses the house. But if all sides didn't have the possibility to take a loan and pay more for the house, they would all pay less. Allowing buyers to take mortgages sets them off in a prisoner dilemma against every other buyers, and they all come out losing. If you outlaw mortgages, everyone interested in the house itself wins.

Moreover, once you have lured a family into strangulating themselves with a mortgage, they are now prone to financial stress that will cause them to take loans with much worse terms than a mortgage, therefore nullifying all the possible gains they had from taking the cheap loan. So while investors fully benefit from the cheap credit of the mortgage, families often follow up with mistakes and bad loans which, in total, make the mortgage costly loan.

The more you think about it, the more you should realize the winners from the concept of mortgages are real estate companies, investors and banks, and the biggest losers are the average family which are forced to take it from the Nash Equilibrium of a prisoners dilemma.

Moreover, if mortgages didn't exist, overall spending across the economy would rise, which will be a good thing.

Nothing screams "we have microsoft keys!" harder than the fact that the only vulnerabilities reported by the NSA is a cryptographic validation bug. If I had to guess exactly what kind of vulnerabilities they do not need, this is exactly those kind. Who needs crypto validation bug when you already own microsoft's keys?!

The most frequent misunderstanding of science, (and it applies to many other fields such as cyber security security, politics, etc.) is that an imperfect solution is worthless, that if a model is incomplete it's as good as no model, etc.

Perfect is the enemy of good. At the core of science is settling for the least errors model. You suggest solutions because doing them is better than doing nothing at all. Of course they will be partial if the problem is of such a large scale as climate change. That's not a reason not to do them.

So what if all the politicians are dirty scumbags? Voting for none is still worse than voting for the least shitty politician.

You need to accept you can't have a perfect solution. I find a perfectionist attitude to problems more common with religious people. Because once you already have one single generalizing solution to so many questions (god / religion), it is just so tempting to believe the same applies to other problems.

So that's the only defining bit of personality? That you're a woman? What about your personality? Up-front / discrete? Introvert / extrovert? Mannered / rude? So many other traits? I'm pretty sure there are man with much more similar personality to you than just a random woman. You've just been brainwashed to have a single bit when judging people, by the same 'diversity' advocates. There is no one like you, and that is not a bad thing. There is no one like every other single person. You don't need someone like you to know you can succeed.

It's not about me thinking I'm successful, because I don't. It's about not giving envious people the positive feedback they desire so much from their corrupt behavior. It's about getting them so hurt they will never again consider coping with their insecurities by transference.

If you've never felt like you need to justify your 'success' (even tho you never felt like it isn't a big deal) to envious people in disguise you'll never understand. It is the most frustratingly impossible task. They can't and will never separate you as an individual from the negative emotion of envy they feel.

I've gotten used to the reeking smell of envy all my life. I was always encouraged by everyone to 'still be nice to them', to try to appease them, etc. It never, ever, and will never, work.

I've had enough of that and decided and realized that the best way to deal with envy, is to stick it to them. Hit them as hard as you can with the reality. Even when it hurts them. Hurt them with the facts of how much you're better and they suck.

You can't ever be accepted by those that envy you, the most you can get is that they stop using you to cope with their insecurities.

EDIT:

It's not about me thinking I'm successful, because I don't. It's about not giving envious people the positive feedback they desire so much from their corrupt behavior. It's about getting them so hurt they will never again consider coping with their insecurities by transference.

If you've never felt like you need to justify your 'success' (even tho you never felt like it is a big deal) to envious people in disguise you'll never understand. It is the most frustratingly impossible task. They can't and will never separate you as an individual from the negative emotion of envy they feel.

Unlike what it might sound, this isn't about me at all. I usually try to stay humble around normal non-envious people. But the best way to deal with envious people is to break their positive feedback loop. They need a strong negative feedback for their behavior so they don't repeat it.

I realize I will be hated by them. I also realize from so many different experiences being loved by them was never a possibility, and I am content with the small success of them dealing with their issues elsewhere.

Don't you think it is racist to actually care about the race of the interviewer? Would you even think about that if there wasn't a non-stop conversation about racial differences? Maybe the nonsense diversity discussion is only making it worse by creating anxieties that wouldn't even be there?

I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals.

Behind every person who goes to an interview there's whole life, and every interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being a female or black. Pretending that by knowing only 1 piece of information, you know they made a mistake, when they clearly have so much more information than you, calling it bias or whatever, is insult to their intelligence. Who the hell are you to know they made a mistake, when you literally know nothing except one little piece of a giant puzzle?!

It also goes for women / black people who didn't choose a career in tech. There are people behind these decisions. They have freedom and free will. You can't just pretend that they are all stupid and don't know what's good for them.

Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem.

The whole diversity conversation reeks of so many self-contradictions and fighting windmills, but the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. and a deep need to excuse their failure with someone else.

You can avoid it. They didn't disable it, but implemented MSR which disables it. Don't configure this MSR to disable HLE and you're good.

They do not disable it. They only implement MSR which can allow you to disable it. If you want to stay with updated microcode and with HLE, just don't configure it as disabled.

If regimes like Iran manage to stay alive despite all the sanctions and international isolation, while having the power to meddle in other countries despite having such a dire situation at home, I think the odds of real revolutions in modern age are really really low. If Iran stays alive like this, I doubt China will have any problem staying alive ad-infinity, with all their surveillance tools.

Just because democracy might be a little bit better, getting there includes civil war, violence, and other costs people aren't willing to pay if their lives aren't incredibly bad.

I posted this on scott's blog, still awaiting moderation:

"I’m trying to understand the chain of inference from Google’s leaked result of quantum supremacy to theoretical computer-science “hardness” of the computation.

Computing the exact probabilities of a random quantum circuit is proven hard, but computing the exact probability of a random algorithm is also an open problem, so what you really care about is approximation of computing the probability (up to epsilon), or even weaker, just sampling from a probability (also up to epsilon under some metric of comparing distributions).

Their computer implements Random Circuit Sampling, and their cited “theoretical” hardness results are your paper from 2017, of QUATH => HOG, and as far as I understood from your paper, proving that approximation / sampling from a (random) quantum computer/circuit is hard is still an open problem (Am I wrong here? I’m not up to date with everything), and a difficult one. But you did make a compelling argument that even if QUATH was solvable, it will lead to new insights.

Their actual benchmark uses cross-entropy benchmarking, called xeb in their paper, and defined as 2^n* [P(x_i)] _i-1 (Can’t type brackets). I could not find any ‘theoretical hardness’ paper at all using this benchmark, some results talk about different XEB using log but they prove these are not strong enough and can be reached classically.

Are there any hardness results for their benchmark? I wonder why they would use that instead of the proven HOG, even for smaller input sizes, I would see more value in a benchmark which has theoretical roots. I feel intuitively like their benchmark is much more similar to the log variation of XEB than to HOG, but didn’t think it through completely.

As for their gates, I understand they are not general random quantum gates, but instead they have a variation of iSWAP and controlled phase CZ. The hardness results that do exist also don’t address the limited gates, in how it changes the distribution of random circuits. Are those two gates at least universal, so that we have hope that this could be proved? Their statement was “but reliably generating a target unitary remains an active area of research”, so I assume they aren’t universal. I would love to see some heuristic argument as to why those two in particular are hard, especially given results like Gottesman–Knill theorem, it seems like some surprising gates do have classical simulation. iSWAP is just swap and phase gates, and CZ is phase gate only on the 11 state. Doesn’t feel like it could be universal to me but maybe I’m wrong.

I probably missed some things, so I’d love it if you could point to papers filling the gaps between their results and a real theoretical statement. I don’t have the intuition to tell which gaps are important and which are not. I also don’t know which papers/results already exist and I can’t really search as I am not an academic, and don’t have full access to many papers, and you probably know the state of the art results. "

Make no mistake: these aren't rebel, this is Iran, trying to force the world to buy oil from her by terrorizing the competition.

Let me get this straight: Israel risks pissing the U.S by spying on them, which can lead to them cutting ties with Israel, in order to make sure that US does not cut its ties with Israel. Would you risk spying on your girlfriend to make sure she wants to stay your girlfriend? This makes no sense.

Naive would be thinking you can conduct espionage without ever getting caught. Getting caught spying a huge risk, and unless you have an even bigger risk, why would you ever do that? What can possibly justify risking getting caught spying on the US? Israel isn't dumb, it's a simple risk analysis. Unless Israel has a bigger risk to protect against, than the US cutting off ties as a result of another polard, Israel would never do that.

No, I think the lesson was learned. Why would you risk such a backlash again?

Exactly, why would you ever risk that? Would hearing trump talk to whatever on the phone, worth the huge risk? You can talk to him yourself, why would you ever risk pissing the US off for just that?

I could see a use a screen saying, I'm travelling as fast as the guy after me, so back off. It's so annoying to be after those drivers that can't seem to understand it's not your fault that you're driving so slow.

The equations of quantum mechanics aren't random, only its interpretation, in the form of born's law.

Unitary evolution means there's neither information loss nor gain, and if there was anything random you would at the very least expect to see information gain (as new bits of information are created from the "random" result of an observation).

Randomness in quantum mechanics isn't even a hypothesis, it's an interpretation.

No organization ever managed to land on the moon so far on the first try. My guess is that this won't be any different.

This article is so twisted. The less search options other people have with public facebook data the better. Facebook is already privacy nightmare as it is.

Probably an article by some lobbists in some company that doesn't care about war criminals at all but is just upset by the change which would make the data less accessible to them. I say good riddance.

There's an underlying assumption that economical growth has anything to do with physical limits. Economical growth is a lie we tell ourselves so that innovation has its incentives, while everything else that's there because it must be there (because it will always have a demand), such as energy (but also food, real estate, etc.) just piggybacks with a similar 'fake growth' that really arises only from the fact these things are just as valuable as before. The threat for the lack of supply is just enough to keep businesses that can't really 'grow' still grow. It will still be exponential growth so long as the leading innovation companies are growing and everyone else is just corrected for inflation.

I always failed to understand what the "consciousness isn't local" can predict. I mean, come on. You either take the egocentric view that you're the only conscious being in the universe, or you realize other humans are similar enough to you that the only conclusion is that they are all similarly conscious.

From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really all there is. Just look at all the brain malfunctions. You've got people forgetting from dementia, so clearly the brain has most of your memories. You've got people with all sorts of weird phenomena from strokes.

Even if you take the most egocentric worldview, you can still drink alcohol and watch and realize how your internal logic and consistency and personality is changed by an external chemical. I can't see any possible conclusion from that other than the fact that this brain really is all you are.

Suggesting there's anything non-materialistic in consciousness means there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions, under drugs, under different education, under different environment, under different circumstances. I've yet to find a single counterexample.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_on_the_Moon

For everyone wondering how common is it, it seems like it took everyone multiple tries before figuring out how to properly land something there.

Dunning Kruger effect going on with the author of the article. He's too ignorant of the subject he's writing about, to understand the difference between the low-level way computers works and the high level sophistication algorithms can exhibit.

Quite ironically, I think his line of thought shows precisely why the brain is probably quit like a computer. The algorithm going on in his brain was probably like this:

1. Assuming I'm like a computer leads to negative emotions (because lack of free will and reduction in self-esteem it implies). 2. Therefore give high weights to facts contradicting this, and low weights to facts supporting this. 3. For a range of subjects regarding the behavior of the brain, do: 3.1. If the subject feels like it's logically supporting my view on the subject, add it to the article. 3.1.1. Anything I know the brain does and I have no clue on how can a computer do, will automatically feel like it supports my conclusion. Since I'm pretty clueless as to how computers work in general, most things are actually going to seem like something a computer can't do. 3.2. Otherwise, ignore this and keep going on to the next example.