ecoquant

I have spent so much time in Canada and it is just unbelievable watching the country go more and more insane.

What I have read about the Harms act is so bat shit crazy that it is hard to believe it can be real. Then looking at polling on support of the bill it seems like that is what Canadians want.

I actually didn't know there are buildings that say "no whites allowed". How incredibly disturbing. All while electing a leader with multiple pictures in black face.

"Harmful" has really become a ridiculous word in my lifetime.

In Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone it mentions how MIT professor/Black Jack card counting/Hedge Fund manager Edward O. Thorp spent a period as a kid building pipe bombs and various chemical explosives for fun.

That is what I could consider a harmful activity.

To pretend ASCII art can be harmful strikes me as the thoughts of someone with paranoid delusions. Someone completely detached from reality that probably needs medication.

I am sure part of the reason we have popcorn at the movies is that popcorn was easy to scale.

I guess tastes just change. Dinner and a movie did not use to mean dinner AT the movie.

If you want a full restaurant at the movies why not also have an oil change as part of the deal? Watch the movie, all you can eat soup, salad, breadsticks with your meal and at the same time someone changes the oil in your car.

For me, any one of the issues would be a problem in isolation but the combination of issues makes it so going to the movies isn't something I really consider.

Oppenheimer was the first movie I considered going to in a long time but still did not. I am going to finally watch it Sunday. Even if I love it, I know I won't think about how much better it could have been at the movies. I will actually just be grateful it wasn't ruined for me by some negative aspect of going to the movies.

It seems a constant that raves were better 10 years ago before everything became commercialized.

"It use to be about the music"

I remember hearing this 25 years ago.

Of course, what happens is that you get people who have been going to these things for 10 years and the novelty has worn off along with being 10 years older.

Most fun activities are better when you are 10 years younger with no expectations.

I made a pointless cube with a square in VRML a long time ago and VR is ultimately going to be the biggest tech disappointment of my life.

The killer app is what I have when I get lucid inside a dream. To only cover vision is missing so much. I can remember being in a war in a plane and getting shot down in a dream. The decent felt unbelievable. That is the killer app for me. That had nothing to do with vision.

The irony is that youtube was largely built on copyright violation with taking everything that existed in video before youtube and giving it away for free.

Nasdaq returns by year

2002 -37.58

2001 -32.65

2000 -36.84

The people that think this is bad, can't imagine what 2002 was like when the all time high in the Nasdaq was a few days ago.

Hate to break it to everyone but the good times are right now.

The next decade we should see a massive deflationary force from software being so much cheaper to create.

I imagine everyone in this thread is basically correct.

The only real thing we have done to combat cancer is stop smoking so much while at the same time increasing every other factor imaginable to promote cancer.

That is great anecdote. I have been trying to get into Schoenberg for about 30 years now and besides for Yuja Wang playing his Piano Suite I continue to fail.

Exactly. There are all these steps you don't even think about when you actually have to leave the house.

I have estimated that I have to go on about a 90-100 minute walk a day to get back to what I was moving in 2019. I was walking 60 minutes a day , 5 times a week for exercise then and going to the office.

No humans have ever moved as little as the modern remote worker is moving. There is going to be a massive price to pay for this over time.

I think in the US it is the same issue as Tata.

I might buy a Tata Altroz for $7500 if I could go to a Tata dealer and test drive one but Tata doesn't even sell to the US from my understanding.

So you can't test drive one, can't get parts for repairs, can't buy one and I am not even 100% sure if you did get one you would be able to get it legally on the road in the US.

People had the same perceptions of Kia 20 years ago in the US. The major difference though is that you could actually buy a road legal Kia from a Kia dealer.

Then couple that with the stress of testifying. I have none of these issues but testifying like this would be hugely stressful.

I would have to suspect he felt trapped and this was the only way out of testifying.

It is almost like Occam's Razor proposes some type of probability distribution, not discounting the fringe completely but suggesting as a heuristic that the most simple is most likely.

Some people though seem to like this Anti-Occam's Razor that the most complex and interesting explanation is most likely even though they have to know from everyday experience that is simply not true and not how the world works.

Totally agree. I am not a professional developer. I find programming to be quite dull and uninteresting.

I am going to work on something after this pot of coffee brews that I simply could not produce without chatGPT4. The ideas will be mine but the most of the code will be from chatGPT.

What is obvious is different skill sets are helped more than others with the addition of these tools.

I would even say it is all there in the language we use. If we are passing out "artificial intelligence" to people, the people who already have quite a bit of intelligence will be helped far less than those lacking in intelligence. Then combine that with the asymmetry of domains this artificial intelligence will help in.

It should be no surprise we see hugely varied opinions on its usefulness.

IMO we underestimate the psychological implications of wealth in modern society.

I suspect even if a power ball lottery winner takes a philosophical position it would be taken far more seriously than if they had never won the lottery.

At some point you start to believe your own bullshit when all of society signals are telling you what a genius you are.

This all reminds me of my asshole great uncle making fun of me as a teenager circa 1997 while I was at the computer and on the internet.

Sarcastically asking me "Can you meet girls on that?" and then laughed.

He wasn't wrong in the short term but laughably wrong in the long term.

Maybe they should have just not thrown such a slow pitch over the plate with running the whole thing on discord in the open.

I am not sure what they expected to happen.

The real danger is that at some point we hand over command and control of society completely to algorithms and we get bad results because we simply have no idea what is going on. Maybe even worse is we get long term bad results that in the short term we think are great results.

To frame this as the bad result being AI eats though is just stupid. On the surface of potential risk, framing the argument in this way is intellectually embarrassing and highly counter productive.

On the flip side, it is hard to see what can actually be done along with huge unintended consequence to whatever is done. Some of the smartest humans to ever live were certain of nuclear annihilation at the start of the atomic age. What could have actually been done in 1945 that would have given us a better outcome? We avoided the paths that lead to nuclear annihilation by building bigger and bigger bombs.

Doing nothing but building stronger and stronger AI should be the naive strategy that needs incredibly strong evidence to deviate from. Really strong regulation at the start of the atomic age that keeps nuclear weapons at bay and consequently only in the hands of the US would have been an unimaginable disaster.

I think a melodica is a good comparison and goal.

A melodica is not good for learning piano obviously but is a really interesting musical instrument in and of itself.

Trying to replace the real instrument makes about as much sense as a paper computer keyboard for learning typing. If you really want to learn to type, you obviously are going to "invest" in a real computer keyboard.

If that investment is too much up front then you have already set yourself up for failure so what is the point?

There is no reason to bring labor into this discussion.

If you increase the demand for housing without equally increasing the supply, price goes up.

I don't think one needs a PhD in economics to figure this out.

This is just typical doomer stupidity.

Of course, no one goes around trying to stomp on every ant hill they can because ants aren't good at math.

Not to mention, so much competition in humans is related to sexual competition. I suspect many doomers have no sex life and much of these ideas are projecting sexual frustrations on to AGI and AI.

The computer/software is not going to build a harem and try to eliminate competitors to the harem. Assuming software possessing being and consciousness isn't complete nonsense, even assuming the software is not an asexual being, humans and software are not going to be competing for the same sexual patterns lol.

This whole line of thought is just ridiculous.

I don't know, pretty "meh".

We forget that our language will evolve in time too as all this is normalized.

I could say I just took my artificial general horse to the store after stopping to feed it gasoline but it obviously sounds stupid.

People philosophizing about total nonsense like the morality of how many souls of a dead artificial general horse can dance on the head of a pin will fade in time.

Of course, there is a real danger of cult like, non-logical, non-falsifiable, religious type beliefs gaining a big foothold between then and now.

I don't know why the parent comment is being downvoted.

The source is using your brain and probability.

The ease of ordering research chemicals vs the difficulty of LSD synthesis.

This line stands out to me though: "Nevertheless, it should be noted that the sodium content of the study diets may have confounded these findings."

Ya think? Really? May have? We are going to study diet on blood pressure but not control for sodium.

I would have a hard time seeing the mechanism that one meal of oats and chicken breast vs 4 meals of oats and chicken breast with same daily calories is going to have much effect on anything.

You also can't underestimate the possible behavior changes of seeing a massive blood sugar spike from oreos, causing less oreos to be consumed.

To believe measuring something doesn't change behavior is just wrong. We know this.

It also reminds me of stories I have read of drug mules that it makes no sense how they think they wouldn't be caught using the methods they were using.

The twist of the story though is they were duped themselves. They were setup to get caught as a decoy while the real crime took place.

I think you are underestimating how tough it would be to be playing James Bond and not tell anyone.

You wouldn't have to be a delusional braggart to want to tell a friend this. Most spies are not going to be as much of a compartmentalized lunatic like Robert Hanssen or someone at that level.

It almost like people wrote about a replication crisis a decade ago.