effable

The core idea of ASI arriving before AGI seems to be true: we have already seen that through Chess Programs, LLMs etc.

However what caught my eye and that to me does reflect the lens through which the author sees the world, unless I am completely misunderstanding their point:

"Most of the world's important problems have never been modelled at the precision AI requires to act on them. Pollution, traffic, healthcare, taxation, public infrastructure, water distribution."

Pollution, traffic, healthcare and public infrastructure however are not really problems that require "clever" solutions - rather they are problems of political will, regulating industry and moving to cleaner energy sources. For example, we have known about human caused climate change for decades and carbon emissions are just hitting their peak now.

But are you arguing that when people believe things that are demonstrably false, like using bleach as a Covid remedy, not because there is any evidence behind them but only because they were uttered by someone they trust wholeheartedly, and this person does not have any hint of medical training, that nobody should say they are stupid, but only quietly believe it in their minds?

If not that, then what were you trying to say?

According to the article, such patents seem to come with a lot of restrictions and the patent apparently applies to traits of the patented plant:

When a company is granted a utility patent on a type of seed, it doesn’t just own the seed. It also owns its traits (color, texture, disease resistance, the way it was grown), future generations of that seed and all of the rights to research.

So, if a plant breeder like Morton develops his own variety of lettuce and the lettuce matches any of the traits of a patented variety – whether it be color, the curliness of the leaf or a trait that makes it conducive to a particular climate – the breeder is technically in violation of patent law and risks getting sued by the patent owner.

So according to the article, the patent system actually does place heavy restrictions on research in this area.

If somebody walks past a shop and does not buy the wares on offer because they are offended by the horrible decor, I assume, under this definition, this will be called coercion in that that they 'coercing' the owner to change the decor?

That seems like a horrible suggestion: That might work for one person but an entire country? That people who have lived their lives for generations in Ukraine simply uproot their entire lives, give whatever wealth they've built up and move to a different country where they speak a foreign language, have different cultures and customs, where they need to integrate and learn the language to have a chance at any semblance of a life. Sorry that sounds like a horrible idea.

So the argument is that since this criticism came from presumably a socialist, which we have no evidence for, we should not consider the criticism on its own merit?

Apart from violating privacy, instilling a culture of fear thereby impacting people's right to free speech and free organization, which is a cornerstone of democracy, making people fearful of saying anything against the government or the police even in private conversation, nothing whatsoever.

Yes, I have definitely experienced this too. I also sometimes get results from websites that seem to be reskins of github (usually issues and pull requests).

While I am by no means an expert user, and I have a lot to learn on how to properly use inkscape, I used it for creating some figures for my thesis and it really came in handy. Congratulations on the release!

This may be a little off topic but your comment piqued my interest: I am currently learning JavaScript and I was wondering if you would like to recommend any of the books you read.

I don't want to be nitpicky but I am sorry I have to be: Is that feeling not better expressed by "misanthrope"?

"The problem is there's evidence should you choose to see it, constitutional unlawfulness & just cause on an unprecedented scale"

Maybe you would want to provide examples of these then?

"The way to kill the fraud narrative is by debating those raising the charge"

I am actually not quite sure that debating the issue will kill the narrative but that's just my opinion.

"actually hearing the cases in court instead of tossing them on procedural grounds"

Frankly I have no comments here. What real evidence of fraud is there?

"Trumps moral compass seems far better than the shifty and obstructionist Georgia Secretary of State"

I never commented on the Georgia Secretary of State's conduct and frankly, that's not under review. If the President had just asked for the review of votes, that would be fine. Instead, we received the exact number of votes that he needed, statements to the tunes of: 'Fellas, what are we gonna do here? I only need 11,000 votes' and to do 'the review with people who want to find solutions but not with those who do not want solutions' or something to that effect. Claiming that someone stuffed ballot boxes does not constitute evidence.

Furthermore, this does not change my comments about the pardons either but that's not really the point under discussion.

I think the point about wars is fair.

However, there's no evidence that the election was crooked - the courts think so too. In addition, the President's moral compass seems to be pointing towards strong arming election officials to provide him the exact number of votes (11,780) that he needs to overturn Georgia, pardoning his former friends and allies and convicted war criminals. And this is just within the last couple of weeks.

I agree. That's an important point and I suppose that begins with the government focusing on enacting legislation to actually solve problems that would make people's lives better - healthcare, educational debt, financial assistance during the pandemic and so on - rather than say shutting down the government to try to erect a barrier.

At that level of generality, a lot of things are political since one of the definitions of politics, according to Merriam-Webster [1] is: "the total complex of relations between people living in society". Does this now mean that if I hang out with a friend, this may, under this very broad definition, be considered political? Is your suggestion then that me asking my friend to hang out is in some way an incitement to violence?

I feel like these sorts of categorizations based on broad definitions of terms almost never arrive at anything substantive. Categories are generally always fuzzy on the boundaries and using strict definitions to demarcate them is a complicated process (see, for example, the Judicial System).

Also I find this opinion preposterous because the incitement to violence in this instance has nothing to do with "political discussions about what the state should do". The President certainly did not have a political discussions with his supporters about what the state should do - rather, people in a state voted to decide who should lead, according to rules that ostensibly most of the citizens agree with, which the losing party then tried to contest by trying to wield violence themselves.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics

Frankly, are you not concerned that by not doing this, you would be signaling that there should be no consequences for this level of corruption, plain falsehood, and ostensibly deliberate attempts to overturn an election?

Argument against Trump on what though? If you are talking about direct incitement to violence: Sure, he did not directly incite violence - he merely mumbled fire in a crowded theater.

However, if the question is about impeachement: Yes. There's more than enough reason to go through with it. In the broader context of how the President has been lying to his supporters about election fraud, telling them to stop the steal, and that he will never concede. The President is on record trying to strong-arm election officials in Georgia to find him 11,780 votes, the exact number that would overturn the state.

No, he does not say that they need to investigate. He wants them to find him the votes because he knows he won it. And that is just what has happened in the past week.

I imagine that would be to hold an elected official to account for offences that are impeachable. When a president incites a riot and puts under siege the entire apparatus of your government, perhaps it would be prudent to show that there are real consequences for this sort of behaviour?

Can you point us to any evidence of actual election fraud? If so, what do you make of the courts not being clear about the facts as you see them? Was this evidence simply not part of the tens of lawsuits that were filed or are you suggesting that the courts are simply complicit in this stolen election? Or is it something else?

Will you try to explain why this is nonsense?

Do you think the results would be different if people were asked "If A implies B then does not B imply not A"?

This could just be about using the right prompt - I do not know how information is stored in the brain and whether most people would be able to access the correct answer: "not B implies not A" if the prompt were just "what can we say about not A and not B".

Assuming that most people would actually know the answer if prompted the right way, one reason the prompt given in the article may not lead them to the answer could be that most people do not need to apply Modus Tollens outside of a class on Logic. And thus, since the concept has never been widely applied, at least in their heads, it is not accessible?

This is all conjecture of course.

I have a few questions:

"In my city of Charlotte, with the Keith Scott shooting, it was: 9 democratic council members to 1 republican, democratic mayor, democratic governor, black police chief, and a black police officer that did the shooting, but somehow it was institutional racism."

Why does the political affiliation or the colour of the people involved mean that it cannot be institutional racism. Isn't the idea that the racism is baked into the policies, the modus operandi of the police and judicial system?

"There is a policing problem in this country. Period. Color of your skin be damned. If people started from there, things might have been a little different at this point."

Let's assume that this was the case. How will this improve things compared to now?

It's even hard to say how "genuine" cleverness in human beings works - and we've had a lot more time to study ourselves - granted that most of that time we've not had the tools to understand how our brains work at the algorithmic level. I am not claiming that achieving some version of "genuine" AGI necessarily involves understanding how human intelligence works, but it is reasonable to expect that knowing more about it will definitely reduce the search space of possible systems.

Wouldn't you say that a society that only places high value on taking a stance if that comes at great personal cost will probably not find too many people willing to take a stance?

Curious to see if there's evidence for this. I am not sure how one would go about measuring this - but perhaps it would help if you elaborate on how this favoritism manifests in the way Twitter operates. Is there anything like that or is this based more on your personal feelings on the matter?

"fortran 77" - username checks out.

On a more serious note, I have been dipping my toes into Rust and it seems fun. I suppose, I'll have a more considered opinion of it once I actually build something substantial with it.

To add to this: you have to rely on authorities in a sense. I trust that Einstein's theory of General Relativity is true because I trust in the scientific consensus. I trust that the claims made by climate scientists are true because I trust in the peer review process. Now, of course, all of these people can be wrong. But I, as an individual, only have a limited number of years to live and I cannot verify every single of piece of information for myself. Ergo, I have to decide to trust certain authorities, at least partially if I want to do anything useful with my life.

So what's the criteria for ascertaining that a company, like Twitter, has a monopoly on speech and why does that make it like a government? Unless you are claiming that the US government has a monopoly on speech - meaning that anything the US government does not want said, cannot be said in public which is certainly not true in this case since the head of the US government is threatening to shut down Twitter over something they "said".

The T495 / X395 series is based on Zen+ (Ryzen 3000 mobile) chips and not Zen 2 (Ryzen 4000 mobile) - I know the naming is confusing given that the 3000 series desktop chips are Zen 2. However, Lenovo has announced ThinkPads based on Zen 2, such as models in the rebranded T14 lineup, but they have not been released yet.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15772/new-lenovo-thinkpad-ran...