HN user
American Christians are extremely individualistic... As long as your individual interests coincide with their rigid moral code and what they see as a "good Christian lifestyle". Seems right to me
That's funny. I come at this from the opposite direction. I like to run stuff on my home server, and I started a ROM collection because of Romm. If you're used to managing a media collection using jellyfin/Plex, adding roms feels pretty natural.
Maybe this project is appealing to a totally different audience than most ROM managers
I thought that for a while. Until it was pointed out to me that most long videos are made of 6 second shots.
Generating a long video one shot at a time kind of makes sense, as long as there's good consistency between shots
You don't need to root an android to install apps from outside the play store
That argument feels entirely circular to me
Why are you ok with the president being above the law? That idea was not considered normal even a couple years ago
Maybe for now. But I think there's a good chance the market for diamonds goes the same way as the former status symbols that became common, like purple dye[1], or pineapples[2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c05ako/...
In the case of diamonds, you have the choice of buying the exact same product with human suffering involved, or without. If there were a lab-grown iPhone on the market, of course I would choose it
the elders of the internet
to me, programming is playful math. I think I would have enjoyed math a lot more as a kid if we learned programming alongside the traditional math lessons
Dogs don't automatically love either, you have to build a bond. Especially if they are shelter dogs with abusive histories, they're often nervous at first
They're usually loving by nature, but you still have to build a rapport, like anyone else
friendly reminder to you: you won't be in the future either. because all humans have short lifespans. having children won't change that. enjoy the ride, whatever that means to you
I think the difference with qualia is that it has so many ethical implications too.
I can accept that I have inner experiences and can suffer, but what about animals/robots/outsiders?
Will I need to take GPT-10's feelings into account, or is it completely unconscious?
I'm honestly shocked you're skeptical about this
The primary value of any social network is the network effect
what is a complex life to you?
you say gaining new information from out of body experiences are a fact. what's your evidence to back it up?
I treat those kinds of stories the same way I'd treat an alien abduction or bigfoot story. humans are unreliable narrators. have there been any successful reproducible experiments on it?
that very much depends on your philosophy. Many believe that there is no continuous "self" in the first place.
it doesn't matter if the upload is a copy, if the "original" is constantly being shredded and re-printed every moment anyway
At the same time, pretending that brains don't obey the laws of computation has its own implications, which can confuse unprepared minds into thinking:
1) That brains are something supernatural, instead of physical information processing systems that can be analyzed and understood as such.
2) That digital turing-complete computers are limited and can't possibly do the kinds of complex processing that biological computers can do
Which is also misleading
A brain is not a Turing machine, but a Turing machine can be a brain. Biological brains are just a subset in the space of all possible computers
But I don't think either of us is confused, so this is just a conversation about the semantics, which I'm not very interested in
Because calling it a computer means you can apply computer science concepts to it. That's the interesting part. You can talk about the classes of algorithms the brain uses to solve difficult problems, the ways it tries to conserve energy, the architecture trade offs, how to model it with math, etc. That stuff is non-obvious if you treat it like a magic black box. It's not a meaningless insight
Can the brain solve NP problems in polynomial time? The brain itself is a mystery, but we know some things about computation, so it's pretty safe to say no, it cannot.
Maybe on HN it's consensus that all living things are computers in this way, but plenty of people think the brain is literally supernatural. By saying "the brain nothing in common with a computer. We don't know what it's doing", those people will be nodding their heads. But we do know some things about computation, so we can apply those insights to the brain
Brain doesn’t perform computations in any CS accepted sense (neither it is a turing machine nor it has any encoded program to execute any defined algorithm).
That's a big statement. Anything that can be effectively described with math, can be described using Turing machines and algorithms. Any Turing-complete system is equivalent. As far as we know, all of physics can be described by equations, therefore is (theoretically) computable. What makes you think brains are special? Are there any other physical systems that you think are uncomputable?
The only arguments I've found for why the brain can't be described by algorithms go into unconvincing pseudo-scientific arguments about the magic of quantum mechanics, which I find very unconvincing (quantum algorithms are still algorithms, and describable through math after all). Do you have a better one?
Would you call an ants colony a computer? A tree? A government? But they all obviously processes information and seemingly perform computations, don’t they?
Yes, absolutely. You can use ant colonies or slime molds as biological computers to solve real-world finding problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZUQQmcR5-g&t=1s
Some of your other examples are more complicated, but all of them can be described through the computational lens, and modeled as Turing machines. you will find many scientific papers filled with equations trying to describe the algorithms behind each of them
So it sounds like we both agree the brain is at least a physical object that performs computations. I'm surprised you don't see similarities with other physical systems that perform computations, but sounds like a terminology difference
Read the comments on that link for a summary of my thoughts.
But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions
Oof
Like I said, it depends very much on how you define computer. To me "processing information" == "computation". And a physical system that performs "computations" is a computer. Therefore, a brain is just one type of biological computer.
In a computer science class, the first thing they should teach is that the word "computer" in the course name is abstract, and not just about the metal slab on your desk. There are fundamental laws that apply to all information processing systems, whether electrical, mechanical, or biological. So it makes sense to put them in the same category at times.
But obviously words mean different things in different contexts, and "computer" might mean something entirely different to a neuroscientist than a computer scientist. But I don't think a neuroscientist would disagree that a brain is a computer using the loose definition I described above
there are a lot of mysteries around the brain, but at a high level, I think you'd have a hard time finding a neuroscientist who doesn't believe the brain processes information. what's the alternative?
I'm not seeing the distinction. All computation "just is". computation happens through the physical world. adder circuits are performing a computation. an x86 CPU is nothing but a bunch of dumb circuits. water canals can do computations just like electrical circuits. as can biological neurons.
This is a computer with all the abstractions stripped away [1]. It's hard to see the loops and conditionals from the falling marbles, but it is processing information. And electrical computers are essentially the same thing, just scaled up to an unimaginable degree
how would you do pattern matching without computations?
I think anything that could be described through logic gates or turning machines would be a "computation". And any object or organ that processes information would be a "computer "
I think that very much depends on how you define "computer". the brain is doing computations, so I think it's safe to think of it as a computer. it's just a completely alien computer to what we build ourselves
have we ever not lived in a time like that?
And high school: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/florida-just-expanded...
That doesn’t mean it can’t be questioned