ummwhat

Maybe the trick is to just teach it young. I first learned about the towers of Hanoi when I was about 14. Blew my mind. It was like circular reasoning that worked somehow.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't have this fear/anxiety about recursion. In fact the opposite. I friggin love recursion. I actively seeking out the recursive answer. It doesn't hurt my brain. In fact the opposite, it's gratifying on an almost sexual level. At some point in my apartment we had a recursion bin next to the recycling and normal trash. Inside of it was a power strip plugged into itself.

Maybe the trick with recursion is to teach it while the brain is still a bit plastic. Don't assume teens are too dumb. Talk to your kids about recursion, before it's too late.

You're biased by a priori knowing you were about to read computer generated text. I hereby invoke the right to a fair and public Turing test.

Race to the bottom tax incentives are the first wrung on the ladder to bootstrapping a nice place with robust investments. Provided the benefits aren't squandered.

I guess she's hit a new low.

Consistently not being able to run code that was just fine 2 years ago. Consistently having "quality assurance checks" that somehow always entail paying more rent to Apple.

I'm personally hoping during the subway tunnel dig they uncover a Byzantine era svbway station already built. Sure it would completely upend our understanding of history and technology of the era, but it would also be quite the useful serendipity.

90% of work used to be farming. Today 10% of people are farmers. The next big thing was factory work. At first looms meant more textiles, not less workers. But eventually we hit the transition point where there's actually less factory workers. Now we've moved on to "knowledge work". Sure the effects of automation make more complex knowledge products and jobs for now, but once the automation becomes advanced enough, jobs in the field go down not up. So what comes after knowledge work?

We can't have it both ways. We can't pretend like automation will never kill our jobs while simultaneously pursuing the dream of permeant vacation through automation. The very goal of automation contradicts the idea that we would and should always have jobs.

Ya stupid sons of bitches, you automated everyone else out of a job and then you gone done it to yourselves too!

I'll take a stab at it.

Imagine you sit at your desk all day answering emails. Emails come in, responses go out. Except when you step back from the desk, it's just a black void. Information from your eyes? That's just an email saying what grandma looks like. Pain in the leg? Re: URGENT. Nothing exists beyond the emails. The emails are reality. The brains representation language is the same as it's actual language. Why have more than one language?

A while back I went on a google maps street view tour of a place I lived until I was 9 but hadn't been to in well over a decade. I wasn't sure what to attribute to the tenuous nature of my ancient memories versus what things had actually changed since I last looked. It was honestly a bit uncomfortable and disorienting having this gaping hole in my perception of reality. Was the swing set always blue in that park? I thought it was yellow. Maybe they repainted it? I will never know.

Your going to hate my answer because it makes the problem worse.

For about two weeks I was convinced my new roommate was a hallucination and I'd finally snapped. There were a number of uncanny cases where he knew the same incredibly obscure trivia and references that I knew. Things like "trap remixes of musicians that sold their soul". That's too specific to write off as just similar interests by men in a similar demographic. There were also a number of uncanny instances of not knowing the same exact things I didn't know. I had never seen him outside of the apartment. We had no mutual friends. We were both in the same unusual living arrangement, permanent temporaries at an Airbnb partially bartering code / home automation work as barter for rent. At some point the topic of eye color came up, and someone pointed out how all of us in the room have green eyes, and how that is the least common eye color and 3 of us is very statistically unlikely. Eventually I had to ask myself which is more probable, there really are two people with all these characteristics in common that ended up at the same place by coincidence, or I'm having a schizophrenic break and this is my delusion? My possibly imaginary friend had mentioned that he lived in Russia through the first grade and speaks Russian at a first grade level. I do not speak Russian. So I ask him to teach me some Russian grammar. He agrees but then changes the topic. I ask him to teach me some Russian. He says sure but avoids the question again. I ask him to teach me a bit of Russian. He agrees and evades again. At this point I am having some very serious doubts about my grip on reality.

Eventually we do meet other people from each other's circles. After a while there's been enough mutual third parties acknowledging both of us, that either a very large cast of characters are my delusion or this man is real. I can never actually prove one way or the other, but the scales are now tipped towards real by all the people standing on them.

And so we get to the answer to your question. "Reality is shared consensus." There's a shared consensus that my roommate was real, and that consensus may as well be reality because I can't distinguish it from the case where everyone has the same delusion.

Of course reality isn't the shared consensus per se. Reality is not subject to a referendum. However, shared consensus is the multimeter we use to read reality. Where is the difference between a 9 volt battery and "if I touch the proved to the terminal it reads 9 volts"? There isn't one.

In your example, my definition of "reality is shared consensus" becomes a big problem. If there are two groups with their own consensus then those are two realities. You are free to believe anything and everything is true right up to the point of fatally erroneous belief. For things where the consequences of being wrong are not so sure, there is nothing forcing a consensus around "objective reality".

Niels Bohr allegedly had a horse shoe in his office. When asked he said it was for good luck. One audacious visitor asked "do you really believe that?" He replies "no, but they say it works even if you don't believe in it." This was cheeky of Bohr. Plenty of people don't believe in quantum mechanics, but they say it works anyway. If someone truly insists on believing magic horse shoe theory and rejecting quantum mechanics, there is nothing that will force them to acquiesce to our objectively correct answer.

I like how the Manchu word for horse kind of looks like a horse.

In the maximal case where bots are indistinguishable from humans, by definition the odds of failing the Turing test are 50/50. A coin flip per comment. Yeah, I can put up with that.

Realistically, I don't think I will ever start regularly failing it. Go ahead, call it arrogance or hubris or whatever. I've looked at the originality and predictability metrics on a large corpus of my online comments. Let's just say, you won't be replacing me with gpt-3 or similar.

I'm ok with filtering humans who fail the Turing test.

This sounds scarily similar to descriptions of brains dealing with incomplete information. Good thing brains aren't keen on rationalizing prior beliefs in the face of new evidence or believing spurious things.

Oh. Oh dear.

I learned it from the Stanford Neuroscience lectures available on YouTube. The ones with Dr. Spolansky. I'm not sure how to discern the subtle difference between "a brain liable to conflate sex and violence" with "violent behaviors tangentially related to sex" either. I'm just trusting the scientist telling me the difference is there and they've studied it.

This assumes a normative value of truth being good. You could be ambivalent on the truthfulness of adults, accepting early on that everyone lies some fraction of the time and it's ok for you to do it too. The badness of lying is a societal rather than universal value. Kids lie all the time when they think it will work, so why would they be surprised or offended when it happens?

The real hat trick is to lie to the adults about still believing in Santa so the presents keep on coming. A con so deep the marks think they're the ones pulling the con.

There's two facets of sexual behaviour that are unique to humans. The first is we're the only species that sometimes gets aroused on violence or gets violent on arousal. This is an accident of neurology, both feelings a processed close by. The second is we're the only species that cares if anyone's watching. This observation seems to hold across cultures and time periods.

So the answer is, it was always taboo for kids or anyone else to watch. People may not have always been able to hide it effectively, but they were always at least trying.

Even that assumes a fair bit of background knowledge. At that age it would be perfectly logical to suppose that "making a baby" means assembling all the parts together like Ikea furniture.

He's not missing the link. The link is the empty string.

What's the point in life if you don't get to work on what you find interesting. Those Yaks ain't going to shave themselves you know.

Paul Graham's submarine essay probably.

As far as I know, I currently hold the world record score at knife fairy. The game of knife fairy is very simple. You must sneak into your roommates room late at night and slip a knife under their pillow. My current score is 1, so it should be easy to beat. Good luck!

Hold up. Downed a plane is different from grounded a plane. I don't know the Belarusian case, but either you misused the word or they are very different.

You've demonstrated that you've fallen for the popular misconception of Malthusian theory. It's not that food is "depleted at the margin" as in people starve until death rates go up. What actually happens at the margin is, lacking in sufficient resources to comfortably do so, people forego having kids. Perhaps, in olden times, lacking the prosperity to get the fathers permission in marriage.

I forget exactly when this happened or which data set it's in, but at some point sanitation and medicine got good enough that cities aren't a population sink per se. They can have around equilibrium birth rates.

"'just enjoy it and don't think' is for those who don't understand what a joy it is to think."

If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.

My pet theory is cities are malthusian. Contrary to popular belief, Malthus didn't predict runaway population growth. What he actually predicted (and was right for most of human history), is that any gains in productivity would be eaten up by population growth until the average wealth per person diluted down to it's previous level. So back to cities. Here's my pet theory. You build more apartments, or faster trains or whatever to expand the availability and affordability of 1 be apartments within a 1 hour commute, and it will work for a while, but within a few years people chasing opportunity will have moved to the city until the rents and costs of living eventually return to previous levels. This dynamic works because unlike pre industrial malthusian times, cities do not rely on birthrates for population growth.

I thought this looked familiar so I checked my collection of 2 player abstracts and sure enough I own an octagonal variant called "pathagon". Haven't played it yet. Hard to find people interested in this genre (except for chess and go, grrr).

.. -. ..-. --- .-. -- .- - .. --- -. / .. ... / .--. .... -.-- ... .. -.-. .- .-.. / ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. / ... - --- .--.