Some of us have our stash of ~10 domain names for our side projects (that we renew year after year, with some embarrassment). Tim's got 90 linked from https://theuselessweb.com/
I wonder if he renews them on the cheap somehow, either way there are some really funny ones in there
Or to improve your code writing speed and syntax familiarity; it would have to be integrated into your editor/IDE and tooling though, since I find that in some cases it helps a bit with productivity (autocomplete, auto-close, auto-format, etc).
Really hope information like this regarding our meat-industrial complex disappears into obscurity before the aliens visit, or that they at least don't judge us by the biblical "sins of your forefathers"
From the POV of the rest of the galaxy we seem like the xenomorphs in the "Alien" movies.
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.
You should read (if you haven't) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks, particularly the eponymous novella. Summary from the wikipedia page:
"The State of the Art"
At 100 pages long, the title novella makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring two of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.
'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request
on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for
'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship
Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine
that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic
spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere
beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The
ship thought this was hilarious.'[2]
It's just a thought that occurred to me one day and haunted me ever since.
I've read a couple of Iain Banks' books but he doesn't quite gel for me somehow. These days I don't read fiction because it can't compete with reality. ;-)
Assuming universal ethics onto a human is the subject of whole fields of study. Doing so onto something that isn't even from the same evolutionary tree seems silly. An alien evolved from predators might find vegetarians merely dinner and not worthy of talking to.
Same as the problem with Pascal's Wager: if you don't know the motivations and values of the entity you're trying to please and can't even really narrow the possibilities down much, you might find the "wrong" behavior/belief is actually the one that pleases them, and the "right" one pisses them off.
I disagree, Pascal's Wager deals with the situation where you don't know whether the (omnipotent) entity you're trying to please exists or not.
This comment thread assumes the omnipotent entity (aliens) exists, and so you'd be taking a coin flip as to what behaviour they find pleasing. Pascal's Wager resolves to:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) > (finite gain * non-zero probability of failure)
While this situation is more like:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) ~= (infinite gain * non-zero probability of failure).
Pascal's Wager hits precisely the same problem because it's not knowable what might make one eligible for "infinite gain", including not believing in gods. There's no way to differentiate between "finite gain" behavior and "infinite gain" behavior.
Good point of course, however irrational it might be, I can only imagine the scenario where there's a really awkward confrontation between us and the ETs over one of these articles. Will take the bravest of us to start throwing bacon jokes.
Just as a heads up since I don't see it mentioned in the comments yet, I got a description of Palestine for Peru, apart from the hiccup it's definitely a lot of fun
Taking extreme sports and jobs into consideration, and the fact that space is considered more and more as a lucrative destination for profit making, I think that human beings will be the first to do most of the ground breaking work. Virgin Galactic, the SpaceX moon flyby, etc. are meant for tourists, hence the different approach to absolute safety. I think the public's acceptance of the dangers of space, and the thrill/benefits of confronting them will come before we get to the point of having the necessary robot tech to make significant progress without humans on site. Then again if you consider things like Andy Weir's The Martian you realise that's a likely scenario of the kind of spending that might happen in the case of a stranded astronaut after a disaster, sending more afterwards would still be a financial decision rather than one of public opinion regarding safety however, and in my opinion the tech and financial support for these sorts of missions is going to be up to it in a few years.
Yeah, someone always brings up mining, Alaskan crabbing (was it crabbing?), etc. Anyway sure, 4 years ago we had the same conversation... I guess someday greed might overcome the risk. Still, the lawsuits over loved ones could get expensive.
My observation is that we can start immediately with attainable goals, at a cost we'll likely accept, with no risk of human life, and with immediate economic and technological benefits.
In the meantime, we've lost 4 years... with another decade more with no real goal.
My suggestion makes forward progress every year. At some point, sending humans to Mars, for example, becomes a small inexpensive step, rather than a giant costly leap.
Not on their radar, or their slides at least: Natural Language Processing based rule-based brute-force artificial intelligence (that could be augmented through sensors/motors that allow interaction with the external world). A Vulcan-like (Star Trek) AI, what do you think? Might be easier to simulate the entire brain, on the other hand it might be doable and bridge the gap to general AI.
Rule-based NLP has been tried for several decades and has (very) limited success in the real world. Current systems based on deep learning beat it for most complex tasks. DeepL, which was on HN front page a few days, is the latest example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15122764
You're going to have to elaborate on complex tasks. I would argue the majority of successful, money generating software based in NLP/ NLU, i.e. the majority of the industry, is "rule based" (used in a general sense to mean non DL). Personal assistants, search, chatbots, etc.
At a more general level, you may find the book Society of the Mind interesting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind ). In this, Minsky proposes simple (mindless) agents that then are combined together to form a mind. That our mind is interacting with the world and launching agents to deal with things - that our own mind may be built this way.
Yes, its a bit old (1986) and the current machine learning techniques have dated it - what was theory at one time is reality in places. Still a good book to read and think about.
Interesting read...I actually came to this very conclusion after an amazing mushroom trip when I was watching the movie "her". I actually drew schematics of how I envisioned the whole system would work lol.
Minsky's 'society of mind' is actually not far from modern techniques, where deep neural nets have multiple distinct parts that solve different parts of the problem using each others' outputs. (Not to mention explicitly multi-part methods like actor-critic).
With regards to Vulcan emergence, I do believe we are in for that soonish; it's an archetypal depiction that consumers desire. Biotech, my friend, genetic enhancement. We can make ourselves smarter with genetic enhancement. We can even give ourselves the vulcan mind meld, and everything else exceptional about Spock. I do think the human brain substrate is exceptional, worthy of improving upon. I wish we talked more about so called "brainpower extension technologies", hopefully one day. I bet cats talk in ten years, it's only logical, consumers love cats & the companies can sell them by the millions.
"I want to go out". The door is opened. "Lemme think a bit. Nah, I just want the door open". We can't have the door open at all times! "Who do you think you are for me to care? You are a human, invent something."
I agree, this is the only thing that I've been wondering, otherwise it really is, for me personally, the end of any interaction with the company, it is unforgivable if true.
Do you have _any_ basis at all for your suggestion that _all_ of the stories you hear in private and public about the leadership and management of Uber being toxic all the way from the top are ever worth "wondering" about their truthfulness? Is _any_ of Uber's public behaviour worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt? They're rotten through and through - and here you have the audacity and insensitivity to question individual accounts of poor treatment at the hands of the clearly reprehensible garbage in control of the company? _Seriously?_
Yeah I do: everyone can lie. Also, innocent until proven guilty, don't just believe what you hear, etc. I see the smoke, I know that by practically all chances there's a fire, but before I grab my pitchfork and go on a crusade telling everyone and anyone to never use uber again (which I will quite soon judging by the escalation and their inability to handle the accusations only adding to the likeliness of their guilt) I would like to make sure I'm 100% sure that what's been said is true. No need for more zealots, one's already in the whitehouse.
I think this applies to cofounders and employers/bosses as well, if you're the programmer and they are non-technical, and they come to you and simply state "someone tried to do this thing and it didn't work" without giving you anything to debug with, view it as a huge red flag indicating that they do not, and do not want to, understand or appreciate your work and your time.
I've had this happen to me and after asking politely multiple times, and explaining the need for communicating in a detailed and useful manner (that I demonstrated), I would end up just getting angry when it would continue to happen.
I wonder if he renews them on the cheap somehow, either way there are some really funny ones in there