Ieghaehia9

> in real democracies the populists (facebook, tiktok, chrome) always win. because that's what the masses want

Is Friedrich Merz a populist? Was Angela Merkel a populist? This theory seems to have considerable limits.

On Linux, too. The headline says "Fix" [blank] "in seconds, not hours".

That in turn makes me wonder:

Given fixed opposition, finding a warrior that performs the best is an optimization problem. Maybe, for very small core sizes like a nano core, it would be possible to find the optimum directly by SAT or SMT instead of using evolution? Or would it be impractical even for those core sizes?

> There are people who believe that proof-of-work isn't very effective, but none of them have succeeded in spamming the Bitcoin network with blocks they've mined, driving the other miners out of business, nor (for the last several years) with spamming the Bitcoin network with dust transactions they've signed, so I don't think we should take their opinions very seriously.

Different system. The parent and GP are talking about proof-of-work being used directly for account creation. If a chat service required mining-levels of PoW (and hence any prospective new users to have an ASIC), it would not be very popular. Nor would it be very popular if it used a relative difficulty system and the spammers used dedicated servers while the legitimate users had to compete using only their phones.

A video I watched not too long ago expressed something similar as "in some RPGs, society exists for you" (e.g. you, a random escaped prisoner, can just waltz up to the local lord in Skyrim and be taken at face value). "In others, you exist in a society" (and the guards will keep you from even entering the nobles' district unless you're in good standing, which takes a considerable amount of the game to get).

It's not quite the same thing, because that example is about how other people treat you, not whether they've got lives of their own; but in a broader perspective, it's still about how much the game seems to be a prop for the player's enjoyment vs. being a proper world that doesn't fall apart five days after the player wins.

I'm not sure. Suppose that someone magically woke up to find they had no subconscious, i.e. that they were now aware of everything going on in their mind, and aware of their awareness, etc. Then it doesn't seem like that would itself give them the power to create a direct neural interface and extend their mind.

In a wider sense, a system can have lots of equilibrium states without being able to move into any arbitrary state or make any arbitrary state an equilibrium. For instance, such a mind, if it were constrained by logic, could not sincerely doublethink. So on the face of it, it's only PPAD (determining fixed points), not NP (solving arbitrary polytime-verifiable puzzles).

But again, I don't know. Perhaps some types of hypothetical thinking could, for such a mind, lead to a kind of recursion that would bring NP-hardness or the halting problem back into the picture. Maybe a situation similar to AIXI: the perfect intelligence can only reason about a universe it itself doesn't exist in. I'm merely saying that I can't entirely see whether it would be impossible or not, so it's an interesting thought.

As for creativity, I guess so far, the only way we've found to make AIs be inventive in a nonhuman way is to use brute force or combine it with a generator that essentially produces its context for it (e.g. AlphaGo).

Maybe it would be possible to create some kind of equilibrium/fixed-point based AI that, for everything it knows, it knows that it knows, knows that it knows that it knows, and so on.

Then again, perhaps not, because PPAD is much harder than P; so just getting the AI to maintain the perfect self-knowledge invariant as it learns more things could be intractable. There might also be halting problem reductions if the AI is sufficiently powerful, although I'm not sure.

It's a warning if it isn't accompanied by great democratization, because the planned economy concentrates a lot of power in the hands of the planners.

Some proponents of planned economy (e.g. Cottrell) suggest that elected democracy should be replaced by sortition for just that reason. Or perhaps there are technical ways to make planning less centralized, say some kind of federated system with freely available real-time production data, where a new producer can decide what group of existing producers to join.

Democracy combined with local units significantly valuing their autonomy also seems to work, e.g. the International Typographical Union example from Union Democracy.

Even on a reptile-brain level, the article's use of wanting is sort of an equivocation. The brain has different systems for "wanting" and "liking". Cocaine affects the former, opioids the latter.

Capital A Algorithms maximizing engagement are very much on the "wanting" side. Firing off an angry response to a political opponent's belittling post is rarely ever really /enjoyable/.

>It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.

Since, as you said, there are infinite possible unfalsifiable theories, it's a good idea to avoid them. It's better to deal with them when evidence does appear; otherwise you have an infinite number of them to go through.

> E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.

I'm not sure that's even decidable. Is, say, relativity a glitch in the Matrix or just the way the universe works? Or, to flip the question on its head: do simulations we can construct behave like the real world because the real world is simulated, or just because what we can construct is limited by the world we live in?

I think these outright flaws would have to be very obvious to unambiguously point to simulation. And I can't escape the feeling that the simulation idea is a modern version of Newton's clockwork universe: trying to explain the universe by the metaphors we have available today.

> If we're in a simulation, you have no basis for drawing conclusions about any of our observations, whether those observations have taken place, whether anything outside of this moment exists, or anything outside your mind, or both.

But then simulation is unfalsifiable. Whatever you observe, the simulation could have paused an arbitrary number of times, or modified you or the environment to an arbitrary degree, hence it's compatible with simulation. Which makes simulation "a difference that makes no difference".

> I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum.

Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW.

It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"