alexilliamson

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
656
Submissions
331
Member since
Jul 1
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
I have armchair thoughts but would love to see more studies on this. There's no doubt that reduced consumption, taken in isolation, would be a good thing. However, if this is correlated with an increase in social isolation, the benefits would be more complicated.
Comment · 6 months ago
Perhaps you misundestand the Tennessee Williams quote. He's not saying that Miami is literally in Ohio, just that is has no character.
Comment · 9 months ago
The current guy is nothing if not a documented professional wrestling fan
Comment · 1 year ago
I have a decent grasp of theory and have seen the value of grinding scales on other instruments. With piano, I'm never sure which fingers I'm supposed to be using or when to move my fingers up the keys. Do you have any guidance?
Comment · 1 year ago
Most likely is that the side with the army and guns turns the blue areas into an occupied police state, and sells it to the constituency as a "civil war", despite it being completely one-sided.
Comment · 2 years ago
Well-defined goal is the big one. We wanted a big bomb.

What does AGI do? AGI is up against a philosophical barrier, not a technical one. We'll continue improving AI's ability to automate and assist human decisions, but how does it become something more? Something more "general"?

Comment · 2 years ago
It would still need an objective to guide the evolution that was originally given by humans. Humans have the drive for survival and reproduction... what about AGI?

How do we go from a really good algorithm to an independently motivated, autonomous super intelligence with free reign in the physical world? Perhaps we should worry once we have robot heads of state and robot CEOs. Something tells me the current, human heads of state, and human CEOs would never let it get that far.

Comment · 2 years ago
Do you have examples?
Comment · 2 years ago
I didn't mean for it to be inflammatory, but it's certainly not unnecessary to the conversation. We can both-sides it all day, but the fact is that one side has a militia proudly ready to use force. Like other commenters have suggested, this isn't necessarily a concern with a functioning civil society. But if we descend into populist mob violence, the side that has eschewed firearms will be at a distinct disadvantage. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's not so improbable as to be irrelevant here.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, but only one side has the guns.
Comment · 2 years ago
This is the "limiting harm" part of 2.
Comment · 2 years ago
Congrats on having good parents! However, I believe that most of this discussion applies to those less fortunate poor kids with shitty parents.
Comment · 2 years ago
I'm very skeptical of the claim that most of the kids with good parents in your poor neighborhood ended up in the 1%. Even with good parents, kids can grow up to be dumb and poorly socialized.

Also, "poor" as you're using it here might be too broad a term. The amount of brain cycles that parents can spare for their kid's academic performance is inversely related to how much time they're worrying about food, whether or not the utilities will be shut off, how to work overtime and keep the kid safe, etc.

Comment · 2 years ago
What happens more often, MSM doing culture war gymnastics? Or people accusing MSM of culture war gymnastics (an accusation which is, itself, culture war gymnastics)?
Comment · 2 years ago
I was sort of with you until the FSD

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