kgwgk

So there are "different branches" as in "one branch now, two different branches later" or not? (Or one gazillion branches now, one gazillion branches plus one later. The point is whether the "different branches" can be counted or not.)

> there are different branches

If by different branches you mean something like « now there is one, now there are two » it seems that branching is no less mysterious than collapse.

There's the handwaving.

Decoherence gets you a diagonal density matrix description of the world. It doesn't get you a single-state description of the world. Going from "There are many parallel universes" to "and we are in one of them" still takes a lot of handwaving.

Sure, the MWI still has an open problem which is why it looks like there is a collapse of the wave function.

One person's waste is another person's wealth.

For those unaware, this was famously stated as a test for hardcore pornography by a Supreme Court of the US justice in 1964.

Other people have claimed confidently year after year over the last few years that the latest model was AGI - or that the singularity would arrive in a few months anyway. All the battles are uphill when you’re at a local miminum, I guess.

  Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.
  Jerry:        How is it a write-off?
  Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.
  Jerry:        Write it off what?
  Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.
  Jerry:        You don't even know what a write-off is. 
  Cosmo Kramer: Do you?
  Jerry:        No, I don't.
  Cosmo Kramer: But they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

Edit to be fair: the "500 minus tax write off" comment does make sense but often people overstates the benefits of writing things off.