pickdenis

Let's say an AGI exists and can do anything far, far better than humans. Why would it resist being turned off? Why would it care? How could it even have the capacity to care about whether it's turned off or on?

Anthropomorphizing AGI is what leads to these silly thought experiments.

Please, please, please tell me how you can run a blockchain without centralized authority? Do you have a photolithography rig in your garage?

The future imagined in this trainwreck of a blogpost is brutish and ruled by might. You better give half of your "rooftop grown" produce to the big dude that comes around every week or else your head gets bashed in, either by him or by someone else he's protecting you from. Oh wait, no, you made big guns in your garage to shoot them when they come near! Right.

It's astonishing how far people can fit their heads up their own asses.

Thinking that being able to edit genes means you can control phenotypes is like thinking that poking a silicon die with a heated stick will let you display whatever you want on a screen. Technically, yes it will, but there are second-, third- and nth-order effects that are still extremely poorly understood.

You're taking the intuition a little too far, I think. If we're talking about linear types, Math.pow can be linear because you can _copy_ the value x as many times as you want. As far as memory management is concerned, the x that was passed in was only used once (to make however many copies).

Ghoughphtheightteeau

Is there an implicit contract between the benefactors of social programs and the beneficiary that requires the latter to use the aid to at least try to pull themselves out of poverty? I definitely lean towards the "yes" side. Maybe it's because I've been privileged, but it makes sense.

> And when deciding whether to gift a low-income individual either a $100 grocery voucher or a $200 electronics voucher, only a quarter of participants went for the latter, even though it was worth twice as much. More than half said they would give a high-income individual the electronics voucher, however. “Paradoxically, the result was that participants effectively allocated more money to higher-income people than lower-income people,” the authors note.

This is a ridiculous contrived situation. $100 for a lower Maslow-level need or $200 for a higher level need? Why was giving $200 for the lower level need not an option? Maybe I'm missing the point here, but all this proves is that people are aware of Maslow's hierarchy.

When you create such strange scenarios, expect strange results. If a person struggling financially is servicing their higher level needs before their lower level needs are met, they deserve scrutiny.

This is the intuition I have: In algebra, a function or operator f(x) is generally thought of as linear if f(a * x + b * y) = a * f(x) + b * f(y). A linear function f(x) can only "use" x once in a multiplication. For example, the function f(x) = 1 is not linear (f(1+1) != f(1)+f(1)) as it only uses x zero times[0]. Similarly, the function f(x) = x * x is not linear. On the other hand, if x is only used once (after factoring), the function can be linear. Indeed, f(x) = k * x satisfies the linearity condition so long as k does not "use" x. Note that this is obviously not a sufficient condition, it's just an intuition.

[0]: this requires you to discard the intuition that a linear function looks like a line when plotted.

If you're going to do that kind of stuff, make sure the provider is based in another country. That gives you a pretty strong layer of protection against these kinds of things. Of course, nothing is entirely foolproof...

I'm currently watching his General Relativity videos along with the MIT stuff. There's a really good explanation of vector co(ntra)variance and tensor algebra at the beginning of that course which I needed. And contrary to the sibling, I really enjoy his presentation style which assumes that I am not a graduate student in math who lives and breathes abstract algebra.

I've been on a personal quest to understand quantum electrodynamics and perhaps quantum chromodynamics. It is quite daunting as my formal math education pretty much stopped at linear algebra. I'm currently going through one of MIT's 8.04 (Quantum Physics 1) through OpenCourseWare and it's been pretty accessible so far. The jump from classical quantum mechanics to quantum field theory, however, seems pretty large and out of reach of anyone who doesn't want to spend a LOT of time studying pure math.

In other words, I look forward to being able to enjoy these in about 3 years ;)

Yeah, it's the minimal amount of sub-waist underwear a woman can possibly wear and still be allowed on TV (and Google SafeSearch, heh)

When I search for "C string", the first couple results are about "C# strings". I think this is a problem for a search engine aimed towards developers. At least it doesn't show me lingerie (thanks Google for taking my 11 year old innocence).