psandersen

Is it really that easy for religious folks to dismiss though?

If someone believes consciousness arises from a non-physical spirit through an unknown mechanism; then it seems difficult to argue that this can only happen in the specific arrangements of biological cells that we've seen on earth and not in other ways.

E.g. Donald Hoffman's view around consciousness being fundamental certainly wouldn't preclude a machine operating as a portal* in the same way humans do.

*I'm only familiar with his ideas and the concept of 'portals' from his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman and TOE podcasts.

Not an American but similar view of GWB. However... I feel leaders should be judged by the direction they tried to move things; and the Bush Administration did not move the USA in a more lawful, democratic and humanistic direction to say the least.

There are many steps to move a democracy to a totalitarian state, and the time to hit the breaks is at earliest signs of fascist behavior.

Abstractly, the people who excused and weakened institutions may have done more to create an eventual totalitarian state than the asshole who moved the final 1% and seized power.

Wow, this is exactly what I'm looking for, thanks so much for developing it. I'm going to give it a shot over the holidays, have a pretty big home assistant install I'd love to control via voice.

I'd primarily like to be able to turn on/off a few specific switches, set a few specific scenes and ideally play a few playlists (squeezebox integrated with home assistant). Would creating scripts in HA and then calling them from Hi be the way to go for customising without building custom components?

If this works well I'll be keen to add a few cheap pis plus ps3 eye cameras around the house.

Thanks for sharing the story, that's an interesting window into their personality. Do you think they were completely serious, some a long running joke or a bit of both?

Also if you wouldn't mind elaborating on surprising ways reaction diffusion equations can be used to solve problems I'd love to read it :)

Could you give a one sentence summary makes them awesome?

Agree with everything you said, especially on the challenge of recommendations and feel this is where those designing the recommendation engines have at least the same moral responsibility as a bio-engineer doing gain of function research on viruses.

IMHO the core problem is the recommendation engines are optimizing the wrong metrics and this leads to destabilizing feedback loops.

The problem is likely AI complete, but it should be possible to tune recommendations so they don't create self strengthening conspiracy theories. I suspect a reinforcement learning environment that mimics users interacting with a recommender system would be the best way of tuning the larger system behavior so the longer term properties aren't catastrophic for society.

OTOH if the platform was setup so "good faith" arguments were somehow incentivized, there might not be any need to optimize for any other metric than engagement.

You can get a referral to a psychiatrist from a doctor who will get you to fill a number of multi choice forms and look at your past school reports to form a diagnosis. This may be more or less involved depending on which country you live in, some places irresponsibly hand out adderall like candy.

IMHO the best approach if you suspect you may have ADHD is to do a lot of googling for adult ADHD, there are good videos on youtube, discussions on reddit and various forums. If you still think this might apply to you, then search for ADHD test.

Outside of speculation and hype; is there currently much demand for bitcoin as a currency outside of industries that operate in a legal grey area?

Get tested for ADHD if you haven't already. Most people think ADHD means hyperactive children but its more an attention disorder where it can be very difficult to get things done if they don't actually interest you or there aren't severe consequences like failing a subject. I've felt the same as you, and it was a 'wow' moment when I started reading about ADHD and people's experiences who were diagnosed as adults.

If you have ADHD there is a rich set of literature on managing it, supplements to investigate (lots of discussions in the nootropic community) and the meds can be a life changing tool when used responsibly.

There is the "whole food plant based" diet, see Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" and "daily dozen".

I found it compelling and switched, feeling healthier and lost around 20kg in 6 months without thinking about calories.

Interesting idea! I'm not an expert, but if I'm reading you right and the decompressor is Turing complete; you're searching for the smallest Turing machine capable of generating the input sequence?

That would indeed be an optimal compressor and start to enable things like Solomonof induction and AIXI.

Seems the challenge is to get feedback to guide the search for the right Turing machine. With infinite compute can just run an ever expanding set of Turing machines until you get one that generates the input, but without some breakthrough that would enable something like stochastic gradient descent to efficiently work on non-differentiable programs I don't see how it can be made practical.

Perhaps there is some sweet spot thats more general than current compressors that looks at a restrict class of Turing machines that could be feasible.

I'd totally take that, assuming reasonable convenience and cost.