Viewing profile — etangent

suspecting that star explosions are caused by nefarious super-intelligences is just Greek mythology with more steps.

Okay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the autho…

100% correct.

> a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social intera…

there is no such thing as a scanner for undeveloped film nor will there ever be.

> A complex society or a natural disaster (a la dinosaurs) wiping out megafauna sounds much more plausible than the equivalent of the primitive societies we see today. The problem …

> For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars? This is a very strange crit…

Read Mearsheimer's paper again. Nuclear deterrent is far cheaper than equivalent conventional deterrent. A country under existential threat will find means, one way or another, to …

The episode starts with a strawman (that Ukraine never had nukes) and proceeds to beat it up. It's a strawman for reasons I will not go into for long, but ones that should be obvio…

It seems to me that the selection task is tricky because it concerns interpretation of language. "Every card that has a D on one side has a 3 on the other" makes a claim: that ther…

It could also be that the numbers/assumptions input into the equations are incorrect but :)

Your calculation is interesting, but I beg you to go outside and look at how Godwits actually fly. Godwits fly in a straight line using rapid powerful nonstop flaps. They are relat…

Godwit does not glide at all. Its wings are physically too small to support any kind of gliding flight. It must flap constantly to stay aloft.

> My understanding is that these incredible distances are achievable less by "flapping" and more by leveraging small adjustments to harness the incredibly powerful forces That is n…

I would argue that it does not matter. The AI could even be "smarter" on pure IQ/reasoning, but in terms of practical reasoning that humans need that depends on exposure to real wo…

Unconvinced. Europe simultaneously exists and does not exist, depending on whether one uses the term pejoratively or not, which makes it impossible to subject anything in it to cri…

if you read the article, it also talks about outsourcing software production. In the broad sense, if one outsources both hardware and software production, what is one even left wit…

This comment does not quite make sense: "The new trend here is very strongly Large Language Models (LLM)." Is every problem a language problem? No, of course. Is every problem goin…

Of course they are artifacts -- everything in that picture is an artifact, by definition of how it is produced. But these artifacts are produced under specific conditions, which pr…

rwerwrwerw

I discovered a "color-scheme paradox": Every color scheme I enjoy using avoids using color red for anything except error messages -- which seems to be objectively a good thing -- y…

Well, neither am I, considering that the Western governments have been using the term "democracy" to launder a specific flavor of apparatchik authoritarianism.

Insane take, especially considering that over the past 10 years we have observed a steady creep of authoritarianism here in the West.

Even so, there are procedures, protocols, and best practices for working with (and validating) black boxes, acquiring which may require time, skill, and patience.

One might as well write an article claiming that "UI design is still too hard for software engineers" or "controlling a nuclear power plant is still too hard for software engineers…