Viewing profile — jrowen

The result of this bias is that virtually every movie that has ever been made about the future contains a dystopia, with very few exceptions. It's somewhat sad to me that this phen…

It blows my mind that (my fellow) Americans are so averse to taxation that they don't even consider that option. Whether you're worried about jobs or faraway tech elites or resourc…

> scale is a necessary ingredient and running things at a physics sim level is just too taxing. I once had an idea for a system that basically took in multiple video inputs and pro…

Makes sense, thanks. Even attempting to go for something that could span all those layers of complexity would be such an ambitious project. I doubt any projects in this field have …

And maybe that just isn't really your area of work, I get that it would be a totally different project (like saying to a C++ guy "have you tried JavaScript?"), but that's why I thi…

> UBI is a distraction. Of course it would help, but it's not a solution. Nobody is going to accept "here's how you filthy masses can be miserable instead of very miserable" as an …

Yes, that's the other thing -- starting from a soup, it takes a very long time to know if the parameters that have been chosen are conducive to evolving something we would consider…

What I said was meant to apply at the societal level. I wasn't meaning to speak to personal responsibility. The fact that it's become standard practice for employers to require OTP…

I did look that up and took out a line about voter turnout because of it. He definitely has rallied people. He does tap into an energy that the DNC has been blind to. But if you lo…

I tried to be clever and succinct and it backfired. I was more referring to "everyone else" as apathetic. Generally, I don't think voting is itself considered an act of activism. S…

Sadly if they were smart they would push for UBI rather than jobs or stopping data centers. Zero-sum scarcity mentality needs to end. Don't push back on prosperity. Push to have th…

> And I would say that speaks more to your disconnect with most of US society. Very few folks actually trust activists for good reason. I don't follow. What I said is in alignment …

Smart phones are fine though. Technology is just what we make it. It's a reflection. It is, and always has been, the people that need to change.

> They did. They elected Trump. I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism. > Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight …

Everyone may be discontent (which might be a baseline feature of the human experience for many), but is anyone actually willing to do anything about it? Compared to the activism of…

I've long felt that Artificial Life or an approach rooted in that is the best way to get a novel and interesting machine intelligence. The breakthrough with more conventional metho…

Did that comment indicate any condemnation of the west? What I'm tired of is zero-sum jingoistic nationalism of any kind. Can we just be happy for all of the world to prosper? edit…

FWIW, I took the Jesus stuff to be "part of the joke."

You said I was on a high horse, I said I was just having fun. Now you're just agreeing with my original assessment? What do you want me to do? They seem like they've got a handle o…

Sure it’s a tall order but we’re not even trying (in a broader collective sense, I know there are people doing good work). We’re still voting for billionaires rights.

And many of them have the pleasure of working on projects that will never see the light of day and have roughly epsilon chance of positively impacting anyone! One golden goose that…

It’s all in good fun, brother. One has to have some awareness of how unhinged they are (and yes it does take one to know one).

That is a good point. I’m not old enough to care too much about physical media but I do take pride in “my collection” which I would guess is less prevalent in Gen Z. Everything is …

I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/ele…

HN is everything. HN is nothing. HN is this. HN is that. HN is Meta™ edit: how many HN comments talk shit on HN comments? Ask your therapist about self-loathing