Viewing profile — pyrois

Why is knowing how to open an IDE or set up a mail server a prerequisite for good governance?

People really like to trash Freud, but you have to put him into context. Before Freud, we had a few branches of psychology: philosophical psychology in England arguing about empiri…

Well, it sounds like they maybe shouldn't be: > “Uber and Lyft can survive classifying drivers as employees,” she says. “It might cost them a little more, but it’s a successful con…

I'm not sure how easily one could leave a small town in, say, feudal Europe. Most serfs lacked travel rights, and while one could escape from their lord's land and move to a city (…

Compared to...? Because, compared to, you know, actual 5 star hotels, they kinda suck.

Yeah, that's the author's guess as well. > And when I say "people" I mean mostly "algorithms," which are faster and more literal than humans.

That looks fine to me. He's talking about reducing a matrix to reduced row echelon form, and gives a pretty clear example. If you're giving yourself 4 pages on linear algebra, ther…

Sure, they are commensurate at some point. I'd pick one nanosecond of torture over the dust-motes, for instance. But I'm not certain that I would ever choose the 50 years of tortur…

He's assuming linearity, which at the very least needs justification. He's assuming that the function that maps from the pair (number of people, type of torture) to suffering is li…

Yes, I agree, I would take the risk, but those are two entirely different things. It's not the same argument framed in a different way at all. In Yudkowsky's argument, it's the opt…

Fair enough. I should have said "the model fails to accurately reflect my sense of morality".

I'll give it a shot, but first, a list of disclaimers: Yudkowsky gets a ton of unjustified internet hate and scorn, and I disagree with a lot of it. I read a number of the sequence…

I quite liked his introduction! Be aware, however, that he dramatically overstates some things. For example, he claims that the many-worlds interpretation is obviously correct. Thi…

The linked paper does not suggest that Martians built nuclear reactors on Mars, which then melted down. The paper suggests that there were "large fireballs in the atmosphere such a…

How is that a real patent? As far as I can tell (and I'm not a lawyer), they're patenting mixing protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water in specific ratios to make a meat substitut…

I just donated $30. If there is nothing to stop large companies completely ignoring the GPL then what good is it?

True, but even "Chess lite" in 672 bytes is mind-blowing.

"Memory" means RAM, here. As for why the size of the executable matters, you needed to have the entire executable in RAM before you could actually execute it. That's not so true th…