Viewing profile — ummwhat

Maybe the trick is to just teach it young. I first learned about the towers of Hanoi when I was about 14. Blew my mind. It was like circular reasoning that worked somehow. Unlike a…

You're biased by a priori knowing you were about to read computer generated text. I hereby invoke the right to a fair and public Turing test.

Race to the bottom tax incentives are the first wrung on the ladder to bootstrapping a nice place with robust investments. Provided the benefits aren't squandered.

I guess she's hit a new low.

Consistently not being able to run code that was just fine 2 years ago. Consistently having "quality assurance checks" that somehow always entail paying more rent to Apple.

I'm personally hoping during the subway tunnel dig they uncover a Byzantine era svbway station already built. Sure it would completely upend our understanding of history and techno…

90% of work used to be farming. Today 10% of people are farmers. The next big thing was factory work. At first looms meant more textiles, not less workers. But eventually we hit th…

Ya stupid sons of bitches, you automated everyone else out of a job and then you gone done it to yourselves too!

I'll take a stab at it. Imagine you sit at your desk all day answering emails. Emails come in, responses go out. Except when you step back from the desk, it's just a black void. In…

A while back I went on a google maps street view tour of a place I lived until I was 9 but hadn't been to in well over a decade. I wasn't sure what to attribute to the tenuous natu…

Your going to hate my answer because it makes the problem worse. For about two weeks I was convinced my new roommate was a hallucination and I'd finally snapped. There were a numbe…

I like how the Manchu word for horse kind of looks like a horse.

In the maximal case where bots are indistinguishable from humans, by definition the odds of failing the Turing test are 50/50. A coin flip per comment. Yeah, I can put up with that…

I'm ok with filtering humans who fail the Turing test.

This sounds scarily similar to descriptions of brains dealing with incomplete information. Good thing brains aren't keen on rationalizing prior beliefs in the face of new evidence …

I learned it from the Stanford Neuroscience lectures available on YouTube. The ones with Dr. Spolansky. I'm not sure how to discern the subtle difference between "a brain liable to…

This assumes a normative value of truth being good. You could be ambivalent on the truthfulness of adults, accepting early on that everyone lies some fraction of the time and it's …

There's two facets of sexual behaviour that are unique to humans. The first is we're the only species that sometimes gets aroused on violence or gets violent on arousal. This is an…

Even that assumes a fair bit of background knowledge. At that age it would be perfectly logical to suppose that "making a baby" means assembling all the parts together like Ikea fu…

He's not missing the link. The link is the empty string.

What's the point in life if you don't get to work on what you find interesting. Those Yaks ain't going to shave themselves you know.

Paul Graham's submarine essay probably.

As far as I know, I currently hold the world record score at knife fairy. The game of knife fairy is very simple. You must sneak into your roommates room late at night and slip a k…

Hold up. Downed a plane is different from grounded a plane. I don't know the Belarusian case, but either you misused the word or they are very different.

You've demonstrated that you've fallen for the popular misconception of Malthusian theory. It's not that food is "depleted at the margin" as in people starve until death rates go u…