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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#211

Post by TeMPOraL »

skolos wrote: post #159

> If your screws are longer than 2”, you’ll need different ones, otherwise they will poke out the top of the board and stab you in the foot. Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5" [1]. So your screws should be shorter than 1.5". [1] https://www.archtoolbox.com/materials-systems/wood-plastic-c...

> Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5"

And, as I've recently learned, two-by-four is in fact 1½ × 3½ inches.

How on Earth does that make sense? Why do people call things as if they were X, while knowing perfectly well they're not X? Is this an American thing?

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#212

Post by TeMPOraL »

dingo_bat wrote: post #110
hwillis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them. An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and bu…

Except looking inside a neural network is almost impossible. For example, google photos still turns mum if you search "gorilla". They could not figure out wtf was wrong with the recognition networks and had to just blacklist the keywords. https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google...

That's only an argument against using present-day neural networks as a basis for advanced AI. It's not a fundamental rule of reality that a mind can't understand its own internals.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#213

Post by TeMPOraL »

goatlover wrote: post #118
hwillis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them. An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and bu…

> An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. Except this AI doesn't exist. You're imagining there is such a technology, and this technology will just be able to see all the detail in the world it needs to learn, and presto it does everything better than opaque humans. If you think deep learning is such a technology, then ask yourself to what extent ANNs underst…

> If you think deep learning is such a technology (...)

I hope they don't think that. Deep learning is not suited for building a proper general AI, but that's a feature of deep learning - nothing we know about in physics / information theory says that the only possible intelligence is a neural-like black box.

> So, how will us opaque humans create such a transparent technology?

The same way we identify bugs in our own thinking - by careful application of mathematical methods. It will take time.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#214

Post by asdffdsa321 »

pluma wrote: post #64
shoover wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absurd how people actually do this all the time in Amazon product questions. Will it work with my Samsung phone? "I don't know." Does it come with batteries? "I think it did."

My personal favourite is "I bought this three years ago and don't have it anymore. I don't remember."

I always find it sort of charming and refreshing when people respond as if it was a face-to-face conversation

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#215

Post by bittercynic »

shoover wrote: post #68
harpiaharpyja wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that's because Amazon sends out emails explicitly asking people to answer questions on their past purchases. And for some reason, this makes some subset of people feel obligated to reply even though it makes no sense.

I think you're right. That sounds exactly like something amazon would do and how people would respond. I must have turned those emails off, which makes seeing the answers utterly stupefying.

To give customers the benefit of the doubt: Some may know exactly what's going on, and enjoy making Amazon look stupid by posting those replies.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#216

Post by skybrian »

Johnny555 wrote: post #175
le-mark wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.

I'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).

Consider it a team-building exercise? Companies waste employee time in all sorts of other ways, so why not building desks?

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#217

Post by Florin_Andrei »

sly010 wrote: post #117

A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be? Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a litt…

Sounds like the minimum level of automation that would work is full blown AGI + autonomous robots that could at least match humans in terms of skill and strength.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#218

Post by guelo »

nlawalker wrote: post #176

This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair bo…

Yea but the guy that just gets things done is always completing his projects and exceeding his quarterly goals. So he keeps getting assigned all the new exciting high visibility projects. Managers and execs like him more because he's not always saying no at meetings. He gets promoted or switches jobs before his hacks break down too much. And you're the one left carefully maintaining all the projects he blazed through.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#219

Post by ComputerGuru »

skybrian wrote: post #216
Johnny555 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).

Consider it a team-building exercise? Companies waste employee time in all sorts of other ways, so why not building desks?

Tongue-in-cheek/devil's advocate reply: I wouldn't necessarily consider building furniture a very safe team building excercise, it may just have the opposite result ;-)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-goes-through-every...

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#220

Post by Kluny »

Johnny555 wrote: post #175
le-mark wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.

I'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).

I'd be happy to manage my own desk procurement, including organizing the delivery and assembly, if my employer wanted to pay me for it - that's still paying an engineer for administrative work, but maybe less of it at least.
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