301–310 of 321 posts
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I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to talk to most people in my life lol
Book an appointment with a Psychiatrist, it’ll cost more than a months cc subscription for sure
And Let there be Light - Isn't that either a biblical or a Vedic Origin story? Asimov kind of wraps the whole thing from science into human culture at the end.
>And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Love this story. On this read, I noticed Multivac answers 7x adding a few more words, maybe to imply progress toward its final answer: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. (4x) LET THERE BE LIGHT!
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I'm literally one of those people who almost gave up on the game because I didn't understand that dying is normal. The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated…
You perhaps have a unique neurotype that wouldn't experience the intended positive revelation from the reveal. You are still ruining something for many more others than you are helping. Please consider accepting what your critics are telling you, and remove the spoiler.
I do have some sympathy for the frustration. I don't think neurotype has anything to do with it. Struggling to phrase this in a non-spoilery way, but I think individual experience really depends on where they are in the game at the time of the reveal. I almost quit because of this as well - very glad I didn't.
This could be explained without spoilers though. Something like "There's a moment in the first few hours where you may want to quit. DON'T. Stick with it, I promise it's worth it."
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I'm literally one of those people who almost gave up on the game because I didn't understand that dying is normal. The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated…
A revelation of a mysterious element of the game which is not revealed in any of its marketing material is a spoiler. The fact that you believe it's a "decent compromise" doesn't enter into it. The proper disclaimer for your comment would be: "Spoilers, but I think these things should be spoiled." I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right ti…
>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
hahaha, the irony is that "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER" requires more intelligence than a confident wrong answer. you have to know what you don't know. current LLMs are optimized to always produce output, which means they've essentially been trained out of epistemic humility. Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.
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Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.
I agree (and I don't normally generalize like this, so I apologize). I've spent most of my time in Peru but noticed it in neighboring countries as well.
The captain told us that if we took the bus to Humaitá (a smaller provincial city), we could take a smaller boat that would take us to Manaus. But he warned us that the boat only goes once in three days, and that it would leave soon. The last bus to Humaitá would also leave from Porto Velho promptly.
Despite this flimsy instruction, we didn't see any alternative. So we went. With great luck, we caught the bus and made it to Humaitá (I still have a picture of the boat river transfer the bus took: https://bashify.io/i/CdNcLf).
Our time in Humaitá was surreal. When asked about a boat to Manaus. Everyone told us a different story. There was no harbour (hydroviaria) personal. One person told us the boat to Manaus was named "Caçote". Another person said the boat was named something else. Then someone said it had stopped ferrying years ago. No, we heard from someone else, it would come in 5 hours! Yet another one said it was tomorrow. Someone else felt sorry for us because it had just left. I felt like I was in a (difficult) point and click adventure. There weren't a lot of people in town close to the river, so we ran into the same people from time to time. They would often give different answers to the previous time.
No one was willing to tell us they didn't know. Not a single person out of the 20+ we must have talked to.
In the end, a boat arrived. It went in the direction of Manaus. The captain said that he would only go up to Auxiliadora, and that was still a long way from Manaus. Once again without alternatives (going back to Porto Velho would surely mean we'd miss the flight), we chanced it. In the hopes that getting closer was worth it.
When we arrived at Auxiliadora, it was the smallest inhabited place I had ever been to. Perhaps about 13 houses. Some fishermen. No passenger boat would come for days, they told us. Not to take us to Manaus, neither to take us back. The fishermen had boats, I tried to offer them money so they would take us further. But their day was at an end and they wanted to relax, regardless of what I offered them (we were on a tight budget, but I was desperate enough to offer a significant chunk of a monthly wage, no dice).
Then we found out that on the boat with us, a woman had come who was in a similar predicament as us. She was Brazilian, living in MT and wanting to visit family in Manicoré (which was bigger, and closer to Manaus). Exasperated, she ended up convincing her family to come and pick her up with a speedboat. We hitched a ride. We were very thankful.
When we arrived in Manicoré, I felt like exploring the place. It looked so different from anywhere else I had been, like something out of a movie. But I couldn't. The docks were little more than a collection of wooden jettys (trapiche) that ran everywhere in criss-cross fashion. In order to even get to the quayside we would have to pass through many other boats. In the first one we went through, the captain walked past and I asked him whether he knew of a boat going to Manaus. He signalled where to put my bags. We were leaving.
We reached Manaus in the nick of time.
I love this story, and that time. These anecdotes definitely triggered my memory.
For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
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That is what a base model does. After RL it is a very different thing, and anyone who says they know what it is, is naive or dishonest. These things are grown, not made, and we really do not understand how they work in many important ways.
Yeah, but they’re not magic; we can still do experiments and see what happens. Anthropic did a lot of work on this and showed that they’re not accurately describing their reasoning process.
Lot of confabulation going on in the moist blob of electrochemistry found encased within the hydroxyapatite crystal cage we call a skull. Why is it that things which rhyme, or get repeated a lot, seem more true? How come some of us suffer uncontrollable seizures from flashing lights?
We have to study reason to get any good at it, we absolutely suck at this without training. Our natural state is illiterate, innumerate, and illogical.
The part of our (all animals, not just humans) intelligence that is most magical*, is how efficient we are with few examples, not reasoning.
* Questions about consciousness will have to wait until we can agree which of the 40+ definitions of the word actually answers the question we care about, and then also we figure out how to actually test for whatever that is.
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I find Pascal's wager is of the same nature as Aquinas' Five Ways to prove God, or accelerationists about the inevitability of a Singularity: believing that your own rational argument can be the basis to prove a fact about reality merely because it feels internally consistent. Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.
The Wager doesn't attempt to prove God, it merely states that you might as well worship, because the cost is small and the potential payoff is huge. It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.
Granted, if your belief is based on Pascal's Wager, and is only to hedge your bets, presumably you wouldn't spend much time on religion. But that also raises the question of whether that style of "belief" would be good enough for whatever god might exist.
Granted^2, spending half of your life devoted to a religion could be deemed a small cost when weighed against the eternity afterward. But then you have to think about the idea that you'll have wasted half of your one and only life if the afterlife turns out not to be real.
At any rate, Pascal seems to have failed to consider that there are thousands of religions to choose from, and that a hypothetical god(s) might punish you for choosing to believe in the wrong one. And might even prefer that you believe in nothing, rather than the wrong one!