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- campgroundThis is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
- One compelling theory for why we have not encountered intelligent life is that any sufficiently advanced civilization will eventually stop exploring the universe and immerse themselves entirely in virtual reality, to the point that they harness the total output of their star for computation, and disappear.
Relativity means that the Star Trek vision of a galaxy spanning society is probably an incoherent fantasy. Why pursue expensive, dangerous, and disappointing adventures in the real world when you can conjure any conceivable reality with perfect verisimilitude?
- I'm convinced that wealth and taste are perfectly orthogonal.
- That’s a good place to start building intuition, but it can also distract you actual understanding. What that visualization really is is a bunch of arbitrarily bounded Fourier transforms of little windowed slices of a piece of music. The true Fourier transform of a time bounded piece of music is a single unbounded function over an infinite frequency spectrum.
- Here's a little function that I use pretty often when I want to install a package but I'm not sure what the exact package name is. Give it a keyword and it searches apt-cache and dumps the results into fzf.
function finstall { PACKAGE_NAME=$(apt-cache search $1 | fzf | cut --delimiter=" " --fields=1) if [ "$PACKAGE_NAME" ]; then echo "Installing $PACKAGE_NAME" sudo apt install $PACKAGE_NAME fi } - But all of that labour could have gone into building actually productive assets or infrastructure that meet some of the many real needs that exist in the world. This is a terrible allocation of resources, barely better than him paying them to go into the desert and dig a giant hole and then fill it in again.
I don't the Jeff Bezos personally is the problem, but he and his peers are symptoms of an economic system with very messed up incentives.
- According to this article (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-haves-and-...) annual upkeep is typically about ten percent of the construction cost.
- If by “rid ourselves of the unintelligent” you mean improving public education, then yes, that is a goal. It’s a weird way to put it though.
- “…the evil authoritarian beast just across the way”
Can you say what this is referring to, because I’ve read the piece and I can’t figure it out.
- Iran may not have been colonized but their democratic government was overthrown by the US and Britain to prevent them nationalizing their fossil fuel supply.
I often wonder what the Middle East would look like today if Iran has been able to use their oil wealth for their own democratic civil development.
- Depends which people. The quantity of meat that many Americans eat is absurd and probably unhealthy.
I fully agree that there is a future for meat, but it’s got to be smaller amounts of higher quality, pasture or otherwise sustainably raised meat.
The way I eat meat these days is more as a supplement. A ham hock simmered in a large pot of soup. A single chicken breast in a large stir fry with a bunch of vegetables. It provides a huge amount of flavour and enjoyment, I’m able to afford to buy the best quality, and I’m convinced that it’s a healthier nutritional profile. I think it’s also a lot closer to how most people ate meat historically.
- Giant sea bugs transitioned from inedible garbage to inaccessible delicacy in less than a century.
I was recently comparing cricket flour to various plant derived high protein powders though, and I agree, I couldn’t see the point. They seemed almost identical. Maybe there’s there’s some difference in types of protein that’s not accounted for in the big numbers?
- I tried what you suggested for a bunch of the twitter bios and found nothing except links back to this thread. I also reverse image searched a bunch of them to see if DALL-E was just kind of pasting together large chunks of images, but never found anything close. I do think you're being dismissive but please post any examples of what you mean. I'm a skeptic and have been waiting to find out that this is just a glorified parlor trick, but so far it seems like DALL-E is doing everything the authors claim, which is remarkable.
- This AI is still a minor. It can start looking at R rated images when it turns 17.
- My gut feeling is that AGI is more likely to emerge from our interconnected information systems than to be designed deliberately in a lab.
And I think there is a precedent. We - multi-cellular organisms - emerged as systems to house and feed communities of single celled organisms.
I think it's likely that our relationship with any future, large-scale artificial intelligence will be like the relationship of the bacteria in our guts with us.
- The Italia Squisita YouTube channel has an excellent series of videos of Italian chefs preparing their signature dishes (lasagna: https://youtu.be/H-Ll19h9FFo).
They are 100% authentic Italian by definition, but if you are looking for THE singular authentic Lasagna recipe you aren’t going to find it. Even within Italy there are huge regional variations, and the practice is continually evolving to this day.
I really like this chef’s outro (another lasagna video: https://youtu.be/zXZq6crD6WI) Basically he says “This is how I make it and honour my region and my ancestors, but you should make it however you like, and experiment, because it means the food is alive”.
- I've always been curious why the visible light spectrum appears to "wrap around". Why does the color wheel appear continuous? Is it related to the fact that the frequency range is about an octave?
- I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music. I think you do have to prime the engine a bit. I "like" a lot of albums and songs. Every time I hear something new that I like I press the little heart button. Same when I discover music outside of Spotify (I listen to WFMU a lot). I make a lot of playlists. And I use the radio feature all the time. Click on the ellipses next to any song, artist, or album and you can "Go to radio" and Spotify will spin off a playlist of related music. I'm continually discovering new things that way. My Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists are always full of great stuff.
- Every argument of the form "why would we piss off advertisers" or "why would we make our users unhappy" is void, because they are a monopoly. The mechanism that would make them responsive to customers is completely absent. Everyone hates Facebook, because it sucks. And everyone uses it, because it's a product with the most powerful network effect conceivable. There is a way to have competition, and that is to create a standard for interoperability between competing social media platforms. In theory, the US government could legislate something like that, but in practice that's unthinkable. So it has to come from Facebook itself. That's the only thing that could convince me that Facebook gives a shit about it's users. If you really think people are with Facebook because they like it, prove it. Let them leave. Give them the choice.