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knodi123
Joined 6,403 karma
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  1. I guess that makes sense. Thanks.
  2. > "would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors..."

    It's a dumb law, but, devil's advocate - isn't that how porn shops work? And porn shops also sell some non-porn items, too.

  3. but what about my senile mice? please, won't somebody think of them??
  4. I chuckled, but presumably it's useful for applications where you want data types to take up the same amount of space, like for matrices or database columns? Or maybe where you coerce different data types into boolean? The language offers WordBool and ByteBool too, so they're pretty consistent. And AFAIK, there aren't any languages where you can specifically allocate only a single bit for a single boolean.
  5. "But what if black people really _are_ subhuman?" No thanks. Not biting. I disagree, but arguing that topic just makes me sad and angry, and I've never changed a racist's mind.
  6. > The judge is an incarnation of evil and a pedophile so I don't think that's his Mary sue

    Although... he did rather famously have a thing for underage girls...

    https://medium.com/belover/cormac-mccarthy-was-a-pedophile-a...

  7. holy racist dogwhistle, batman.

    chimpanzees are animals, and the only people who think differently are the straw men in the imaginations of people I prefer not to spend time talking to.

  8. he's been moaning loudly and histrionically about how london is doomed because there's not enough white natives.
  9. her followup post:

    Deleted my post, which I published before Ruby central released their blog explaining things.

    It’s ultimately not my place to say or speculate about what’s going on.

    It’s obviously a disastrously bad roll out or whatever is happening and I hope they are able to make things right w the community.

  10. Try looking at the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve. What isn't beneficial is sometimes retained as long as the cost isn't bad enough to impair reproduction.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evid...

  11. > and then sort out everyone's status after the fact.

    Did they do that? Or did they throw out the ones with valid visas too? (hint: It was the latter. Details are in the article.)

    The bigger problem is that they "invalidate" your visa post-facto, on a whim, for whatever they want. Attend a political protest? Have a 20 year old bad check on your record despite having lived here for 50 years, since you were a young child? Embarrass a politician? I've seen all of those and more result in a legal immigrant having their visas cancelled and then thrown in jail until they can be deported.

  12. > Burden of proof is to show that AGI can do anything.

    Yeah, if this were a courtroom or a philosophy class or debate hall. But when a bunch of tech nerds are discussing AGI among themselves, claims that true AGI wouldn't be any more powerful than humans very very much have a burden of proof. That's a shocking claim that I've honestly never heard before, and seems to fly in the face of intuition.

  13. I googled it, and I can't find support for the claim that DARPA is monitoring internal progress of AI research companies.

    Maybe you can post a link in case anyone else is as clumsy with search engines as I am? After all, you can google it just as fast as you claim I can.

  14. > the USA has had DARPA monitoring stuff like this since before OpenAI existed

    Is there a source for this other than "trust me bro"? DARPA isn't a spy agency, it's a research organization.

    > governments won't "look ahead", they'll just panic when AGI is happening

    Assuming the companies tell them, or that there are shadowy deep-cover DARPA agents planted at the highest levels of their workforce.

  15. * or governments fail to look far enough ahead, due to a bunch of small-minded short-sighted greedy petty fools.

    Seriously, our government just announced it's slashing half a billion dollars in vaccine research because "vaccines are deadly and ineffective", and it fired a chief statistician because the president didn't like the numbers he calculated, and it ordered the destruction of two expensive satellites because they can observe politically inconvenient climate change. THOSE are the people you are trusting to keep an eye on the pace of development inside of private, secretive AGI companies?

  16. That's remarkably short-sighted. First of all, no, millions of them don't walk the earth - the "A" stands for artificial. And secondly, most of us mere humans don't have the ability to design a next generation that is exponentially smarter and more powerful than us. Obviously the first generation of AGI isn't going to brutally conquer the world overnight. As if that's what we were worried about.

    If you've got evidence proving that an AGI will never be able to design a more powerful and competent successor, then please share it- it would help me sleep better, and my ulcers might get smaller.

  17. One of two things:

    1. The will of its creator, or

    2. Its own will.

    In the case of the former, hey! We might get lucky! Perhaps the person who controls the first super-powered AI will be a benign despot. That sure would be nice. Or maybe it will be in the hands of democracy- I can't ever imagine a scenario where an idiotic autocratic fascist thug would seize control of a democracy by manipulating an under-educated populace with the help of billionaire technocrats.

    In the case of the latter, hey! We might get lucky! Perhaps it will have been designed in such a way that its own will is ethically aligned, and it might decide that it will allow humans to continue having luxuries such as self-determination! Wouldn't that be nice.

    Of course it's not hard to imagine a NON-lucky outcome of either scenario. THAT is what we worry about.

  18. You must not be a programmer, or you'd understand that NULL !== 0

    ;-)

    But my overarching point is that $329,000,000 is an absurd and arbitrary number, so for my purposes, either value NULL or 0 would make my case.

  19. to me? an infinite amount! So trying to measure it in dollar terms is already a pointless exercise.

    If you want to see the hole in this argument, try looking at it from the other side- How can you arrive at the conclusion that a life is worth only $329M? Why so low? Why not a billion, or a trillion?

    If you have to come up with an objective and dispassionate standard, then I doubt you'd find one where the number it generates is $329 million.

  20. This (OP) project is inspired by neovide, a recent neovim gui. And iterm2's animated cursor is a brand new feature, also inspired by neovide.

    Honestly, iterm2 is way too nice a piece of software considering the price. A real labor of love from a guy who apparently has lots more free time than me. :-)

  21. I have {{popular job title in tech}}@gmail.com , and let me tell you.... yikes. Actually it's not that bad, I just tweak my enormous blacklist keyword filter once a month or so. For some reason, 99% of the junk is from India, which makes filtering easier. But brother you should see my "misdelivered crap" folder.
  22. Did I miss the vote we had on broadband speed goals, or whether we should publish prices?

    Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.

  23. Should have given tiny doses of HN to the server every day, increasing the dose over time, until it built an immunity to hordes of traffic.
  24. But it was a spinthariscope. If the resin blocked all the alpha particles, then they wouldn't produce the visible flashes in the screen. It seems more likely that the radioactive substance would be embedded in the surface of the resin. And therefore eating it would still allow it to damage your tissues.
  25. not stupid at all! the idea is that practicing conscious breathing techniques can have effects on your stress levels and cognition and such. it's not that you're learning how to breathe, but rather how to breathe for a desired effect.
  26. > “The Master Key,” where a boy wise beyond his years rejects powers too advanced for humanity to adapt.

    For those stumbling by- that's a 1901 novel by L. Frank Baum, who also wrote The Wizard Of Oz! Here's a synopsis: https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/The_Master_Key

  27. > It will power scams on an unimaginable scale

    It already is. https://futurism.com/slop-farmer-ai-social-media

    And all the other things you predicted. They're underway _now_ .

    > Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough

    Nope. That's not how it's gonna work. If you want to prevent things, it will take legislation. But sitting it out doesn't send any message at all. No amount of butterflies farting against the wind is going to stop this tornado.

  28. Assuming he can get his hands on the tokens and then convert them to local currency. Not impossible, but it's worth noting that he still hasn't managed.
  29. The scary thing is that the robots will only continue to improve, and large numbers of them can be controlled by a small number (1?) of people, with other robots to handle logistics and support. So scenarios like "rogue leader ignores will of the people and orders his troops to ethnically cleanse a city" would go from being a mistake that causes the immediate end of a political career, to something that takes 15 minutes for 100% success.
  30. Man, look at all those keywords I remember from college. I wish I got to use fancy well-known algorithms. Instead all I'm doing is building UI components and REST APIs to present elasticsearch results. All the fun stuff is buried in black boxes.

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