- parodysbird parentIt's crazy how convenient and deep the library on soulseek is. I even use it all the time on mobile.
- This is not at all what is meant by fascist corporatism, nor corporatism more generally. Corporatism is more about collective bargaining by professional trades, and is not the sense of corporation as used for private companies.
- > The challenge with comparing AI to humans is that the bar keeps shifting up.
Exactly. There is no standard, humans will adapt and find how to use AI as a tool, and the bar will never and should never be fixed.
The beauty of Turing's Test (which he strangely seemed to misunderstand) is that it is almost impossible to pass.
- There really isn't any Bayesian "prior" for us. We exist as agents interacting with an environment qua data stream. Every single moment brings new flows of "data" and as such there isnt a sense of having a prior and posterior since this milliseconds prior is last milliseconds posterior.
- Not entirely; it's doesn't necessarily involve taking advantage of price discrepancies in different "markets" of the same asset, or contract so to speak in this case, and so it doesn't necessarily lead to "guaranteed" profit in the way that arbitrage does.
- It is not a good idea for retail investors to get heavily involved in zero-sum derivatives trading against much more sophisticated algorithmic trading models.
- Being next to the steering wheel is worse. If the human needs to be in the car, then he should be behind the wheel. Putting him next to the wheel is categorically stupid and only serves as theater for fools.
- I remember being a young boy spending summers with my grandmother who lived on Church Street. I used to spend whole days in those book shops, good to know they are still a major part of the neighborhood.
- I called him a divine being to describe the kind of experience it was. There was a historical human form of Jesus that the chosen apostles interacted with. In Paul's testimony he encounters Jesus who is not take the form of a historical human anymore and therefore the type of religious experience this is, is one with the divine. I am not making a Christological argument on the full nature of Jesus.
I am Christian btw, but I support bringing historical and documentary rigor to theology. I also haven't actually doubted anything, at least not of Christ. I've just characterized Paul's gospel and mission as coming from a private and separate revelation, unlike the gospels and missions that the original apostles received.
The point that I made based on that is that it is strange that a lot of the theology of Christianity as it develops centuries later is derived more from the exceptional and privately delivered gospel of Paul, rather than from the gospels of the apostles of Jesus when he also held a historical human form.
I think there is also an obvious scholarly reason for this that doesn't even require belief, which is that Paul's writings are the closest documents we have to the time of historical Jesus. However, that also gives reason for us to be cautious in hanging major theological positions on specific sections in Paul that seem absent from or in tension with the synoptic gospels.
- > His main privilege was that petty local rulers were more reluctant to persecute him than they would a non-citizen
It's more than that. Basically everywhere he went local commoners wanted to kill him and it was the elite local rulers that safeguarded him
- I chose the words carefully for that reason. The prophet of the nascent religion was a human being who was born, lived and died as a human being. Paul did not encounter this man. In his story, he encounters a divine being, and receives a private revelation (gospel) and mission that is distinct from the revelation and mission that the prophet in question gave as a human to his chosen students (apostles).
Paul is, in this terminology, also a prophet. He explicitly says the revelation he tells is not of human origin, and so not passed down to him through e.g. the ministry of one of the students (apostles) of the prophet in question.
It strikes me as unusual to have so much of the theology coming from someone who simply claims private revelation but is not the prophet in question and when the prophet explicitly chose disciples and set a ministry for them.
- > Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
He wrote for the New Yorker, which is a magazine rather than a newspaper. The number of long-form literary nonfiction pieces that the New Yorker runs every year is drastically fewer than the number of news articles produced to fill a daily newspaper in just a couple weeks.
- I'd recommend looking into adding a speculative final journey he might have taken to Spain. He mentions plans to go there in Romans, and other sources like 1 Clement and Jerome suggest he actually went there. The city of Tarragona has a tradition that he visited, as a speculative destination to map.
- It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
- He was also a Roman citizen, so he could pull some privileges for free rides like getting to Rome through exercising his right to appeal directly to the Emperor
- AGI is made-up nonsense, so it's better to phrase the hardware overhang (and anything else that is meant to refer to reality) without reference to it.
- I think I might value a society where there are fewer people like this
- Or that these people are not suitable to have been judges in the setup of the Turing Test... People also fall for email spam with blatant misspellings, that doesn't mean email spam passes a Turing test, it means the people falling for it are marks.
- > movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator
That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
- That's a wild impression of what living in a city is like
- The original Turing Test was one of the more interesting standards... An expert judge talks with two subjects in order to determine which is the human: one is a human who knows the point of the test, and one is machine trying to fool the judge into being no better than a coin flip at correctly choosing who was human. Allow for many judges and experience in each etc.
The brilliance of the test, which was strangely lost on Turing, is that the test is doubtful to be passed with any enduring consistency. Intelligence is actually more of a social description. Solving puzzles, playing tricky games, etc is only intelligent if we agree that the actor involved faces normal human constraints or more. We don't actually think machines fulfill that (they obviously do not, that's why we build them: to overcome our own constraints), and so this is why calculating logarithms or playing chess ultimately do not end up counting as actual intelligence when a machine does them.
- You can be inspired by anything, that's fine. Gell-mann was amusing himself and getting inspiration from Buddhism for quantum physics. It's the process of the inquiry that generates the knowledge as a discipline, rather than the personal spark for discovery.
- The thing with alchemy was not that their hypotheses were wrong (they eventually created chemistry), but that their method of secret esoteric mysticism over open inquiry was wrong.
Newton is the great example of this: he led a dual life, where in one he did science openly to a community to scrutinize, in the other he did secret alchemy in search of the philosopher's stone. History has empirically shown us which of his lives actually led to the discovery and accumulation of knowledge, and which did not.
- > It’s called Quantum Mechanics.
Nobody is suggesting anything entails a possible violation of quantum mechanics, so yes, obviously any system under inquiry is assumed to abide by QM.
- How is what the same thing? Fabric production vs social communication? I don't really see what is the relation here.
- > Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding.
Sort of. Alphafold is a prediction tool, or, alternatively framed, a hypothesis generation tool. Then you run an experiment to compare.
It doesn't represent a scientific theory, not in the sense that humans use them. It does not have anywhere near something like the accuracy rate for hypotheses to qualify as akin to the typical scientific testing paradigm. It's an incredibly powerful and efficient tool in certain contexts and used correctly in the discovery phase, but not the understanding or confirmation phase.
It's also got the usual pitfalls with differentiable neural nets. E.g. you flip one amino acid and it doesn't really provide a proper measure of impact.
Ultimately, one major prediction breakthrough is not that crazy. If we compare that to e.g. Random Forest and similar models, the impact in science is infinitely more with them.
- Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun, but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But by judicious it's important that the human is the one doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the human is still the one communicating.
When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam machine without the curation.
- This is basically a contemporary reframing of the core purpose of Renaissance magic. I suppose aspiring to be a 21st century John Dee from talking to some powerful chatbot of the future, rather than angels or elemental beings, does sound a bit exciting, but it is ultimately mysticism all the same.
- To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation".
When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual personal expression in a shared social context.
If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation. Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social context in which she generally treats certain things I say as little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output. Thus the shared social context and relationship is then degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above post calls it).
- It's not pedantic, it's true, and it actually is deeply important because misunderstanding this can lead to very different beliefs about the world, science, and technology.