Hey! Just asking you because I’m not sure where else to direct this energy at the moment.

I spent a while trying to understand the argument this paper was making, and for the most part I think I’ve got it. But there’s a kind of obvious, knee-jerk rebuttal to throw at it, seen elsewhere under this post, even:

If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?

Evolution “may be thought of” as a process that samples a distribution of situation-behaviors, though that distribution is entirely abstract. And the decision process for whether the “AI” it produces matches this distribution of successful behaviors is yada yada darwinism. The answer we care about, because this is the inspiration I imagine AI engineers took from evolution in the first place, is whether evolution can (not inevitably, just can) produce an AGI (us) in reasonable time (it did).

The question is, where does this line of thinking fail?

Going by the proof, it should either be:

• That evolution is an intractable method. 60 million years is a long time, but it still feels quite short for this answer.
• Something about it doesn’t fit within this computational paradigm. That is, I’m stretching the definition.
• The language “no better than chance” for option 2 is actually more significant than I’m thinking. Evolution is all chance. But is our existence really just extreme luck? I know that it is, but this answer is really unsatisfying.

I’m not sure how to formalize any of this, though.

The thought that we could “encode all of biological evolution into a program of at most size K” did made me laugh.

but there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve it

They provide a reason.

Just because you create a model and prove something in it, doesn’t mean it has any relationship to the real world.

What are we science deniers now?

I’m not gonna go looking for scans or anything, but KnowYourMeme lists the popularity of this one as starting between 2013 and 2015, and I definitely remember seeing this phrase in a textbook around 2010 or 2011. So honestly, I might blame Pearson or McGraw Hill.

Okay so, this is a rhetoric problem.

This phrase here:

I disagree with the premise, the Holocaust was unique.

You lost the crowd immediately. The thrust of Walz’ position is that people should be more aware of the ubiquity of genocidal thinking, and in your first sentence, you put yourself in opposition to him.

Even though you agree with Walz later in spirit, the immediate impression is that you’re downplaying other genocides by over-fixating on the shock and horror of this one in particular, and it takes you way too long to clear up your position.

If you had phrased this as “added context” or “an additional fun fact” or “some ways in which the holocaust was unique,” it becomes much harder to disagree with you. Your audience isn’t primed immediately to be angry, and you beget much more charitability, at least from those who aren’t insane.

<3

During the third or fourth time I was mad that 3D hadn’t taken off like technicolor, I though “fine! I’ll just look at trees and hallways in real life then!” And yeah, it kinda works.

There’s a lot of beauty in the world if you just, you know, look at it.

I think it’s funny you talk about revenge porn like it’s just so tiresome and tedious to think about.

“Oh, a hurricane struck Florida again.”
“Oh, there’s revenge porn of my neighbor’s daughter again.”
“What a terrible saturday.”
“Anyway, I think my toast is done.”

Imaginary grenades.

Having porn made of you is imaginary?

At some point the “it’s just a game” also stops holding water…

The video game doesn’t produce anything.

AI is not the cause for generating deep fakes,

DUIs can be reduced with public transportation. What do you propose reduces… porn fakes?

Ain’t it interesting how coming up with a consistent framework, makes it applicable to different areas of life?

Fucking lol.

My problem with machine learning porn is that it’s artless generic template spam clogging up my feed of shit I actually want to see. But you know, to each their own.

Exactly! I’m always complaining about the illiterate. I like to write them letters because I know it makes them sad.

I will let myself bleed out in a Safeway parking lot before installing McDonald’s stupid fucking app to get a 1.99 boiling hot coffee to cauterize the wound with.

How do you feel about negotiating the price of a new car down?

Personally, I think it’s really cool that people without social skills are charged more. It’s like “take that! ya fuckin loser.”

I read the first bullet point and immediately had a prophetic, future-sight vision of the comments before even scrolling down. I’m so sorry, man, haha.

This is why I have a PS5.

Granted, I don’t hate the thing, but I also don’t find it that useful.

I wish it supported ultrawide. Returnal does.

You two are doing fantastic and I love you.

I had a job that was kind of like this. I spent pretty much all of my down time writing a web game that later got me a software job.

I wasn’t bored, though. I miss working on that thing.

. and … are how terminals navigate around file systems.

The command cd . means “change directory (cd) to here (.)”

cd .. means “change directory to here, but one level up: my parent directory.”

So following that model, winrar and maybe older versions of 7zip used folders called ‘.’ as navigational tools within the archive browser. If you double-clicked through them, you’d see where they go.

I don’t know how much of this you knew, but the point is it shouldn’t freak you out too see them.

Only if I respect the product, buddy.

Subscription services still get worse. The arrogance Cable TV must have to show us ads—cable was the ad-free service back in its day. The same is happening with Netflix. The same will happen with Spotify. This thing is a snake eating it’s own fucking tail.

I want something without perverse incentives. Donations, maybe. Taxes, possibly. I get free roads, why not a free search index.

it’s a good idea not to allow your site to generate any kind of circular self-referential loop that can be achieved via navigation or clicking on things

Don’t nearly all sites have a logo at the top that will take you back to the homepage? I’m not really following.

My intuition is that the only safe solution is to rate limit requests; a poorly coded bot could definitely just be a while loop for the same URL ad infinitum.

[e] Unless there’s something to this I’m not thinking about.

To be fair, we’re getting diminishing returns every iteration. 7 is only 1/6th more than the last one. And 8 will be just 1/7th. I don’t blame people for being a little fatigued by this.