phscguy's comments

The lack of standard scaling of amount of activity breaks this chart. Rock climbing is given as roughly the same death rate as heroin addiction: 0.0145% vs 0.016% per year. But the chart counts 100 years of heroin addiction versus only one year of rock climbing and so misrepresents the risk by a factor of 100.

Also otherwise missing units of time for many of the activities.

I am well aware of von Neumann's works and achievements and mentioned just computing because that is what the HN crowd mostly knows him for. But really, do we want to look for ethical advice from a guy who worked on explosives for the military and then moved on to bring about the most destructive weapons that have ever existed? He then went further and helped make them even more destructive. He imo was one of the people directly responsible for the destruction of the islands in the pacific. His morals to me were clearly twisted.

I can still look up to him as an incredibly brilliant mathematician, computer scientist and engineer without conflating that with him being a good and/or wise human being.

I mostly agree about the point about not basing our views on fiction. I just wanted to point out that of all scientists, of which there are many brilliant ones, there are far better choices for sources of ideas on the ethics of technology. Smarts != Wisdom.

He advocated for a first strike attack (bombing Moscow). Though this was before the Soviets had a strong nuclear arsenal and so likely would not have started a war. So yeah you are right, saying he was pushing for a war is stretching it. He did push for nuking a major city though.

>not the sort of puerile irrationality that privileges Gene Roddenberry's ideas over those of John von Neumann.

Ah yes, the von Neumann that helped developed both the fission bomb and the hydrogen bomb and aggressively promoted the use of them and tried to start nuclear war. I know von Neumann is held in high regard with respect to his role in computing, but he is hardly a guy worthy of respect for his views on the safety of technology.

Yeah. It's these low probability events that scare people away from fission. Fossil fuel pollution kills millions of people per year. Like more than 5 million. How many has nuclear power killed in 60 years? Probably less than 100,000 as a conservative estimate. Events like Chernobyl and Fukushima are sensational and radiation is a sexy topic. People dieing of lung cancer from air carcinogens produced by coal burning is not.

The amount of long lived radioactive material produced by fusion reactors is many orders of magnitude less than fission. Iirc it's about the same amount of the radioactivity released as burning coal in a coal plant of the same power output.

Sadly no. While I think that it would work and probably be cheaper and easier than fusion, fission has an absolutely abysmal public image.

People are terrified of radiation, even if the danger is very low. This means it becomes prohibitively difficult and hence expensive to build and run a fission plant because safety has to be prioritized so heavily. That is even if permission is granted to build in the first place.

I think it is unlikely for irrational fear of fusion to become mainstream like it has with fission.

Because of this I think the barriers to fusion power are at this point lower than the barriers to scaling up fission power.

I can understand that from an enginneering perspective ITER is terrible, but fusion in general?

There are all sorts of approaches to fusion, and things such as type 2 superconductors were undiscovered 30 ago and uneconomic/unpractical 10 years ago. Timing control systems for magnetised target fusion were impossible but now are doable. Our understanding of plasma has been advancing a lot, simulations are good now, we can control plasmas much better. Chirped pulsed laser amplification is a thing now and really good at making high amplitude pulsed lasers for inertial approaches...

I could go on and on. This isn't the 90s anymore, and our technology is still rapidly advancing. What happens if we find more efficient/cheap/high power density thermocouples, or find a direct energy electrostatic power capture method?

Fusion's economic realities today may be overcome soon, we really do not know what we can do in even 20 years from now. The fundamental truth is that there is vast amounts of energy available in hydrogen, and all it takes is 100MK to ignite it.

Yeah, any positive news on fusion progress and there always seems to be the same set of comments appear that are overwhelmingly critical of fusion development. Fusion is not well funded and imo has been let down by mismanagement of ITER, and despite this keeps making progress.

I feel that fusion is one of humanity's best shots at actively reversing climate change, and it is disheartening to see such widespread pessimism about it. Yeah it's hard. There are huge hurdles in making it economicly viable, but if we can go from first powered flight to the moon in 70 years, and put billions of transistors on a chip in 50, then maybe we can get fusion going. It's clearly possible.

I think they meant that sometimes you don't need secure and optimized code and hence you don't need an expert.

It doesn't solve it. The action at a distance is not a problem with quantum theory. This is because it both is predicted by quantum theory and also observed in experiment. It is a fact of nature and must be accepted. Entanglement does not violate special relativity, and QFT happily merges both special relativity and quantum mechanics into one theory without issue.

As others here have already noted, this analogy is wrong. But I think people here haven't given a convincing example of a system that behaves differently due to entanglement than it would if the behaviour were simply conditionally random (the ball example behaves identically if the balls are entangled or otherwise just classically random). The issue in finding a good example is that the effect of entanglement is rather subtle and hard to interpret intuitively.

Here is an example that may make it more obvious:

There exists a game that can be played cooperatively between two players that share two random bits. It is possible to win this game only 75% of the time if the bits are not entangled. If the bits are entangled there is a strategy for winning the game about 85% of the time. The details of the game and a good explanation can be found here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2464

Basically, there is a game that involves sharing two bits, if they are entangled, it can be won 85% of the time. If they are not entangled but otherwise random (like the red and blue ball example), it can be won only 75% of the time.

The parent comment was using Rockefeller's peak net worth as compared to FAANG CEO's net worths to show that FAANG is smaller than Standard Oil was. I mainly wanted to point out that if you instead compare company valuations, each of FAANG is bigger.

Also, at it's peak Standard Oil was worth about 6% of the US stock market. Apple is currently worth 5.3%. This comparison should be robust to differences in interest rates. In this light, Apple is slightly smaller than Standard Oil was. But, the market is broader now and there are more lines of business in existence. So a company that dominates an entire line of business would be expected to have a lower proportion of total stock market cap now than in 1910.

At the very least 2021 Apple and 1910 Standard Oil are very comparable in size. There might not be a clear way to tell which is bigger.

Well actually, Standard Oil peak market cap was about $1 trillion. Rockefeller owned about 25% of this. The rest of Rockefeller's wealth came from the rise in share values post-split. Standard Oil at it's peak actually had lower market cap than any of Apple(2.5T), Google(1.7T), Amazon(1.9T), Microsoft(2.1T) have today, and is about on par with Facebook (1T).

FAANG is huge and market caps already greatly exceed that of the old-school monopolies.