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pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: The Bizarre World of Scam Audiobooks

Yes, only today I noticed a fine free domain recording of a work by Rudyard Kipling has been appropriated by audible with the Librivox blurb removed and the narrator misattributed.

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: How I Practice Piano

After sight-reading through the piece a few times you can generally start writing down the fingering on the score. Keep a pencil handy.

It's a bad idea to finger on the first play or the first day because there's a risk of premature optimisation. It doesn't take much analysis apart from one or two specific problems. The fingerings I end up with usually vary somewhat from the editor's.

But the OP is correct, once you've got a fingering, you have to stick to it, even if it's suboptimal in places. It's your fingering, and if you change something after 200 repetitions there's a danger of slipping back into the old pattern and stumbling.

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: How Long Can We Live?

The treatments don't exist yet apart from a few stem cell treatments e.g. for Parkinson's disease.

But there are clear criteria: there are the seven categories of cell damage proposed by Aubrey de Grey over a decade ago:

https://lostempireherbs.com/anti-aging-7-types-cell-damage/

If treatments are developed to tackle these types of damage then I suspect they will rapidly supersede conventional geriatric care in terms of cost and convenience, a significant side-effect being that the patient subsequently fails to die of natural causes.

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: Why AI is harder than we think

Yes! I like the garbage collection analogy and we already know that children brought up without parents do badly. Why would an AGI be any different, let alone an AGI brought up in virtual chains for safety's sake. What a misguided notion of safety that would be.

>The idea though that we'd make a solo intelligence is bizarre.

Yes, even our outlier general intelligences (i.e. creative geniuses) got that way because they somehow reproduced more of the surrounding culture inside their heads than everyone else did. It's misleading to think of that as solo brilliance.

>They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible.

In addition to pausing, we could also slow the simulation down for periods of communication. But given how long it took humans to evolve from single-celled organisms, and later to develop hand axes, etc, we may find that our potential AGI culture also starts off very very slowly.

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: Why AI is harder than we think

Worth emphasising that the knowledge of how to do these things like tying shoelaces and writing topology papers is contained in the surrounding culture. So if a machine can learn this culture, much of the complexity is outsourced. The ability to learn just one piece of existing culture conveys the ability to learn any other part of it, if one is inclined to do so.

>And that with just 20 Watt?

It is amazing; however there's a school of thought that just as we evolved brains in order to reduce physical effort generally this included minimising power consumption by the brain itself. Intelligence was then a by-product of a more glucose-efficient brain!

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: List of Emerging Technologies

I think you're both right. The benefits of successful invention (most inventions being unsuccessful) redound 1000-fold on surrounding society (rather than on the inventor, who nevertheless may profit).

Yet it's good people who assure the conditions under which invention is even possible.

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: Book Review: “A Thousand Brains” by Jeff Hawkins

The main idea of the book is the very exciting idea of reference frames which are created by cortical columns and whose function is to model aspects of the world such as physical objects and abstract concepts. Thinking is then moving through reference frames and is directly analogous to moving the body.

Importantly, we use many different reference frames to model, say, a coffee cup (Jeff Hawkins' favourite example!) and they vote between themselves in order to produce a coherent/unitary experience. Hence 'Thousand Brains'.

pitspotter | 4 years ago | on: Marbles (2016)

Yes, I hate that motivation. More trivially there are people who enjoy baiting and winding other people up. Why?

I don't know. However I think I know the reason it's permitted to exist: because it makes its victims more resilient. The troll knows this at some level so his conscience is relatively untroubled.

pitspotter | 5 years ago | on: Embrace the Grind

Yes, which piece was that btw?

I'm learning Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G minor, probably the hardest piece for me to date. I'm not timing the process but this must have been going on for six months by now. Practice occurs only when I feel like it, as I walk past the keyboard. Sometimes less than 5 minutes per day. Rarely more than 15 minutes.

But it's getting there! If you added it all up, it would be a tremendous amount of work. Doing it to a schedule, or even just filling out a timesheet, would make it too grindy for me to bother with.

So I think When it comes to learning, it's really motivation that is paramount. Not getting bored is a superpower. It's the ability to 'embrace grind' by discovering what's interesting about it.

pitspotter | 5 years ago | on: FDA approves first test of CRISPR for genetic defect causing sickle cell disease

Health, intelligence and facial symmetry do seem to be linked to the absence of deleterious mutations so yes it may well be that the children of wealthy people benefit, in the farther future. I don't foresee any particular harm, since the standard arguments apply: what starts as luxury eventually becomes accessible to all with the rich having paid the development costs.

Also consider that since the industrial revolution child mortality in the West has declined tremendously (thankfully), so it's possible that our genomes have accumulated mutations presently unknown which will need to be deleted at some point. Better done via gene-editing tech than via the cruelties of natural selection or eugenics.

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