tawan's comments

[Meta] I'd love the read the book with all the stories mentioned in the comments.

At the moment yes.

Thanks! Yep, I also played Blaston a while and really liked it. We basically replaced shooting with a gun with punching in order to make it even more intense.

In addition we also want to build out the social part and create a community of Space Punchers that work out together and motivate each other to stick to a regular schedule. I find it really fascinating how immersive VR can be and really make you think that you are in the same place with your friends. If we can translate this energy into forming a healthy habit of working out regularly with a community than we are on a good path.

Shameless plug: if you are into VR fitness but you think the existing solutions are missing multiplayer options, my brother and I are building Space Punch [1] which is a multiplayer fitness app. It is currently released in early access on Sidequest, and it’s functional. We are working out Monday to Friday 4:30pm UTC. If you have a Quest and want to work out together as group, then drop into our Discord sever. I’ll personally make sure you get an access key and I will show you the App from within.

[1] https://sidequestvr.com/app/5820/space-punch

[2] https://discord.gg/MKsZqrZh

Shameless plug: I work out with the VR fitness app that my brother and I are developing. https://sidequestvr.com/app/5820/space-punch

I think there are two sides to a service like that: on the one hand it provides more transparency to the individual customer (good), on the other hand, any external or internal malicious actor now has a very convenient tool to gain access to lot of very personal information about a single individual (bad). It was probably not even possible without a tool like that, not even for jeff bezos.

I disagree with your conclusion that the odds remain 2/3 even if the host doesn’t know where the prize is. If that were the case, it would mean that if the same scenario is repeated many many times, then in 2/3 of the cases you would still pick the door with the prize with the same strategy. But what about the instances where the host picks the door with prize before you even get a chance to pick the other door? These cases happen with a probability of 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3. Therefore, you only get to choose in 2/3 of the cases and in 1/2 of those cases you have already picked the correct door the first time.

And it doesn’t even have to be conscious decisions either. In my case: I was working for two clients as a freelancer but mid projects it clicked with an exchange student who was about to head back to her home country in two weeks. But it really clicked, such that I neglected my ongoing projects in a really unprofessional manner. I didn’t want to, because I really needed the money, however I just slowly stopped working on the projects so I can spend as much time as possible with this exchange student. And when I wasn’t with her, I was losing sleep thinking of her, even writing songs for her - a prototype courting behavior. Needless to say, my unprofessional behavior came back to bite me years later when I was interviewing and the potential employer was checking references including my former clients. Was that all healthy middle ground? I don’t know. I just know that 10 years later, 5 of those married, and now with two children, I don’t really care :). I'm just as happy as one can be.

> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success.

The author is wrong here, even though it rings true. Early viewers who shared a popular video before it was popular earn the reputation of knowing the next cool thing before everyone else does. They gain “I liked this band before it was cool -tokens”. That’s worth something among peers. If we start to pay out monetary value in addition to that, than we would actually overpay the early viewers. Market forces will eventually rebalance the equation such that early viewers will neglect the reputation part and just start sharing as many videos as possible regardless whether the personally think that those videos are the next cool thing.

I think you misinterpreted my comment (probably my bad, Im not an English native). What I meant is: It is important to make sure that the profits of stocks sold need to be taxed properly, and only the after tax amount that’s left over can be spend on, some may say frivolous, space adventures. Especially when it is often reported that billionaires dont pay hardly any taxes, since their wealth grew „only in equity“. But then suddenly they find themselves on a pretty expensive space vacation.

Lot of people in this thread are arguing that wealthy people can spend money on what ever they want. I think it’s important to distinguish whether the money they spend on personal joy rides has been taxed as private income or written off as business expense. Does anyone have information on whether Bezos‘ investments into Blue Origin has been taxed previously as personal income when he presumably liquidated Amazon stock?

The disconnect in this conversation between employer and employee happens for these reasons: In reality companies had to pay a premium in order to demand that an employee lives in certain geographic area so that they show up every day in a certain office building. Depending on the location of the building, the premium can be very high.

Now comes the pandemic which forces - or should I say “allows” - companies to try out the remote model in unison without the risk of being the first mover.

It turns out that it works good enough. But then a company must be questioning why it should continue paying the location premium to employees if it doesn’t see any benefit in it anymore. Adjusting existing salaries downwards, even though the employees didn’t make any changes in their commitment, is socially unacceptable.

Now companies hope that if an employee decides to take advantage of the new freedoms they have an open for this conversation where they try to cut the location premium based on COL arguments, which they know is not the real reason.

If it would be up to companies alone, they would have already reduced all our salaries and if we wouldn’t have liked that, they would have said.. well just move to a lower COL area, we don’t mind

Yep,I second that. I'm getting redirected to google.

I think this line of jokes has some potential, but I

Given a set of tasks T, that have to be done, and the tasks are interdependent.

Sort T by difficulty to complete. Complete one task after the other starting with the hardest.

This approach goes against the often spread advice that you should start with the easiest tasks, which are probably fast to complete, in order to get quickly a feeling of accomplishment which keeps you motivated. I think this approach is wrong and here is why:

IMO our brains always weigh risk multiplied with investment against reward, and as long as the reward outweighs (risk * investment), we are motivated: Risk meaning here, that you invest time and effort but eventually you miss the deadline and are not paid the full reward. The more time we let pass, without completing anything, then the risk of not getting the rewards becomes bigger and eventually it is not worth our effort anymore, and our brain finds more rewarding things to do (procrastinates). So why should we start with the hard tasks first?

Because, given that we start with the easy ones first, we reduce the available time to complete the hard tasks, and by the time that we start with the hard ones, the risk of failing becomes too big in order to be still motivated. In contrary, when we start with the hard ones, of course it takes longer to finish them, and the time left for the easy ones is less, but our brain can easily estimate the risk of easy tasks, and it will find that it's quite possible to get the final rewards, because we already finished the hard ones.

The realisation changed my life. I completed my CS master studies within 15 months.

I don't know for sure of course, I'm just extrapolating. What we know is that a lot of technical innovation is driven by economical motives. So I presume that there will be engineers who will implement AGI applications with a utility function to make as much money as possible. And making money does not necessarily mean to add value to society. One core aspect of making money today is to supersede competition. And that alone allows a hostile interpretation.

And by disguising as humans, I don't mean that robots will put on human costumes, like the aliens in Men in Black. I think that it will be corporations with an AIG as its actual CEO, but still having a human puppet as its official CEO, just to have a friendly face, for obvious marketing reasons.

AI will not kill all of us, in the beginning. Surely, it will form short term alliances with humans just to disguise itself as human. Because it knows, that with a human face, it can exert more power in this world right now. And there will be plenty of humans to willingly engage in this alliance because it gives them a chance to supersede other humans in terms of economical and political power. In fact, this is already happening. Many decisions are already made by "following suggestions" of big data applications. Who knows, maybe there is already some sort of AGI pulling some string in some corporations ;). Up until the point that humans realize that they are in danger as a species, it will be way too late. And there will be enough of us still happily follow the new masters for the short term rewards, even though it might be clear that there is a high risk of getting liquidated in the near future. As we know, humans are even able to override their survival instinct and blow themselves up when they are proper brainwashed. Humans will be easily reprogrammed by an AGI, and not the other way round.

Probably at the age of ten, the moment when I got to understand the concept of a loop, be it a while or a for loop, I started to realize the endless possibilities one can do with coding. 20 years later, with more sophisticated tools in the pipe, I'm still looking for the boundaries of what is possible and what isn't.

I'm impressed but skeptic, too. Laypeople might not get an accurate impression on what is possible. Considering the image with the guy in a black shirt playing guitar. What if it was a picture of a naked man standing next to a black shirt that is hanging on a clothes hook, and next to it is a guitar is mounted on a rack: My guess it that the computer will still spit out: Guy in black shirt playing guitar, just because this sentence is very plausible in the underlying language model.

Actually I'm thinking of testing future candidates with a "dumb" response like this, just to see if the candidate clarifies the situation and is helpful, or if we are dealing with someone who is just rolling their eyes all day, because of all the dumb colleagues. Someone who feels the need to be condescending when someone lacks some knowledge.