wallacoloo's comments

> we can still clearly state that, say, a coffee maker is not conscious, even if it has rudimentary processing capability

a coffee maker might include a temperature sensor (thermistor) and a heating element. does it predict the future? yes: it has an expectation of the future temperature given the current state. does it model itself as an agent? to a limited degree: it considers the future effects to the thermistor which its immediate control of the heater has, it might even run hypotheticals over a set of different heater controls. throw in a pressure sensor or a flow meter and some valves for more fun.

now, i haven’t read much literature post 90’s on this, but one of the more prominent components of consciousness seemed to be: modeling yourself as an actor within a larger setting, and using that to produce outputs based on predictions and thereby cause a specific future(*). does the coffee maker qualify?

also i don’t think many people think of consciousness in a binary sense. that grey area you describe may be less of “we don’t know if these are conscious (binary)”, but rather “we don’t know if these things have experiences which are relatable enough to our own to be worth considering in the motivating questions (i.e. ethics).” and the things at the bottom (the coffee maker) are more like “whatever experience this thing has is so far removed from our own that we’ll never be able to understand it in human terms (like pain and suffering or wants and desires).”

(*) though some people like Dennet argue that the conscious experience might not always be involved in the causal part of this loop.

this is describing a tendency to shift the burden of trust from those immediately connected to you (e.g. your parents) to those more distanced from you (govt authorities). there’s economic efficiency arguments for this sort of thing: parents can’t keep up with state-of-the-art knowledge in every field, whereas specialization can allow for a system that does. but it creates more fragility (individual mistakes have widespread costs: see prescription opioids leading to mass addiction) and ossification (long after illicit/underground culture has learned something valuable it’s hard to take that mainstream: see the impact of psychedelics on PTSD or depression. or for a case to show that we haven’t reached complete ossification but just slower dissemination, ketamine for depression (which has achieved recent approvals after significant efforts)).

oh, shoot. i assumed i was trying to guess an island nation since it wasn't rendered with any surroundings. but it renders all states this way — just the border, as if it had no neighbors?

from your source:

> Approximately 60-80% of the large displacement motorcycles operating on our public roadways at any given time in the United States have been illegally modified

you’re missing an important qualifier in your own text (“large displacement”). your source also repeatedly says that noise disruption in and of itself is domestic terrorism, which seems… a little ABSURD to me? really? are people TERRIFIED by loud motorcycles? no: it’s a disturbance, an annoyance, a nuisance, many things. but TERRORISM it is not. i really wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in this source of yours.

my thoughts too, based on limited understanding of GPT. but the more pressure you apply towards compressing the neural network during training, the more circuitry these paths are likely to share. it would be interesting to see just how much and which parts could be folded together before you start to lose significant fidelity (though unfortunately the fidelity seems too low today to even try that).

it could be interesting to gauge how entwined the “how did you arrive at that answer” process is with the answering itself. i.e. which paths do they share? even at this early a stage: is there some structure which is used to determine the operand(s) that’s leveraged in both of these prompts? is the “how did you X” answer leveraging most of the “X” circuitry and just bailing out early? or does it deviate as early as post-tokenization?

philosophers would like to know.

step 0: if you’re single and think you NEED to work 60 hrs/wk to survive, quit BS’ing yourself. get a roommate and split the rent.

step 1: gather some savings and take an honest (3mo+) break from work.

step 2: take note of which of your habits actually change when freed from the work-imposed time restrictions.

my personal experience: good habits don’t just spontaneously occur out of the vacuum. and social connections don’t just come knocking on your door. you have to decide these things are important to you, motivate yourself, and build your life in support of them.

to the extent that we don’t teach non-job skills in school, that’s a societal failure. if by “capitalism” you’re referring to how much we shape schooling to focus on making you a productive worker, then sure. but this is as much a failure of our democratic systems (which govern schools) and our social norms around child raising (wherein it’s acceptable to believe that govt schooling is the only learning/wisdom a child needs to be given).

“capitalism” is a boogeyman and — without admitting anything of its merits/faults — using it in such a way only serves to keep yourself from understanding the problems you face more concretely.

i wonder if it’s a city vs suburbs thing. when i lived in the ‘burbs, doing highway driving, i got super accustomed to spotting the next red light and then coasting to a lower speed, hoping it’d turn green before i got there so that my average speed through the light was actually higher, city driving, you accelerate fast and break fast. once you’re accustomed to breaking with force and breaking often, a hard stop at a four way stop becomes a whole lot more natural than the alternative.

i don’t mean to overgeneralize. i expect there is at least some small correlation between density and how much you break at a four-way stop, and i’m curious what the other correlates are and how dominant full-stops are.

> I empathize with those who have been misled by a bunch of loony, grifting parasites who would have been laughed out of polite society 30 years ago.

“laughed out of polite society”? think that one over a bit. sounds pretty impolite to me. (also a decent example of how a group [“polite society”] can inadvertently establish foregranted truths [its own politeness] and be thoroughly baffled when the outgroup challenges that fundamental belief. i’m not accusing anyone here of groupthink — just that it’s a prominent aspect of the present moment).

anyway, i get your point. we all have our limits and there’s no shame in that. IMO if you’re at the point where you truly can’t converse productively with some group — and don’t have the desire to grind it out and search for a way to actually relate to/reach them, then just exit the conversation. leave it to those rare overwhelmingly compassionate individuals who are able and willing to endure to bridge the gap. sometimes you’ll do more good by saying nothing than by fanning the flames. not always easy in an era where people can feel defined by the beliefs we advertise, but if you really believe that these opposing views of the vaccine are harmful to our society, then let go of your apparel and delegate to the best methods for resolving these opposing views. maybe that’s linking to data-based writings (sounds like you’ve tried that, to no success). maybe you’ve found that you can’t actually provide anything to resolve these oppositions. that’s okay. someone else will have it. yield the floor to them.

it’s a blog about async, and especially cancelation. parse presumably doesn’t do any I/O. read/send are the interesting bits because they hit the network, where latency is practically unbounded. a first approach at cancelation might be to make precisely those I/O routines cancelable via (say) error injection, in such a way that none of the non-I/O code ever needs to care specifically about cancelation. so read/send is where the “interesting” cancelation logic lives or hooks into.

oh there’s a pretty sophisticated network for buying arcade cabinets in the US, Sega cabs included. Wired did a writeup on this a couple weeks ago [1]. they really aren’t cheap though. there are a few reasons for the big players to not want these sold on the open market though, like licensing/copyright headaches, which will probably be amplified as people reverse-engineer the game and mod/add their own content.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/gritty-underground-network-bring...

regarding the apparently competing values of reliability and velocity, try propagating these goals through different mediums. code quality can absolutely be ingrained into the culture. things like TDD, when/what to integration test, and encouraging PR reviewers to enforce these requirements. you can literally just run an in-house course/training for everyone and the aggressively follow through.

once you’ve got reliability deep-seated in the culture, then you can talk about velocity all you want without worrying that your teams will make confused tradeoffs. in effect, you’ve communicated the nuanced concept that “we move fast, but always within the constraints that provide for a reliable product”. most people aren’t consciously thinking about it that way (not a bad thing), but their behavior matches what you were originally wanting to convey with a nuanced message.

> Right now we have a huge society-wide problem that requires some sort of societal cohesion and consensus to defeat, but we lack that, and I don't think any of us have the energy to fight this battle at the individual level.

walk me through it: how do we achieve societal cohesion if not by empathy? a society is a network of individuals and entities, and cohesion implies that the individuals want to "stick together". why would i want to be cohesive with the parts of that network that don't acknowledge me? individuals are drawn together by common interests, shared feelings, mutual understanding, ... empathy. it's the basis of every relationship i've ever held onto. how do you build a cohesive society without that? i really don't mean to be obtuse... this is all that i know.

an arcade is an entertainment venue. entertainment venues (along with bars, restaurants) are required to check vax cards (i believe that’s a WA requirement, as opposed to a local requirement). i was being approximate when i said “a year”: more precisely i think the vax card mandate was sometime in June? July? a few months after the vaccines themselves had widespread availability.

> The anti-vaxxers think the vaccines will kill them or make them sterile, or something...it is really hard to keep track of what their current theory is. Again, it's a free shot you can get at the pharmacy, the only rational reason for avoiding it is [..]

in one sentence, you admit that you don't understand what knowledge some person is operating with. in the next sentence, you claim to know what is rational for that person to do. if you're using "rational" in the literal sense, then you've leapt to premature conclusions.

and i get it. it's exasperating. there's a bunch of people who don't want to take a vaccine. and from the outside it seems that as more information becomes available to this group, their vocalized reason for avoiding the vaccine changes. they're being dishonest, and that's infuriating!

if this is what you're seeing, it doesn't necessarily mean every individual within that group is shifting their story. some certainly are, but many aren't and the group behavior can be explained by things similar to "evaporative cooling": some people leave the group as a result of new information (new people are still getting vaccinated, every day), and the people left behind are the ones for which the previously dominant argument wasn't their primary reason for not getting the vaccine -- and so the dominant argument of the group then changes.

group dynamics encapsulate way more complexity than just that one effect. and i think it's worth considering. you see that your own individual behavior is way more consistent than the other side's behavior -- and it is. but that's comparing an individual (yourself) to a group (anti-vaxxers). it's apples to oranges. the other individuals aren't seeing your individual behavior. they're seeing your group's behavior. they're seeing the exact same type of inconsistent and contradictory behavior that you're so fed up with.

what's the way out? well, we haven't found it, so it's hard to say for sure. but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.

> I have little empathy for them, however: I want this pandemic to be over, and they are getting in the way of that.

funny, because most everyone i know wants this too, and it’s always “the other side” which prevents the pandemic from “being over”. from a person standing in the middle, it appears that it’s the divide which blocks this, whereas from deep behind lines i guess it looks like everyone past that divide is blocking things.

well good luck winning a battle in the modern world through force of will. there’s a reason the world powers generally don’t conduct large wars openly these days, and that many conflicts are instead resolved via international agreements (especially of trade). if you do discover a way to resolve the social woes in life without leveraging pro-social behaviors (like cooperation/empathy), write me and share your findings so that i in turn can better the state of our society. and if you spot the inherent contradiction of the previous sentence, i’ll buy you a beer.

i love this viewpoint because your behavior is so similar to what i see among 90% of my friends, it seems logically consistent, and you seem to have arrived at it from your own reasoning/volition.

and then we have the mandates. presumably, your behavior is the same with v.s. without them. as is the case for most people i know. with the exception of my one friend who was building a japanese-style coin-operated 24/7 unstaffed arcade business in a stripmall off aurora. she ditched that a year into the pandemic because navigating the mandates as a business owner is not easy (how does one check vax cards at the door if their business only works because it’s unstaffed? once she does find a solution, how long until the next mandate changes things for her again? it’s settled down a little, but the policy changes were really chaotic through to last summer).

“return to normal” as a phrase is a bit ambiguous. does it mean everyone goes back to living how they did two years ago? or does it mean everyone, within each area of their life, has the option to return to what worked for them then, while keeping the parts of their current lifestyle they prefer? obviously, we can’t grant that level of optionality to every area of life without bifurcating society (e.g. separate schools for in-person vs virtual), which doesn’t sound great. but we can grant that optionality in lots of areas of life that are already adept at catering to different preferences — e.g. restaurants (if you want italian food, go to an italian restaurant), entertainment venues, gyms, and really most small/medium businesses.

i’d love for my friend to be able to open her arcade some day, and i know there are hundreds of other individuals in a similar position as hers trying to bring new things into our community. i think it’s reasonable that we allow a “return to normal” in the areas of life that are already adept at catering to different preferences, and leave the mandates only for those areas in which there’s less optionality (e.g. public transit, schools — for now, etc).

> It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so why maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead?

and you think this is an experience unique to your viewpoint? do you think the people reading your words who have vaguely opposing views might not also be fatigued when your group flatly denies their concerns as irrelevant?

if you find yourself in an us-vs-them mindset and decide to ditch empathy, all you do is widen the divide.

> I don’t understand why people in the West are so anti-mask.

"anti-mask" has an implicit spin where it sounds like you're claiming a person is against the idea of anyone wearing a mask, but then often apply the label to a person who is perfectly fine with masks so long as the person wearing the mask is doing so of their own volition.

so i say split that category, and then the major categories might be more like "pro-universal-masking", "anti-universal-masking" (i.e. "individual choice"), and "anti-mask-wearing-in-public" (not only doesn't want to wear a mask, but doesn't want the people around them to be wearing a mask).

> From this standpoint, I could see [..]

there are so many different standpoints you could take from the HN population.

- "HN focuses on tech; novel tech tends to be anti-regulation => HN must be anti-mandate."

- "HN focuses on engineering; engineering is often an optimization game that involves balancing tradeoffs => HN must believe COVID response relative to all the other risks we face is an over-reaction."

- and of course the one you presented.

my theory is that opinions within any group are just more divergent than people realize. some groups do a better job than others in (a) understanding that and (b) working with that. it's almost all cultural: do people in your culture publicly voice their non-conforming views, and to what degree do people in your culture update their beliefs when they hear new information?