VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
I remain unconvinced about (1): it reads as plausible, but I don't think the existence of "superintelligence" is obvious. It seems just as likely that if intelligence is, say, predictive ability, then it could be bounded by the scale of input data with diminishing returns. As an idea, we can train a human to a decent fraction of what cutting-edge models do without needing anything near the scope of training material that the Big Kids are crunching, and with under a hundred watts for 20 years or so.
But first we'd need to iron out what intelligence is, which seems murky still beyond "I'll know it when I see it" a la the Turing test. Is it essentially connected to consciousness (what is that, too)?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
Maybe related: the "contact us" page has a warrant canary saying no warrants have yet been received in 2023.
Probably just forgetting to update, it, but you never know.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
The US Navy in WWII lost quite a few ships and aircraft to typhoon storms in the Pacific. Typhoon Cobra sunk three destroyers and killed 790 sailors, but there were a few other storms too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
Would I be wrong to think that an artist in Eastern Europe would be more likely to recognize such symbols than a random US tattoo joint? I certainly don't have a good feel for the zeitgeist on the ground there.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.
This is at least a solvable design problem, if not a trivial one --- terrestrial temperatures being generally comfortable compared to the extremes of hot and cold in space. It's a bit different for LEO because the Earth is a big object in view, but otherwise the Sun is hot and dark space is very cold.
The entire planet sits in (mostly) thermal balance between solar radiation, terrestrial energy, and radiative cooling to space. No particular reason a satellite can't do that too, although again not as trivially as "slap a heat sink and fan on it" that works down here.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Is that still true? I'm unconvinced "but every Tesla sold could be uploading it's driving camera data over 5G" is quite the win here. Waymo has a lot of vehicles these days, and could be sneakernet-ing all their data (including LIDAR as a source of truth to train video models) nightly too, just without the bandwidth limits.
Not to mention the entire Street View corpus, which seems likely to cover much of the available value there.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
What exactly is the profit motive?
Notionally, space colonization removes the shackles of terrestrial resource limits for mineral resources, energy, and space. The long-term possibilities seem open-ended, but you're not wrong that capitalizing on those within a reasonable time frame from a finance perspective seems questionable. Can corporate structures handle payoff periods longer than a human generation? Maybe some of the closer-term prospects (asteroid mining, space data centers), which are all still not close, can make it viable sooner.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
True. But if you're confident in them, the horizontal scaling is also such that making tens of thousands of them is comparatively cheap, but despite clearly having the ability to do so (literally a factory), they haven't, and there are more Waymos in the area, and Waymo has been scaling aggressively. The only obvious reason there is that the technology isn't really ready and reworking lots of units would be expensive.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I was taught that si means if, while sà means yes. The accent mark is meaningful as written, although not IIRC pronounced differently for single-syllable words.
It's at least plausible that in 30-50 years, games like these will be sufficiently "retro" that there isn't enough money in the market for anyone to even bother the lawyers to object. Already there are games I played as a kid that can't be purchases legitimately (the first two Civilization games, for example), but they can be played online for free and nobody has bothered complaining. I assume those aren't even worth packaging up (and sorting out licensing, which may be complicated) and selling for 99 cents on Steam, or it'd have been done already. Other games of that vintage are still sold, though (LucasArts ones, for example).
Related: does anyone care about the licensing implications of passing on an iTunes MP3 library? The kids are all using Spotify and streaming these days anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I was always under the impression that a core part of the Rationalist project was rejecting prior societal judgement of things and instead autistically determining effectiveness through experiment and first principles.
This seems to be true in practice, but plenty on this forum (and I'd put myself in their number) would consider Chesterton's thoughts on fences to be quite rational as well in the general case. There is probably room enough to argue that both can coexist as "rational", but that us humans tend to smuggle in our prior value systems at any opportunity: Left-leaning rationalists (in the Bay Area) find leftism completely rational; right-leaning rationalists (here, I suppose?) find rightism completely rational. I'm not sure either can really claim a monopoly on "rational truth".
There are also smaller 222mL soda cans, but they are less ubiquitous.
I don't think that's a terrible definition, but it still ends up bounded by the amount of information in the environment available to feed into your intelligence. A third eye would give humans "more information", but probably wouldn't improve our intelligence substantially. I'm sure there are some perfectly capable blind physicists out there.
The other question is what a bunch of Von Neumann clones could do today. IIRC the idea of an atomic bomb was at least known before the Manhattan Project started. It's hard to know in foresight what sort of advances could be made in the next five years, and which will prove intractable. It'd be awesome to solve fusion power, but it's taken well more than five years so far. I'm not sure that the geography of "the possible future" is well enough known to make great claims about what could be there: not all advances that can be seen are inherently terrible.
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