problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I'm aware, I'm just being facetious - rather, I'm pointing out that there are a lot of Aphex Twin tracks which are probably not suitable for small children (something which I assume the contents of the links I provided would immediately make clear).
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
The human brain is a "chinese room".
Not exactly, ChatGPT isn't possessed of "understanding" of textual content like humans are, but it can generate text very competently nonetheless.
Also AI has done many agentic things. Any definition of agentic that would exclude everything an AI has done would be so strict as to be obviously fragile and not that meaningful.
I mean, I agree that the distinction between an agent and automation is a completely arbitrary distinction predicated solely on degree, but the fact remains people don't think of AI as agents in any real sense at the moment. I think as the progress of the field goes on that perception will shift.
Hadn't heard about the 0E0P metacell before, reading about it now and it's certainly cool.
I don't think the original question is fundamentally interesting, tbh - any system capable of universal computation tied to some sort of action will be capable of self-replicating in all sorts of bizzare ways, comparable to turing tarpits.
I suppose the question was less "would there be other usable self-replication methods" - because the answer's almost certainly yes - and more "has anyone else posited one and would that specific system be capable of significant emergent complexity". The question was asked for completely trivial worldbuilding purposes where specific details are crucial - I have a tendency to get bogged down in detail analysis to an unreasonable degree.
As far as I can tell, no one has seriously tackled that question in full - I'm not aware of any paper for now that confidently advances a novel system explaining how an alternative replicator mechanism can be interpreted as instructions for building stuff. The way DNA/RNA is translated into building an organism is a fairly convoluted multi-step process and building such a system for any hypothetical replicator is probably very difficult.
Most of the papers I come across are at the very basic level of "how can a sequence of information robustly self-reproduce and transmit its characteristics in a way that Darwinian selection can operate on it", that additional layer of complexity surrounding translation is unfortunately not touched on (either because it's not part of their intention to create a general purpose replicator, or because they can't propose one).
Different strokes I guess. I think the following points you’ve listed as downsides of living in a rural area are, to me, upsides:
I've lived in villages, and it feels so isolating, it's awful. I like hearing people around me, even, and in fact especially because I have no interest in actually interacting with them. Then there's the other side, where instead of being isolated, people will try to be friendly even when you don't want that.
To offer the perspective of someone else I know, my dad grew up in a village in Malaysia (that has significantly modernised since) and spent his childhood riding up and down forest trails. He remembers that period of his life as being extremely idyllic, and the nostalgia he has for it is clear.
Similarly, I enjoy being isolated, I enjoy proximity to natural spaces, and vastly prefer the “depression” of the outskirts compared to my daily experience of being shoved in with hundreds of people in a tube, packed like sardines. That’s how my morning commute is, and I always come out of the experience mildly frustrated.
When I’ve been in the outskirts I’ve always enjoyed when people have been friendly to me, or when the odd local has tried to make conversation. It’s felt welcoming without being utterly and completely overwhelming the same way the city centre has been.
And at least in my experience, villages are not quiet. There's lots of animal sounds, especially bugs which I personally despise.
To me, this is a bonus: I welcome most if not all animal sounds, including those of insects; crickets and even cicadas do not bother me. Birdsong is especially welcome. I find it much harder to ignore ambient noise in the city, which is far louder in general and much more unpleasant in terms of timbre.
I live in a very small city, so it's not a good comparison to Sydney, I can take the bus and be in a big forest in 15 minutes, but I would never go live rural.
Perhaps I should’ve been more clear as to what I mean when I say "city", which is a major urban hub. I find small cities somewhat fine as long as there are adequate outdoor recreation opportunities in close proximity to the town. But I think you’re underestimating just how much density my partner prefers - he actively enjoys going downtown, and his idea of a “depressing and isolating” place is living in a suburb of a major (and I mean major) North American city. He has some level of flexibility around this, but he does enjoy the density of urban cores quite a bit, and doesn’t enjoy when he’s too far distanced from it.
I think we're discussing different music crowds here. There's probably a difference in mindset between people who work professionally in music for a wage and "art people" - the young, generally progressive music fanatics who are extremely interested in music as an artform, who really care about cultivating the image and mindset of what they perceive artists are like, and believe that the value of music is in communication between individuals. These people find that AI art devalues artforms and believe it is meaningless due to the lack of human involvement. I will not debate the validity of that position (though I disagree), but it leads them to be disturbed by the idea of AI art and they as a result have a very strong incentive to downplay the capabilities of AI.
You have pretty much also converged on a strategy I had come up with quite a while ago (and didn't talk about because I wanted to potentially implement it in some fiction of my own) - be extremely expansionary, and sterilise/terraform possible habitable planets ahead of time so competition within your Hubble sphere is minimised to the greatest degree possible. The Dark Forest fails to be a satisfactory Fermi paradox solution at least in part because it simply doesn't and can't address why it is that the universe isn't already filled to the brim with intelligent life. On its face it offers up an argument against communication, but that doesn't address the issue of why we don't see grabby aliens everywhere. The utility of expansionism is difficult to ignore.
My personal preferred hypothesis surrounding this (and one I haven't seen in popular discussions of the Fermi paradox) is the idea of an astrobiological phase transition. A possible vehicle for this transition would be gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which occur when two neutron stars spiral inwards. Star formation peaked 10 billion years ago and has declined since, resulting in a decrease in the rate of GRBs. These bursts are probably capable of sterilising large swaths of the Milky Way possibly hundreds of light years across, and such bursts may have been responsible for some extinctions in earth history.
It seems not implausible that we might be just at a spot in space and time where the frequency of GRBs is low enough to allow for the development of intelligent life (which we would expect to see developing not only here but in many other places concurrently), and we're in a phase transition between an equilibrium state where the universe was devoid of intelligent life and another new equilibrium where the universe would be filled to the brim with it.
You understand this is going on your permanent record, right?
As I said, I'm not ecstatic about it. It's probably one of the biggest marks against myself I've earned while I've been there, and while it didn't affect any deadlines or critical tasks (I was able to finish all my work) it probably does have an impact on perceptions of reliability.
At the risk of sounding self-aggrandising, though, I will say I'm not too concerned about people's perceptions of me in the long run since I am aware people are generally happy with my performance. In the org I work at, there's a monthly meeting where you can nominate someone who's performed particularly well, and last month I received three separate nominations. I am told regularly that people have good things to say about me, and often have to be pushed by my superiors into going home. The reason why I was "smashed" enough to sleep 11 hours was not because of any particularly indulgent behaviour, it's because I have consistently tired myself out for the past month or so.
The main practical concern I have at this point is more that this could happen again and I want to incorporate protections against that into my routine. But if three alarms isn't enough to make me get up and stay up, it's hard to imagine something that will.
problem_redditor
6mo ago
You guys underestimate how shit the psychiatric services are in the third world!
Oh trust me I know, I grew up there (and had an impossible time finding any halfway-decent mental health services there when I needed it). By suicide watch I just mean an informal one made up of friends and family.
Glad to hear you left him with company, and good on you for talking him down.
Perhaps this is harsh, but there's also the fact that if we're talking about adults the people who would pick blue in the first place would likely be a tiny subset of people (suicidal people, mentally retarded people, etc) whose QALYs are realistically fairly limited. I'd say "Maybe we could just not try to pull off some incredible coordination feat which might turn out horrible for marginal gains" is fairly reasonable.
It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.
I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.
I'm typically trying to achieve a little of both. I would agree that admitting ignorance when you're not certain about something is always the better tactic (additionally, making errors during a discussion disturbs me so much that I often feel the need to retrospectively correct it in future discussions when the opportunity presents itself).
Of course, the optimal strategy is to remember as much of the information you've encountered as humanly possible, but that requires a concerted effort and is a huge time sink.
Apart from what other users have brought up, there's also the fact that experiments in multicellularity appear very early on in the fossil record. Our oldest evidence for it consists of macrofossils that were discovered in the Franceville basin in current-day Gabon, in what would have been a shallow oxygenated delta at the time, and which have been dubbed the "Francevillian biota" or "Gabonionta". They are dated to 2.1 Ga, in the early Paleoproterozoic.
The emergence of this biota follows the Great Oxidation Event approx 2.4-2.1 Ga, an event where cyanobacteria caused a mass extinction by producing oxygen, something which is toxic to many anaerobes. The interaction of free oxygen with cellular components produces an oxygen radical called a "superoxide anion" which is capable of triggering a chain of destructive reactions in the cell. Aerobes are only capable of withstanding this because they possess enzymes called superoxide dismutase which essentially "neutralise" the superoxide anion (and if exposed to too much oxygen can still experience hyperoxia).
Before then, Earth had a reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen, and the GOE changed the environment into an oxidising atmosphere, with oxygen levels being as high as 10% of their present atmospheric level by the end of the GOE. And it also seems that oxygenation is a factor which is a prerequisite for the development of large multicellular organisms. Only aerobic respiration can produce enough energy for a complex metabolism, and although there are some exceptions, few multicellular life forms are anaerobic.
The Francevillian biota are surprisingly complex considering how early they appear. There are a number of forms the fossils take. Some look like elongated pearl-strings that end in a "flower". Others look like really bulbous nipples. They exhibit patterns of growth determined from the fossil morphologies that are suggestive of intercellular signalling and thus of mutually synchronised responses that are the hallmarks of multicellular organisation, and there's also evidence that they were capable of moving around in search of food resources - there are string-like tracks at the site which might represent mucus trails.
A particularly striking feature of the Francevillian biota is that they are isolated in time. No structures similar to them are known from earlier times and the biota are conspicuously absent from the overlying layer of black shale. It is notable that their disappearance also seems to roughly correlate with an occurrence called the Shunga event. What caused it hasn't been conclusively pinned down, but it involves the creation of one of the oldest known petroleum deposits on Earth, indicating the demise of a massive primitive biomass. The Shunga reserves in the Lake Onega region of Russia alone preserve up to 25 × 10^11 tonnes of organic carbon, and deposits of about the same age and having similar carbon isotope chemistry have been found elsewhere in northwest Russia, as well as North America, Greenland and West Africa, indicating that this was a global event. The organic blooms associated with the Great Oxidation Event abruptly cease, and oxygen levels drop back down to pre-GOE levels.
In short, these fossils seem to represent a first experiment in megascopic multicellularity that arose during a period of oxygenation and subsequently died off when the environment shifted against them. This seems to indicate that multicellularity can start developing relatively quickly, and part of the reason why there was a delay is because the first experiments in multicellularity were abruptly stopped in their tracks.
Which raises the question as to what would've happened had the extinction not occurred. This was a very crucial point in the evolution of life and small changes in the initial state of a system can lead to huge downstream ramifications, so how different would life be today if they had been able to develop?
Currently listening to the Charley Crockett album you posted and am liking some of this, especially Clown. If you like folk, I'd recommend you have a listen to Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, which is a masterpiece of songwriting and one of the more depressing albums I've listened to.
I've been listening to a lot of electronic music recently. For a link to some of it, I posted a list of the electronic albums I've been enjoying not too long ago, and have been updating it as I go along for future reference in these music threads (at the time of this post, it stands at 35 entries). It is basically the antithesis of the music you've posted. I’ve bolded the albums that I think might confuse and/or outright annoy people, which makes up 20 of the 35 albums (and some of which are among my favourite albums of all time, with Exai in particular being my favourite album of any genre). You can take the bolding either as a warning or a challenge.
I mean, if you want to subject it to that level of scrutiny, very little other than a full-scale statistical analysis of wokists and their tendency to "rally around" clearly corrupt people, using other political tribes as comparison samples, would suffice to truly demonstrate the point (and in such a study having cases to analyse is still required). Anyway, I think we both know that doesn’t exist, and that TPTB would never conduct that study.
To say something that may get me in trouble, on a more practical level, I think we also both know in colloquial discourse nobody ever adheres to this standard or forms their opinions on it, except Rats, and when you're talking to normies these standards do not apply and you will have to address arguments that do not adhere to that standard of rigour in the slightest. You'll notice I've repeatedly talked about how convincing having these examples is to people. If they are throwing examples of, say, anti-woke bad behaviour at you, having examples such as this to throw back is necessary. Appealing to them with Rat hypotheticals like Chinese Robber isn't going to change their opinion and is going to make you look like you have no counterexamples. Trust me, I've tried, and in the beginning I cited heaps of good sources and made rigorous arguments that would very much make a rationalist piss themselves. In actual debate, this does not work and is completely unrelated to how normies conceptualise things, and you'll very easily find that your rationalist thought experiments fail miserably against an opponent and an audience that doesn't care. How argument should go is not how argument actually goes. Not now, not ever. I wish this was not the case.
Additionally, I'm not even sure how much people here adhere to that standard, either. Applying this standard consistently would exclude a huge portion of content on TheMotte (and an even greater portion of content on most other discussion spaces), and kind of feels like an isolated demand for rigour that almost nothing else here gets subjected to. I'm more than happy and able to submit to that standard of proof for the claims I make, but it is noticeable that in general the standard doesn't seem to be enforced in almost every other situation.
EDIT: added more
Do you know if anyone's around to watch him at the moment, like a family member or another friend? It's probably incredibly impractical for you to do so (and it's not really your sole responsibility), but it definitely doesn't sound like a good time for him to be left alone. After someone tries to make a death cocktail for themselves and threatens to use a knife when prevented, suicide watch seems like a perfectly reasonable measure.
I'd second Hoffmeister's statement that there is some very good Christian music out there, it's just that the ones that don't tend to explicitly evangelise are typically not classified as "Christian music". One folk artist I particularly like is Sufjan Stevens, who incorporates a ton of Christian themes into his music and does it in a very natural and sincere way. His lyrics are often not explicitly about religion, but you'd have to be mentally challenged to miss the constant allusions to faith in it. I have recommended this multiple times now to multiple different people, but his album Carrie and Lowell is probably one of the finest folk albums I've listened to.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
I don't think this is necessarily a solution to the OP's existentialism, because ultimately all you are is a complex system of cause and effect that interacts with a larger, more complex system of cause and effect to produce outcomes we call behaviour. Whatever you "choose" to do is as predetermined as everything else.
The only thing I can really say is "First time?"
So, this ended up being not as small-scale as I would like. It is 1:40am on a Tuesday. I can't sleep, because my work is causing me to inappropriately panic. Not sure how I fix this.
My tasks for a week can be as follows (here is an anonymised version of the notes I made just to keep track of all the tasks that I needed to either finish, or at least make good progress on, in one of my work weeks - IIRC, this list was made early in the week and more stuff was thrown at me I didn't expect later that week, so this list is an underestimate):
- setting up a service for Client A, which I need to contact the ATO for
- looking through and fixing the review points for Client A’s quarter-end reporting for seven to nine entities
- having a meeting so we can discuss a different approval process regarding accounts payable for Client A
- processing the weekly payments and staff reimbursements for Client A
- doing weekly bookkeeping and bank reconciliation for Client A
- working on improving the process for Client A
- looking through the documentation that Client B has provided, understanding the workpaper provided to me for preparing financial statements and calculating tax owed to the ATO, and requesting information from the client if necessary
- finishing off the financial statements and income tax returns for Client C, which is a group consisting of two individuals, two trusts and one company
- setting up two trusts in our internal system for Client D
- training at 8:30am on Friday
- Correcting Client A’s setup forms for connecting a bank feed to an accounting software
- requesting deferral for an ABS survey Client A neglected to fill out
- Fill out timesheet at COB Friday.
I have taken to working overtime and/or on the weekends fairly frequently because my work somehow seems to endlessly keep piling on, and requires so much multitasking and deadline juggling that it feels like overload (many of the tasks in question are detailed work that if you get wrong have consequences further down the line). A good portion of these are the type of tasks that need to be done yesterday. And it's worse now because it's tax season, and the deadlines for all the clients I've put off due to being swamped with other work are coming due.
What makes this really sting is that my current workload got the way it did because according to them I was competent and people thought I could take on tasks effectively, so a really big client (Client A in the list) that's currently expanding got delegated to me. The sheer volume of work coming from that one client is truly immense, and a lot of the work is new and novel, and the deadlines are incredibly tight. They basically use us to perform an array of admin tasks, and often just spontaneously spring poorly articulated requests on us which then need to be taken up by someone (performing these tasks often requires a large amount of back-and-forth before one realises what they even want). The diversions are incredibly distracting and when I get back to my other work, I effectively need to get reacquainted with it, which takes a large amount of time.
I think that at this point, I'm working more than any of the other juniors in my place despite having been there for less than a year. Perhaps I am just inefficient, that's a distinct possibility I don't necessarily discount. But I believe this is almost entirely because of one incredibly pesky client which swallows up anywhere from 40-90% of my time depending on the week in question (no other junior is working on this client).
It doesn't help that I'm getting quite burned out, and am increasingly finding it difficult to concentrate on anything at work which results in more procrastination than I'm proud to admit, especially because I know I can be pulled right out of what I'm doing in favour of another task. The refrain from many of my managers is that they would prefer me to work on stuff I enjoy. However, in practice it works on a needs basis - this client needs working on, and I can do the work + have demonstrated I am willing to put in the time, so it gets delegated to me. Going to work now feels interminable and like being pummelled, and the dread mounts before every workday in a way it hasn't prior to this.
Sorry, I realise this is basically a long, reprehensibly self-pitying complaint session about how my work sucks. But I am at the end of my rope, and if anyone has any advice, I would like to hear it.
I just don't understand this perspective, since voice acting, like music, is merely the production of sound waves at the end of the day. AI will only get better at manipulating sound waves, and there's no need to understand the emotions of the character the same way a human actor needs to, merely what sorts of sounds give positive feedback from the human audience (i.e. evokes certain emotions).
I really just think this is based on a lack of understanding of how one can converge on the same outcome through radically different methods, and how meaning can just come along for the ride once you're appropriately good at pattern-generation. So you get all these midwit "critiques" and outlinings of the supposed limitations of AI by people with no grasp on the idea that human-level output can be generated through radically inhuman processes.
Whether this is good or not is a question of values and not really related to the point, the topic of discussion is more about whether it's possible.
I think your scenario is unrealistic in any case - automation of manual labour tasks is certainly feasible (and has been achieved in many cases) and more such jobs in these domains will eventually become obsolete once technological advances make the cost of doing so lower than employing human labour, but that's besides the point. You can be an AI doomer and still realise that AI has immense potential. Plenty of the people discussed on this forum certainly believe so (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc). But there are still a lot of people basically treating AI as a hype-fad pushed by techbro caricatures, who regard automation of all these oh-so-human pursuits as practically impossible and scoff at the mention of AGI, and pretty much every two years their predictions get overturned.
Somehow I still haven't watched Fight Club myself and as a result can't comment entirely on what would be its antithesis, but regarding general nihilism-antidote movies: It's Such A Beautiful Day very deeply delves into nihilism and in fact fully accepts every single one of its premises, yet still somehow manages to come out the other end presenting a worldview that's incredibly life-affirming. It's probably my favourite animated movie of all time.
I suppose it is less about Making A Point About Society and more to do with dealing with one's mortality, lack of agency and other such topics, but it is a great movie that's hugely concerned with how to find meaning and beauty in the chaos.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
I sometimes vote if someone has written something I think is insightful. So I do cast votes very occasionally, but they're virtually all upvotes - I basically never downvote or report people for that matter.
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