olofscience

By then it will be too late - you'll actually lose a lot more money later if you don't mitigate the problem ("bilge pumps" as you say) today. Compounding interest and all that. If Europe had invested more in nuclear and renewables instead of becoming dependent on Russian gas, it would have cost them a lot less than the billions they'll almost certainly lose now. Finally, who says you can't walk and chew gum at the same time? You can prepare for the short term while trying to reduce your impact for the long term. It's not like there's only one person who can do things, right? In the very short term, hundreds if not thousands of people might die in the UK on Monday - the very first red heat alert in history. We'll have to adapt somehow, but "go all-in to what caused this problem in the first place" just sounds...stupid.

For me, YES, yes, and yes. Every little helps. What I find really stupid is you want to join in the punching holes in the hull and thinking it's not going to bite you later on. This argument sounds even stupider when you consider per-capita emissions, but I'll leave that for now. Well hopefully you're not involved in the contingency planning, since your long term strategic outlook appears to be almost nonexistent.

Public desire to reduce consumption actually stems more from increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the climate crisis. No one's making the argument that it won't cost anything extra, you're making arguments up. Yup, like how the Australian conservatives did so well with climate change denial right?

As the soon-to-be-former PM has repeatedly demonstrated, rules are only for ordinary people like @Bokdrol. People like the SAS, the Royal Family, and of course the soon-to-be-former PM don't have to follow any rules or laws for that matter. Because "you might need them one day" is enough excuse to get away with anything! /s

One important difference is you can't choose your skin colour. But religion, on the other hand...

If you think only the government is to blame for the "market mood" then you're oversimplifying. There's increasing public desire to reduce consumption, and there's increasing competition from alternatives as billvon said. You left a lot of your statements unsupported, but I guess making it about your ego helps you maintain your self-illusions, whatever floats your boat I guess

Well according to brent's "sources" crude refineries are forcefully being repurposed (fractional distillation columns and all) by Biden for biofuels and unicorn pee so it's his fault prices went up I told him there were refineries for sale he could buy but he went quiet after that. Oh hey metalslug, you're here! You went quiet in the AI thread...

Sorry, but currently there are NO major uses of blockchain other than cryptocurrencies and NFTs. (And their usefulness is debatable - with NFTs you're basically buying a token to a URL...whatever that URL points to which you don't even control) IBM and a lot of companies have declared research projects into using them for supply chains, or copyright, or contracts, but they haven't entered mainstream use yet. I've had friends and relatives asking me about blockchain, but in almost all the potential applications, a normal database would do better. One, you can't have a "small" blockchain - with the risk of a 51% attack it needs to be big from the outset. Two, it's much slower than a database. Three, it's much more complicated and unless you really know what you're doing, someone's going to end up hacking it. I do agree with the ideals of all this stuff, but actual performance doesn't match the promises...

Nah, they were perfectly fine with him lying to the public repeatedly. What broke them was him lying to them repeatedly.

And here I was thinking Brexit was going to give us such a boost </s> Hard to admit you've been lied to, isn't it? Because that's all BoJo has ever done.

Well the usual goalpost is "can it take my/our jobs?", so not so many people actually set the threshold to self-replication yet. I think capitalism will have enough trouble if the number of jobs taken keeps increasing. We're already starting to see it.

The problem with crypto, since it doesn't have any intrinsic value, for someone to have a gain, someone has to lose out - no value is being created, fiat money just being stored temporarily in the tokens. But in other assets it's not zero-sum. If you buy a plot of land, then you build something valuable on it, you've just created additional value. You can buy some paper and write a blockbuster novel on it, you've just created a lot of value. There's value destruction as well - properties can get flooded, etc. but the sum is not zero. Okay, some people do make money by trading currencies and their fluctuations in value - but that's really just feeding on the slight mismatch between the fiat currency supply and demand.

Backus-Naur Form. I hated it, luckily I was able to avoid most of it since I got into AI in the 2010s when neural nets were just starting to take off.

BNF too?

"Understanding" can be defined as a sort of data compression - mapping high-dimensional data to a lower-dimensional representation that contains the concepts or model of the thing being "understood". So if you ask, does AI understand things? Yes, yes it does. But you might say, "if you can truly understand something you should be able to create it - like if you understand English, you should be able to generate (i.e. speak) it". AI can do that too. AI can generate handwritten letters and numbers, and like us it could be slightly different every time, and they'll have their own style similar to, but not exactly like how they were trained. Same with voices. Humans have created machines that can fly to the moon, and even outside the solar system. We regularly drive around in vehicles that are many times faster than the fastest human being. Our brains weigh on average 1.5kg, consume about 15 watts, and there are more than 7 billion of them around the world, millions more are "manufactured" every day. Brains are just a collection of cells. Why would creating "intelligence" be off-limits somehow but spaceflight isn't?

The arguments against AI come in two forms: 1) the "I'm/humans are special" argument, or 2) quantitative "current AI is nowhere close to doing X". The "special" argument pretty much says that there's something magic about human intelligence that AI could never do. (Usually creativity: they compare computers isolated from a random environment, to humans in a random environment to give humans the advantage) The quantitative argument is basically "current AI can only do this now, therefore in the future it will also be the same". Which ignores the reality of technological progress. And the funny thing is, you'll see a lot of these views with people in tech - more often programmers. AI researchers are more split in their opinion.

Yep, definitely not Convolutional Neural Nets, Reinforcement Learning or anything remotely capable. You probably think a bunch of 'IF' statements made it an AI. You definitely can't take my job, but I'll take your espresso maker over you - I love coffee.

Could you identify these experts? I've also developed AIs as well, that are now being used by thousands of people. I was a contributor to a popular machine learning library, but my experience with neural nets is more limited - only 90,000 neurons using the older sigmoid activation functions. But I'm currently working on a more modern one now with ReLu units. Aw, look at the little hobbyist attempting an insult I'd be glad if an AI came for my job, I've been trying to make one for years!

Have you developed any AIs? How would you know if it's easier?

Really, which posts?

You can say the same about people. For example, your reply was entirely predictable. Just shows that you don't really know all the different ways computers generate random numbers. People are way, way worse at random number generation. Measurably worse.

AI won't be taking *my* job, because it takes creativity, strategic thinking, interacting with people on a daily basis blah blah blah. Those poor people whose livelihoods got taken by AI, they can always swap their entry-level jobs with high-level AI research, right? They only can't because they don't work hard enough. If they're poor, it's because they're lazy. </sarcasm> AI will eventually be going for all jobs, mine included. The only people who will win from this, are the people who own the AIs. Capitalism will probably collapse sometime before then. (Oh, and I love technology. Seriously. It's not technology's fault people made a broken economic system!)

I actually wish it would work. I don't think "those people" are idiots - when bankers got away with the 2008 crash getting even richer, it got me interested in cryptocurrency. Bankers get a huge cut right now for being the first middleman when a central bank creates fiat currency. They get additional cuts for moving bits around that cost them next to nothing. So I can see the attraction for a digital currency that cuts out the middleman. In Clayton Christensen's terms, this industry is ripe for disruption. Unfortunately, it's clear now that proof of work cryptocurrencies are not the silver bullet...yet. There's now Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies coming out, but I still doubt they've fixed the flaws to be actually useful. I wish I knew how to fix the flaws, but hopefully some clever people are working on it and will hit upon the solution eventually. In the meantime I do feel sorry for people who got into the current crypto hype and lost money.

Actually it won't - the energy cost of mining a bitcoin is fixed (ish). Mining rate is measured in hashes per second (or millions or billions of hashes per second) and there's a specific number you need to find to mine a block. What's not fixed is the price of bitcoin - if bitcoin is high, then it's "worth it" to spend more energy on mining it. If bitcoin value is (or will be) below the electricity cost to mine it, then you might as well do something else with your equipment...like something actually useful, like solving protein folding. It's an incredibly wasteful system, at its peak it was using more than a small country's worth of electricity, to find arbitrary bit sequences that meet an arbitrary hash requirement. And it's designed to keep increasing the hash difficulty, wasting even more electricity. The designer assumed that improving computer chips would cancel out the increasing hash difficulty by consuming less electricity per hash. But that's not a given - Intel for one was stuck on the 14nm process node for years and years. It is, unfortunately its complexity also fools a lot of people who don't understand it so they throw their money at it.

Technically it was interesting, enough to even get some large financial institutions' interest. I don't think it's that clear-cut, BTC jumped to almost $20,000 in 2018, then it got hyped in 2021. Didn't change value much in 2020 when the stimulus checks were sent. I have NO idea who will be the biggest losers in the end. I hope it's not poorer people hoping for a way out of their situation who were duped into this, but they always lose don't they? It's how the system is set up.