Like a hipster wearing a monocle fashioned with metaverse-substrate. The new age user interface is like cup of coffee and a pipe with eco-friendly, translucent tobacco.
I tend to nitpick in similar ways. However, LibreOffice is used across language boundaries, and words like Free and Open don’t translate as well in my opinion.
There’s a huge difference: in the animal kingdom all species play their part and live freely—yes there is predators and prey, and the wilderness can be a violent place. But humans breed animals in cesspools, and humans rip mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef—much of which is tossed in the dump in the name of “food safety.”
Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary. Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
I could go on and on. But you know, we’re all fucked from this behavior. In the name of money we will all perish at the hands of our fellow cheek-turners.
Orcas are known to play with seals they've killed and never eat as well. Chimps also participate in clan wars [0]. I'd venture to say that the more intelligent an animal the more capacity they have for needless killing, or at least killing for reasons other than food. What that says about humans specifically I'm not sure, but what I dislike about these conversations is the need to feel like we are so special compared to other animals. We are unique and I'm positive we'll reach a point where we won't need to kill animals for food, but we're not there yet and until then we'll need to be a responsible component of the natural food chain.
The thing is an orca isn’t going to mass-kill a bunch of seals because that’s wasteful (of energy). Sure they can kill and play with seals for entertainment, but they don’t (can’t?) cross the line of ecological torture/waste humans have.
On the human side: the problem is the producers (of meat/dairy) hide the torturous aspects from consumers by abstracting it away. We go to the store and get some chicken breast, steaks, or pork ribs, but we don’t do ANY of the work to prepare that animal. It’s prepared by underpaid/exploited foreign labor.
In contrast, even if a wolf killed a bunch of sheep for sheer pleasure: they are doing the killing, which takes energy. And if the sheep has a herd of rams with them the wolves might come out bloody themselves.
NOTE: I’m talking about factory farms and large scale production. There are farms which follow good, holistic procedures—where the farmers do care about the well-being of the animals and the cycle of life, even when animals are slaughtered.
I think the problem in our case specifically is that we centralise our food production, unlike other animals. Given our population size this sort of makes sense, but what you end up with is these death factories of concentrated animal slaughter. I would say the energy argument isn't a good one; factory farms are maximally efficient by design (which is why they're terrible for the animals) and humans definitely waste very little to nothing in these facilities since every inefficiency costs money.
I definitely think there's a disconnect between the average person and their food and it allows this sort of thing to happen more easily. I'm not sure what the right way to handle it all would be until we can 3D print all our food needs, but free range farms and farming animals that require less space (such as insects) are probably the best we can do currently.
Wolves are known to just kill a dozen sheep, either to train the young or because they can. Most predators are known to have behavior which involves killIng and/or maiming inefficiently and for reasons other than food. Even worse is that you have plenty of prey animals that will also go ahead and kill or maim each-other for social reason (elk, zebras).
So there are evolutionary reasons baked in such behaviors? Regardless, it's not quite the same as building factory for the sole purpose or killing, and esentially kill for pleasure. The equivalence would be an ongoing massacre which is not seen in nature to my knowledge.
Very ignorant, the difference is clearly the number, and the fact that humans kill for pleasure (taste) and convenience, but let's just focus on the number. Do you see the difference between murdering one person and murdering 10?
What's this quality of life horseshit? So if a person has "low quality of life" then i guess murdering them will get you a lighter sentence?
Sorry for using murdering as examples, I just dont have a better way to make the point.
Taste is a proxy for nutrition. Murdering people is bad not because of some abstract causing of pain or whatever(otherwise youd have nothing against killing people with heroin would you?) but because murder begets murder, making existence of organized society very hard and inefficient. Killing animals doesn't cause such problems so it's irrelevant.
> Murdering people is bad not because of some abstract causing of pain
Let’s just say it’s not, pain and suffering are still bad things youd want to minimize
You could say that the bad thing about death isn’t pain itself but the lost of life (otherwise an instant death would not be bad), based on the axiom that life is a good thing. You could also make your own axiom that only human lives are good.
> murder begets murder, making existence of organized society very hard and inefficient
So massacring uncivilized tribals that are not part of your organized society, like in the colonial days, is OK?
That is 100 percent unadulterated bullshit, that's what it is. Animals will happily grow their population till they ram their heads into whatever limit they reach.
They're not constrained by thought or conservation, they're constrained by environmental limits.
Cats, Orcas etc are known to do the same. But only humans have perfected the art and science of torture and killing on an industrial scale. Here is an example
We're simply more capable. That's really all there is to it. Animals are not limited by some magical conservationist instinct, they're limited by capability and environmental limitations.
And presumably there is some kind of genetic advantage to this. The cat probably doesn't know why it plays with the mouse or that the mouse is suffering. It is just following instinct.
An instinct that humans have is to project their own kind of consciousness into animals. We imagine the world through their eyes, but from a human perspective. So some animals are wicked, others show love. But it is really unfair to project human expectations onto animals.
> Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary.
Bears love salmon brains. In boom years, bears will pull salmon after salmon out of the water, bite the head, and discard the rest. They're basically nature's dynamite fishers. Stray dogs will eat anything they can -- and they can and do kill themselves by overeating.
> Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary
Nope:
> Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing, henhouse syndrome,[1][2] or overkill,[3] is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or abandon the remainder. The term was invented by Dutch biologist Hans Kruuk after studying spotted hyenas in Africa[4] and red foxes in England.[5][6] Some of the other animals which have been observed engaging in surplus killing include orcas, zooplankton, humans, damselfly naiads, predaceous mites, martens, weasels, honey badgers, jaguar, leopards, lions, spiders, brown bears,[7] american black bears, polar bears, coyotes, lynxes, minks, raccoons and dogs.[citation needed]
The wiki passage lumps "saving for later" (caching) and abandoning the food completely into the same category. Which doesn't support your point as well as you think — the cached food may well be "necessary" over a longer time frame.
I'm not saying your point isn't valid, just that the passage quoted is too broad to be a strong support of your argument.
At any rate, there are always outliers, no? When someone makes a generally true statement, is it really that useful to reply with a rude "Nope" and point to outliers?
I took the parents' comment to mean that it is a general truth, not an absolute truth.
> I'm not saying your point isn't valid, just that the passage quoted is too broad to be a strong support of your argument.
What is my argument? You're making some assumption there that I'm not privy to.
The OP says "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary". That's a very broad statement that obviously ignores surplus killing even for the purpose of storing more food for later (which is often also abandoned when the animals move away or find something better to eat). Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
Hence, "nope".
I agree my reply is rude. I apologise to the OP, but it's frustrating to see how popular opinions seem to be shaped by the behaviour of Disney animals, and yet are expressed with great certainty. It's very frustrating.
Would you agree that "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary" is a generally true statement then?
>Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]. That is, they were making a moral argument. "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
[0] Yes I know some animals have been known to do this, but they are the exception.
> Would you agree that "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary" is a generally true statement then?
See: "Nope".
> The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0].
You are putting way too much interpretation on what the OP actually wrote: "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary".
That's not true: many animals will "catch" (really, savagely kill) more than necessary, much much more. In case you consider food stored for later "necessary", that also doesn't work: animals will kill much more than they can ever eat in an entire lifetime, much more than can be expected to stay in the ground without rotting away. Not to mention, many animals will just kill, without any attempt at storing or returning to the kill.
The OP also said nothing at all about hunting. They talked about over-fishing:
> Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
And also about ripping "mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef" and other things like that. Nothing to do with hunting, for sport or not.
> "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
I don't understand what you mean. Can you explain?
If you're going to insist that hunting is somehow different from fishing (literally: hunting under water) in this context, I think I'm going to disengage. You just don't seem genuinely interested in honest discussion. Have a good day.
The OP talked about overfishing. You said they were referring to hunting for sport. Overfishing is relevant to commercial fishing, wich is practiced not for sport, but for food.
So it really doesn't look like the OP and you were talking about the same thing and I can't see that you should expect me to automatically understand what you meant when the OP said "over-fishing" and you said "hunting for sport". If you meant "hunting under water for sport" you should have said that more clearly, because it's not the first thing that springs to mind when someone speaks of "over-fishing".
Edit: here's the relevant quotes from earlier comments.
OP: "Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil."
You: "The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]."
Can you see why it's not immediately obvious why you think you're talking about the same thing as the OP?
Also, can you see why these discussions get derailed so easily? The OP said one thing and then you joined the conversation to explain what you thought the OP meant. But how could you know what the OP meant any better than me, when neither of us is the OP? If there are different interpretations to what the OP said, then your guess of what they really meant is as good as mine. So when you insist that, no, your interpretation is correct, and here's what they really meant, even if they used different words (words that may be stretched to mean what you want to say they meant "literally", like "fishing = hunting undewater") there is inevitable confusion and the discussion is derailed.
Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should? And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
You chose to ignore that. In doing so, interpreted my comment uncharitably.
>Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should?
When did I stop the OP from commenting? What a bizarre thing to suggest.
>And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
No, I'm not. That's why I attempted to disengage.
It was you who started this particular chain off by being combative and rude (by your own admission). Then you refused to accept the basic principle around the idea of generalizations. It was you who has been combative and have failed to interpret other users' comments charitably. Both the OP's comments and mine.
Remember likening the OP's statement to a child who gets their understanding of the animal world from Disney movies? You did that right after you "apologized" to the OP for being rude. See the problem?
This is an active field of research. Search for "program synthesis".
We are advancing, but the current state is... not mind-blowing yet (albeit somewhat cool!). See [1] for an example interactive demo and [2] for the corresponding presentation.
I was in the audience for that talk. The recording doesn't capture how much energy there was- we were all gasping and cheering throughout.
Still a decade off from production, though. That it doesn't just take "test cases": you have to know how to formally express the program properties, which is a separate skill from both unit testing and implementing.
Is this not almost how logic programming (prolog, etc.) works? You tell the language some things which are true, and then it'll be able to infer answers to "questions" you ask:
Sounds like NN training that could be achievable. The problem comes with unit testing, because the minimal testable unit could be more complex than a function.
We typically write _sample_ tests in boolean logic, which isn't quite expressive enough for this.
But if you look at logic programming with more expressive systems you can have something like what you propose. We describe what we expect to have and the system deduces a result. Not quite what you want but its closer.
Now there is also an ubiquitous logic system that many use: static typing. In a sense you are describing the general properties of something and the compiler infers optimizations based on your assertions. The concrete program is not a line by line translation from your code to machine code, but perhaps looked at in its entirety.
I agree that there is a lot of merit in pushing these things further and further. Right now we're kind of in a stage of patching things together. But I hope and assume that programming becomes more holistic in the future. Ironically we have to look at the past first, there was a lot of momentum in this direction up until the 80's roughly.
How would this even work? At best you might get a set of class/function stubs with some minimal logic. At worst what you'd have is a compiler that is actually a complicated, truly AGI brain, which could produce some truly awful code. In which case you've simply reproduced TDD's normal result: truly awful code.
Aside from that, to produce a program that did what is actually required would require test cases and functions that cover the set of inputs and outputs. This is trivial for mathematical functions, but impractical (or impossible) for more general applications (e.g. anything dealing with human inputs).
You could just use a fuzzer to generate code, and run tests on the output. Each new test would approximately double the run time until a new "correct" output was found.
This doesn't become practical until you can do it on a quantum computer with millions of cubits.
Machine learning requires a problem that you can have partially correct, so that it can climb the gradient to optimize on. If you can build tests that have an analog instead of pass/fail output, you could, in theory, do it with machine learning.
Beware that machine learning in a single pass/fail is more like having an infinite number of monkeys trying to write the works of Isaac Asimov.
[Edit/Update] All of the tests could be individual values, so non-zero (but nowhere near all ones) might help. Thanks for making me reconsider this, sdenton4.
Not all ml is gradient based. Other options exist: Bayesian black box optimization (like vizier), or genetic algos. And Vizier is actually quite efficient for small problems.
With genetic algorithms you still need to be able to calculate a fitness. Usually a test is fail/success. There's no fitness in that.
I would guess the other optimizers also need such a signal?
Success/failure is just a binary classification signal: you can look at how it correlates with your target variables, how noisy it is for particular choices of variables over multiple trials, etc. The noisier it is, the harder it is to learn, but such is life.
I think it would be impractical for a naive fitness function that is 0 for failure and 1 for success. Wouldn't the signal be too difficult to find? GA would be brute force until you find code that passed a test.
I don't think tests for factorio are trivial.
Maybe you could move the goal/fitness function along the way. So start with something that compiles. Then having the desired input output. Etc.
Addendum. More tests. I see. Would you then lead the algorithm along a trajectory. If you can pass this simple test you would probably be able to pass this as well then this... Babysitting it along the way. Ideally you wouldn't need to, but maybe to make it possible..
Check out Thompson Sampling and multi-armed bandit problems for how this can work out in real life. (I tend to think this approach is much better than genetic algorithms...)
Each 'bandit' is a random boolean outcome, governed by some hidden success probability. Thompson Sampling trades of exploration and exploitation. If there's no successes ever, then all bandits are equally bad, and you just keep exploring randomly until you find some success (or give up). If you do have some success, you can try to exploit it.
For a problem with continuous parameters, you can discretize the parameter space by binning, and then choose randomly within a bin for each trial. 'Exploiting' a particular bin might lead to breaking it into more bins for finer resolution.
I think the author is just referring to writing heart-felt letters or well-thought-out business correspondence. People en masse don’t know how to communicate these days because of the instant gratification of snaps and DMs and yadda-yadda.
We don’t know how to read either because we skim the internet’s garbage, sifting through ads to get to the meaning of a blog entry, only to think we understand it but… what if we skimmed over it??
Communication and social interaction have been junk-food-ized just like everything else mass produced, and supplied in abundance.
Then again, the author’s post didn’t exactly communicate that well—this is just my interpretation :)
If it phones home to China count me out. I’ll go for the reMarkable tyvm
I can just see me working on a brilliant invention (one can dream , right?) and putting my notes into the note boox, only to realize it gets patented before me by a Chinese company.
Interesting because this idea touches on a few things:
1) Effective data visualization is extremely beneficial for the learning process;
2) Combining sensory experiences together enhance learning process;
For instance, on piano you can see AND hear the intervals on a scale.
Strangely though, outside of elementary school there’s less emphasis on tactile learning—and no football is not the same thing. Art teaches the mind how to think outside the box and in creative ways. It also taps into the subconscious and allows us to learn and communicate better.
They would probably have to bag the devices as evidence.
But let’s be serious here it has to be at a place where a warrant is issued right? Tech folks are super paranoid. Like, try to make sure no warrants are out for you and your cousins and you should be fine. If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time: sucks to be you anyway!
In theory though, this is no different than making someone “empty their pockets.” It’s just we happen to have information in our pockets.
Folks, keep your information AT HOME where it belongs. Don’t dirty the streets with those ugly snaps no one wants to see (unless there’s a cat filter) :)
In theory, there's a world of difference between the two.
* Pockets may contain items that are dangerous to an arresting officer, or to other arrestees. Emptying pockets serves the purpose of removing that danger. Data stored on a phone are not dangerous to nearby people, and so there is no corresponding danger that needs to be removed.
* Pockets can be verified to be empty, and so it can be verified that the person has complied with the order. There is no way to verify that all information accessible from a computer has been revealed. A police officer can demand that a suspect produce passwords that they don't have, then use the "noncompliance" as a way to add additional charges.
* Emptied pockets can be returned to their original state. If my pockets contain a driver's license, $5 and lip balm, those items can be returned to me. If I reveal a password, the reveal of that password cannot be undone, and that account must be assumed to be compromised.
* (For the US only) I have the enumerated right for my papers and effects to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. A full investigation of accounts to which I have access, done at the site of an arrest, by untrained officers, with no checks for data security, no limits on the breadth of the search, with no basis of reducing external harm, and no right to contest the disclosure until after it has occurred, is entirely unreasonable.
I agree with your conclusions, that information security is important and should be more widely practiced. I disagree strongly with how you reached that conclusion, as a physical search of pockets is entirely unlike a search of one's phone or connected devices.
> this is no different than making someone “empty their pockets.”
Except they can take your key, search your house, take your work key from there and drive with your car to you workplace and search everything there you can access, as well. So metaphorically as well as actually (home server etc.), your home is not safe.
That’s why the coins I have more faith in are coins which incentivize things like distributed compute/storage. However, currency in google play or whatever is missing features that “cash” provides. Sometimes I don’t want credit card companies/payment gateways/stores selling my purchase data to the highest bidder and would prefer anonymity.
Problem is how do you solve the need to eventually provide a real name and address for products to be shipped. Even if payment providers can be blind to what you are buying, the store/courier company still needs it.
Inversion of control. An idea that could be quite easily implemented by national postal services who already have a database of all addresses.
Instead of an address, you basically use a "PO Box number", which is an opaque handle. When you post it, it goes into the Royal Mail/USPS or whoever and they translate the PO Box into an address and deliver it to you.
Someone still has your address but the post office already have it so it's not much worse.
Mostly I mean: walk into a store, grab a few things off the shelf, and pay with bitcoins—the way cash is used.
If I use any current digital forms of payment, someone is watching/recording the transactions and pairing them with my ID for some ad campaign.
Oh and: I should be able to stroll up to a traffic light and be able to donate some BTC to a homeless person via Bluetooth without getting out of my car (so I don’t give them COVID)
