HDMI Cable

Karma: 24

HDMI Cable 6 Apr 2021 21:26 UTC
7 points
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: What will GPT-4 be incapable of?
It would really depend on how many parameters the model has IMO, if the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 is something on the order of magnitude of 10-100x, then we could potentially see similar gains for multiplication. GPT-3 (175B) can do 2 digit multiplication with a ~50% accuracy, so 5-6 digits might be possible. It really depends on how well the model architecture of GPT scales in the future.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 18:20 UTC
5 points
on: The Fall of Rome, II: Energy Problems?
This is an interesting theory (one I would love to read more about) but this neglects that the vast majority of people in Rome would not have had access to many of these energy sources. About 75-90% of people lived in rural areas, never seeing the famous baths or mud-bricks. Many who would go into the army came from these areas, only every seeing the glory of Rome itself in a preceding triumph. But I think this theory might hold for energy efficiency in agriculture.

Rome went through many different systems throughout its history: first the small-scale farmers, then the Latifundia and slave-estates, then the local patronage system (circa 300AD), and then fully developed manor estates (sort of like medieval feudalism). One could trace the rise and fall of Rome with the changing of these different agricultural systems, so I wonder if later systems scarified efficiency for stability.

On the other hand, I shouldn’t mistake correlation for causation, and so it could be that these systems didn’t cause the rise and fall of Rome, but were merely a reaction to it.

HDMI Cable 8 Mar 2021 19:07 UTC
4 points
on: How I Meditate
I’ve always been interested in meditating, and quite like it, but have never really had it click. Would you say that the ritual that you do for meditation helps solidify to your brain that you’re in the “process” of meditation in any way? Also, when you described the “opening of the hands” motion in your mind, is that a concrete thing (for lack of a better word) that you think, or more of a phase transition from the not-meditating state to the meditating state?

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 19:09 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
I would also include Charlemagne, Otto II, and Justinian onto that list.

For West Africa, I need to read more on the topic, but I believe that a couple empires came and left (Mali and Ghana?), but their descendants eventually split into various small kingdoms and polities. Although, I guess you could include the French as being one unifier.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 19:06 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
Oh yeah, sorry, I was mostly replying to the OP. I don’t really know much about Jewish history so sorry for any inaccuracies. In my point I was mostly talking about the Republican Era (before Caligula and Vespasian) when Crassus (?) first conquered the area. I’ve heard that at the time, the governors were pretty lenient, up to (and maybe including, depending on your religious sect) Pontius Pilate.

You’re 1000% correct however in saying that the Emperors after Tiberius were very bad to the Jews. However, the time before this—including the time of Jesus, the Romans and the Jews coexisted.

Also, at a few points in his sermons, Jesus mentions that people should accept the rule of the Romans, e.g. Mark 12:17 (King James version):

And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 18:34 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
Oh yeah for sure. Europe is very unique in this regard, only really sharing it with West Africa. I don’t have any definitive reasons why Europe specifically tends towards disunity, but I would say it is mostly culture.

The Frankish Empire got very close to dominating the entirety of the West (I feel like that’s close enough), but then Charlemagne died, and it was split into three due to succession laws. Later, the Holy Roman Empire got close again (around the time of Otto II), but castles and the ratio between the ease-of-building and the defensibly prompted further disunity. The very fine balance of power between the Catholic Church, the nobility, the serfs, and burghers also prevented one from gaining too much power (in Rome the nobility and the urban-poor banded together).

Maybe geography played a small part, because there are no large irrigation-based river bodies to control, but there is the Rhine, Danube, and others (I’m not European, so I don’t know which rivers require irrigation). Also, there was the Mediterranean, which Rome used.

Sidenote: I just wrote 150 words on ancient history, completely unprovoked.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 17:42 UTC
3 points
on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
One thing to note here is the automatic assumption that Rome was “greater” than Medieval Europe. This is anecdotal, but if you look at technological progress from 200BCE (the Punic Wars) and 200AD, you find that not much has happened, except the expansion of trade networks.

Meanwhile, the 400 years from 476CE to 876CE saw the growth of the Frankish Empire, the subsequent Holy Roman Empire, the invention of the heavy plow (note that Rome had been in control of Gaul for 520 years, and never invented it) and further discoveries by Catholic monks. In fact, analysis on skeletons show that people were better fed after the fall, not before (I’ll see if I can dig up the citations for these).

Rome did succeed Europe in some ways (namely architecture, central planning, and infrastructure), but it wasn’t more “advanced” per se. All of the buildings, roads, and aqueducts still stood after Rome fell.

Your main point—how Europe was able to stand up to outside pressure while Rome couldn’t—still stands, but we shouldn’t consider that it was “better” in some way.

HDMI Cable 16 Mar 2021 1:31 UTC
3 points
in reply to: magfrump’s comment on: Strong Evidence is Common
They might have been talking about the total amount of people with the potential to become better than you at the specific thing rather than the pure percentage of people who would be if everyone tried.

HDMI Cable 24 Feb 2021 18:13 UTC
3 points
on: Coincidences are Improbable
Some event $D$ caused by both has been conditioned upon; new introductions have improbable attribute combinations because your friend seeks those combinations out.
This reads quite a bit like some sort of reverse-Barnum Effect, where instead of people trying to assign causality to vague descriptions / coincidences, they try to view linked (because of them) things as being coincidences.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 18:08 UTC
2 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
I agree with you as a whole on the fact that Rome expanding into the Levant helped cause the rise of Christianity, but for the most part, Rome didn’t impose polytheism onto the Jews. I’m not familiar with Jewish history, but Rome mostly allowed the Jews to practice their religion; one example is how the Emperors (before Vespasian) sponsored the Second Temple and the practices there.

Secondly, we shouldn’t forget survivorship bias. There were many different “cults” all vying for their share of followers (my favourite being Epicureanism and Manicheanism), it just happened to be that Christianity won out in the end. Until the 3rd century, Manicheanism was in the lead, it really was Constantine who allowed Christianity to become dominant.

But in the end, I think this all ties back to Rome. The late Republican era was a deeply agnostic period for Rome, with many outright disbelieving the classical Hellenic religion and the later Imperial Cult (especially after Octavian straight up committed human sacrifice). These cults were responses to the general agnosticism, allowing people to believe in things beyond themselves.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 17:57 UTC
2 points
in reply to: spkoc’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
I think another thing that made Alaric successful was that by 410, Rome was not located in Rome. For the most part, the Western Empire was not as rich as the East, and the city of Rome itself was becoming less and less favoured by emperors (especially after the 3rd century crisis). Alaric was able to capture Rome in part because they had lost the culture of warrior-farmers, but also because Rome was like Philadelphia: Once a great city and capital, but now a medium-sized town with no real attractions (except the Pope, but even then, the Patriarchs were more powerful at the time).

HDMI Cable 6 Apr 2021 22:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Michaël Trazzi’s comment on: What will GPT-4 be incapable of?
That’s fair. Depending on your stance on Moore’s Law or supercomputers, 400 trillion parameters might or might not be plausible (not really IMO). But, this is assuming that there’s no advances in the model architecture (maybe changes to the tokenizer?) which would drastically improve the performance of multiplication / other types of math.

HDMI Cable 26 Apr 2021 1:04 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ForensicOceanography’s comment on: The Fall of Rome, III: Progress Did Not Exist
I don’t necessarily agree with your depiction of the Romans as being “parasitic”. Just because they did not produce food, does not mean that they were not valued.

The Romans were interested in math, its just that most of them weren’t located in Italia. Just look at the various mathematicians who lived in Alexandria, Athens, or Constantinople, and invented the fields of trigonometry (among others).

Rome had almost completely absorbed Greek culture and academics, to the point where many prominent Romans often read and wrote in Greek. Unless you were Cato the Censor, you almost certainly learned Greek math, its just that if you wanted to practice it full time, you would live in the east (and spoke Greek). Especially after the 4th century, when the focus of the Empire shifted to the East anyways.

Also, the Romans heavily benefited the economy of the Greeks. An interconnected empire meant that Greek goods (such as amphorae, pottery, or other luxury items) could be traded anywhere in the empire, with only the nominal port taxes placed on it by the Empire. Also Rome wasn’t militarily occupying the East either, since the entirety of it was governed by the Senate (except Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia).

HDMI Cable 26 Apr 2021 0:47 UTC
1 point
on: The Fall of Rome, III: Progress Did Not Exist
While the lack of fuel was a serious concern to the Romans (even during the time of Augustus), I don’t think either the population pressures or the lack of fuel had much of an effect on the decline of the Empire.

After the 3rd century, Rome was more likely to face under population than overpopulation. It was estimated that the Crisis of the 3rd Century led to the deaths of about ¹⁄₃ of the Empire. Afterwards, (particularly in the West) the severe lack of people led to the development of the patronage system. That was one of the reasons why Rome couldn’t defeat Alaric in 410, they had no available people.

Also, for the most part, Rome was “full” even during the peak of the Empire. For the most empty provinces, Gaul and Hispania, they were empty not due to the lack of people, but due to the lack of arable land. The technology to start tilling the hard soils of northern Gaul wouldn’t be invented until the 10th century. So the late Empire wouldn’t have faced any more population pressures than the Empire of Claudius or Nero.

And finally, the lack of fuel was also a problem during the peak of the Empire. I’ve once heard (though I don’t have a source) that much of the German economy was selling fuel to the Romans circa 100CE. But besides that, the Romans had other alternatives to wood, such as how coal was often used by blacksmiths.

Oh, also I wouldn’t say that history has “moved” north overtime, just that the history of the predominant “western” empire has. If looking at the most powerful and/or sophisticated state overtime, the focus of history would constantly move between Egypt, Anatolia, Persia, Northern India, and Southern China for most of history. I think the main western empire has moved overtime simply because it can’t go south, west, or east (because of the Sahara, Atlantic, and because if it went East, it wouldn’t be considered western anymore).

HDMI Cable 24 Apr 2021 2:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: LukeOnline’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken
Yeah, I think that they both had their individual strengths and weak points. I would say that Rome was overall better if you lived in an urban area or valued peace, while Medieval Europe was a more “fair” (in relative terms) society for the rural folk.

HDMI Cable 23 Apr 2021 17:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Fall of Rome: Why It’s Relevant, And Why We’re Mistaken

Western historians traditionally view the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as a deviation from normalcy. I think about the rise of the Western Roman Empire as the anomaly and its collapse as a return to normalcy.

I don’t know if Rome is the anomaly for most civilizations. When looking at Europe, Rome was the only civilization to unify (most of) the continent, while others couldn’t—though many tried. But when looking at human civilizations as a whole, most centres are unified, and then stay so.

For the Middle East, that was the Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires, later being replaced by the Empires of similar sizes. For India, that was Ashoka and the Mauryan Empires, for China it was the Han, for Ethiopia it was Aksum, and so on.

Europe is (mostly) unique in that Rome came, Rome fell, and then no one was ever able to replace it.

HDMI Cable 6 Apr 2021 22:40 UTC
−3 points
on: Don’t Sell Your Soul
Looking at it in a purely monetary way, a soul (being an eternal representation of you and all) would have an asymptotically infinite value, while $10 is $10. Even if there is a 0.001% chance of a soul existing (e.g. God existing, or some sort of Matrix-like scenario), then the expected value of keeping your soul would be on the same scale as: $infinite \cdot 0.0001 = infinite$ . Unless you view the value of a soul as non-infinite, and/or the chance that it exists as exactly 0%, it doesn’t make sense to sell it.