Icelus

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Icelus Sep 24, 2011, 12:51 AM
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on: Silicon Valley AI/Machine Learning study group
Oh wow great minds. Just a few days ago I made this: http://groups.google.com/group/ai-ml-db-classes-ca

Icelus Sep 22, 2011, 5:39 AM
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on: I hate TL;DR
One thing to keep in mind is that although many seem to be trying to kill it, sarcasm isn’t dead and sometimes use of those “internetisms” is meant tongue-in-cheek (I think similar to how ‘lower class’ language/words/mannerisms sometimes are used by people that normally speak in a more ‘upper class’ way). Although happening upon an article by someone without reading any of their writing history could cause a person to not know it’s in jest.

So you don’t necessarily have to get as angry each time you see it.

Icelus Sep 22, 2011, 5:33 AM
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in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: I hate TL;DR
Chances are it’s the halo effect, but one other (admittedly less-likely) explanation is the hope by people here that lukeprog is actively working on improving his writing (and therefore providing higher quality writing that those people will then read) and they want to encourage his effort.

At least that’s what I’d come up with as an explanation if I was asked to assume the people voting had thought their vote through.

Icelus Sep 22, 2011, 5:17 AM
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in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Real time video face substitution (and the resulting “psychological hacks”)
I see it as a cat-and-mouse game, like the spam problem.

Or even better is the problem of Photoshopping things which people have come up with some I guess fairly good tool to counter:

“Error level analysis (ELA) works by intentionally resaving the image at a known error rate, such as 95%, and then computing the difference between the images. If there is virtually no change, then the cell has reached its local minima for error at that quality level. However, if there is a large amount of change, then the pixels are not at their local minima and are effectively original.”

From http://errorlevelanalysis.com/

Also people could be more skeptical of video from an unfamiliar source, as they must be getting with photos (magazines covers, especially US beauty-oriented ones) and movies (special effects getting better and better, the young Jeff Bridges in Tron 2.0 didn’t fool me but I remember reading a comment or two about people saying they were fooled).

My link to the ELA page and inspiration about using one’s judgment came from these not-so-technical articles that cam up in a quick Google search:

http://lifehacker.com/5644259/how-to-detect-a-photoshopped-image

http://www.ratchetup.com/eyes/2007/04/detecting_photo.html

Real time video face substitution (and the resulting “psychological hacks”)

IcelusSep 21, 2011, 11:32 PM

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5 comments1 min readLW link

Icelus Jul 3, 2011, 3:30 AM
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on: An Outside View on Less Wrong’s Advice
I just want to say thank you for posting to /r/discussion.

This kind of posting workflow is something I’ve tried to encourage through advice on the IRC channel and hope more people adopt it because I see a lot of potential in it. Namely, people that might not be totally ready for front page posting can get good feedback, learn a lot, and then LW winds up with more high quality articles than it would have otherwise. The more quality writing for LW, the better.

This is what I’d like to see more of!

Icelus Jul 3, 2011, 3:21 AM
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in reply to: CaveJohnson’s comment on: Introducing… The Less Wrong Forum!
Seconding the dedication of the forum to gaming. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a flood of gaming-only posts is something worth avoiding.

But I wonder if the /r/LessWrong on reddit would do. Subreddits seem nicer to me compared to the kind of shoddy proboards forum.

Icelus Jul 3, 2011, 3:13 AM
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in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: Introducing… The Less Wrong Forum!
I don’t mean to stray offtopic too far, but the IRC room is actually pretty good. There have been two or three trolls but they haven’t stuck around for more than a few days.

They might have left due to moderation, but if so I wasn’t around to see it. If it was then I’d say that’s a point in favor of non-LW.com things doing alright with vigilant moderation.

Icelus Jun 21, 2011, 11:31 PM
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on: Amateur Cryonics (one guy packed in dry ice) Festival Seeks Buyer
A quick google for more information about cryonics’ illegality in Nederland, Colorado came up with this page that has “The Frozen Dead Guy Day Story”:

http://www.nederlandchamber.org/events_fdgd-story.html

Even if cryonics is illegal there they seem to be fine promoting all the Frozen Dead Guy days (I assume for tourism and related things):

http://www.nederlandchamber.org/events_fdgd-home.html

Icelus Jun 21, 2011, 11:26 PM
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on: Artificial memory hardware might be on the way [link]
For anyone interested in tracking the spread of stories like this, it hit Gizmodo which just links to the same prnewswire as this one:

http://gizmodo.com/5813821/scientists-create-first-memory-expansion-for-brain

Icelus Jun 21, 2011, 11:18 PM
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on: EFF stops accepting Bitcoins
For the sake of clarity, the first news I saw about the EFF stopping accepting of Bitcoins was two weeks ago:

EFF no longer accepts donations in Bitcoins (bitcoinmoney.com) | HN link

The EFF blog post is I think an announcement insofar as to address the kind of news above that was floating around but mostly an explanation.

Icelus Jun 7, 2011, 7:47 AM
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in reply to: jasonmcdowell’s comment on: Torture Simulated with Flipbooks

However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.

You might find it useful thinking about computations in terms of turing machines and the tape they use: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5vx/torture_simulated_with_flipbooks/4b7p

Icelus Jun 7, 2011, 7:38 AM
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in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
Yes, it fails to repeat the computation, simply because there is no machine doing active computation.

Although whether or not using cached values to make a person in a sim think they were tortured is a moral quandary to me. Highly relevant is this lw post linked to elsewhere in this thread here.

Icelus Jun 7, 2011, 7:25 AM
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in reply to: DanielVarga’s comment on: Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
I’m undecided on how to treat ‘running the exact same torture sim (say as a flipbook of instructions)’ but I’m leaning towards it being increasingly morally worse the more time one runs the simulation because of one thing that sticks out to me: that if you complete the torture sim then ask the person in the sim if they think they’re a person, if they think it’s okay to torture them because they’re a copy, etc they’re going to have every reason/argument a human in meatspace has against torture being done to them.

Icelus Jun 7, 2011, 7:18 AM
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in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
Agreed. Actual computations have to be performed and I think a useful mental-model is of a turing machine and tape and figuring out what in a situation is part of each.

More here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5vx/torture_simulated_with_flipbooks/4b7p

Icelus Jun 7, 2011, 7:16 AM
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on: Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
I was thinking about this for a while and I think I have an insight. A good way to think about computation is to just go with the model of a turing machine. (I don’t know if this includes all kinds of “simulations”, since it seems people are still arguing pretty heavily around whether or not the universe, or an individual section of the universe, is representable by a turing machine and I don’t have the expertise/skill/knowlege/experience/etc to know one way or the other.)

Though, assuming turing machines are okay, I think it’s important to distinguish between what is (and what is part of) the turing machine and what is (and what is part of) the tape (or memory, etc).

A person reading detailed instructions of a torture simulation has that person’s brain as the turing machine and the instructions are the tape.

In this xkcd where a universe is simulated on rocks the tape is the rocks and the turing machine isn’t specified. Some type of omega-level observer would be necessary to ‘run’ the computation.

Is tape without a turing machine a computation? I’d say certainly not.

I would say just having a stack of instructions (say in a flipbook) isn’t morally wrong but that it depends highly on how likely the computation is to be run. Say if there are a bunch of roomba turing machines that start running whatever they come across, it would be very morally bad for one to leave around a bunch of torture sim instruction flipbooks, since that sim would probably get run quite a lot.

Although this all assumes answers to some pretty tough problems have been found. Such as nailing down what a tortured mind consists of and gray areas.

Gray areas like how much fidelity is required; since one could design a torture sim but only run the computation for each 10 second jump, so only a fraction is actually computed but something ‘torture-like’ is going on.

I’ll reply to this if I think of any others.
What links here?
- Icelus's comment on Torture Simulated with Flipbooks by Amanojack (Jun 7, 2011, 7:18 AM; 0 points)
- Icelus's comment on Torture Simulated with Flipbooks by Amanojack (Jun 7, 2011, 7:47 AM; 0 points)

Icelus May 18, 2011, 10:46 PM
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on: [LINK] Human Brain Project aims to emulate brain by 2024
HN discussion with some interesting comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561354

Icelus Apr 12, 2011, 7:06 AM
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
It seems vote scores of EY posts about site-related actions and discussion turn into agree/disagree, so based on that the consensus is this was a good action.

But I would like to have a comment here at least voicing the opinion (my opinion on this coincidentally) that just displaying a low vote score is enough to warn people that don’t want to read things that get low vote scores.

Icelus Nov 12, 2010, 7:03 AM
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in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Study shows existence of psychic powers.
For this particular case I would also point people to the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160

Icelus

Real time video face sub­sti­tu­tion (and the re­sult­ing “psy­cholog­i­cal hacks”)

Real time video face substitution (and the resulting “psychological hacks”)