No, I don’t want 5 different buttons on every article encouraging me to share this. Why the need to shove facetwittergram everywhere?
Gunslinger
Karma: 58
Can we ban AI/EA/commonly recurring topics that show up too often? I think there’s more than a few posts on discussion about AI currently. I realize this probably isn’t going to happen but I’d still like to raise the point that it can get a little repetitive especially if you don’t take part in those discussions.
I’d like the LW women series to resume. It was a nice initiative although in practice many comments (and some posts to be fair) weren’t really interesting to read. Only problems I see with this is that 1. I’m not aware if there is a seizable amount of women here and 2. The bottom line looks like there isn’t going to be anything significantly different between men and women anyway.
In other words, brainwashing?
I think it’s not such a big deviation from the low-hanging fruit posts/comments I occasionally see here but here goes anyway: what are things I shouldn’t miss? Books are the only thing on my mind now, but anything can be suggested.
Can someone explain me what’s the point of this post? No offense intended; reading the first paragraph made my mind literally explode wondering what the hell I’ve just read.
I haven’t read Permutation City (a comment mentioned it) and in fact I approached all LW material I’ve read with only my previous experience and reasoning abilities, and ALL topics such as this that feel so meta, out-of-this-world, and seemingly with no practical implications make no sense to me.
Am I missing something?
Some comments are very insightful and are not particularly long. I recently have been reading Roissy’s site, and I searched a few terms at LW. I discovered the user Vladimir_M who had some very interesting comments, not only on that front. HughRistik was also someone who stood out. Both of their commenting were very insightful. I am disappointed those people were not on the list.
My other problem with this is that if karma is a good indicator. That pretty much depends on the userbase; I guess we have another thing to test here.
I wanted to post a comment about my disagreement with many “self-[stuff]” concepts, that are so commonly appear in various self-help media. I consider them extremely harmful. To me, those concepts are on the same plane as any spiritual stuff.
But I can’t really write a more detailed comment than the paragraph above because.. I never really thought about self-esteem before I heard the word and subsequently the definition. From what I see though, it’s seemingly a never ending maze of finding something.. but.. I can’t be sure of what to find and where to find it. There’s a very noticeable lack of clarity, as if magic is supposed to happen by invoking certain rituals. At least it’s how the self-help books describe it. In practical terms, I seem to lack any perception of self-esteem.
Does anyone else share the same sentiment?
Depends on who you’re marketing the site to. Programmers would be satisfied by descriptive links or even plain urls. Have you ever seen werc in action?
On the other hand of the scale, you have websites like this that appeals to.. I dunno, this design annoys me but I guess it works otherwise the site wouldn’t be there for almost two years I know it.
In fact, I would say that if you don’t start out with a decent amount of self-esteem it’s about impossible to build back up.
I guess I’m not a good representative if this is true on average. I’m not experienced enough with psychology/neurology to actually suggest anything. On the other hand I could but it’s not that the odds are against me, they’re totally unknown to me.
I have a question about the digital reconstruction/revival/uploading/etc. How do you know it’s truly you? Do you wake up and just see you’re now in a computer?
I might be missing something, but the process in my head (heh) is that the brain is being copied, analyzed and then booted on the computer. Then there’s two copies of the person, and while the biological brain will eventually die, the brain ex machina will still be living.
However, the brain ex machina, even though it’s an identical copy, is not the same person. Therefore, it’s more like personality-immortality, or brain-data-immortality. The person’s conscious experience will be branched off until the brain dies.
I thought immortality implies that you actually stay conscious, not that you die for a hundred percent but are preserved.
I’m not a programmer, so my view may be a little bit skewed.. but this seems like a list of things that may or may not be correct (and I’d like to put things in a continuum, or percentages, or some other more practically observable other than a list) but it doesn’t really get any further than that. How substantial many of the claims are?
I honestly doubt “programmers” get all these wrong. I’m not going to link to a post (I’ve seen some people replying with a post as if it’s a substitute for actually saying what’s wrong) or even say that “programmers” is a group too big and perhaps too inclusive to really have anything to say about them. I’ll just link to esr’s guide on hacking and ask the people who wrote the articles who they were dealing with. I doubt that the “hackers” being talked at esr’s guide would do a thing like that. I’d also like to link to the suckless philosophy and ask if the “programmers” and software the writers were dealing with were really what what the suckless philosophy is completely at odds with.
The real question that we should be asking is this
This sounds like a straw man, right there at the beginning. Stopped there.
The september 1752 example sounds like something you’ll find on a trivia show. It’s not really such a good example. It’s the exception rather than the rule. When I read this I feel like I’m back in elementary school being the detail obsessed nerd.
I can’t say anything about the minute example but seeing the trend is to take some obscure occurrence, pointing fingers and saying “how can you not know that?” and looking like a special snowflake to every regular person.
In practical terms, what are the merits of all those examples? Going back to the lists, some of them are probably bad design[1], like one example that a backup is a string of numbers 053901011991.html so let’s not focus on them.
[1] What constitutes “bad design” may vary; some people could probably easily filter through many files like that using ls. Some people prefer minimalism, others don’t feel compelled to use their processing power so sparingly, and would rather get the job done more quickly. (It seems like this has some time implications. If you have cleaner code, you can work with it more easily in the future, if you just want a task done and forget about it) So if I were to describe “bad design” in a way that holds some water, I would say that it hurts productivity.
Isn’t “karma” just a fancy word for “how much I like this post/comment”? I mean at registration I didn’t get questions like:
(1) How much of your income have you donated to charity? [1]
(2) What is more dangerous to humanity? God’s rage, or an out-of-control AI? [2]
(3) Which of the sequences is your favorite? Name two. [3]
[1] You must enter a number above 100%
[2] AI means artificial intelligence, but you’re supposed to know that.
[3] “Favorite” means one, and it asks for two; clearly the write answer is to point out the grammatical error.
So clearly not everyone here is as rational as they should be, or at least LW-rational.
Moreover, that’s only by a per-person basis. On comments with more upvotes, it would probably be the community’s outlook on the comment/post. Same with downvotes. Just a matter of scale, really.
Meh. I’ve always thought the gender stuff and many others (not getting into them) are borderline insane, which is why I usually avoid that if possible.
I might be overly cynical but the world runs in it’s own way. I’d like to be treated in a certain way but I can hardly blame people for not treating me the way I’d like tp. Nobody owes you anything so you can’t ask them to pay their debt. At the end of the day all you can really do is work on yourself and that’s it.
The problem is that it’s a two-way street. What you see is not what I see, and if person X is claiming A, I myself might be seeing D instead. Reality-wise, we would probably have to check their genes, but that’s less practical. So instead people go to their intuition and just call them whatever they think fits.
It’s also a pretty big offense to call a woman a man, and vice-versa, so there’s still risk in that.
I thought each language performs certain roles better, so it depends on the task involved.
Programming is mostly text, so the debate should be vi and emacs, and it’s a fruitless one. Learn both.
Any reason to keep your source code unavailable? I can see a monetary one, and a psychological one (insecurity).
Any time you have to deal with a big field, you should cut it down into human-readable sections.
I find ideologies quite frustrating to deal with, and that’s why I thought of but didn’t answer the test.
Consequentially the body needs certain nutrients in order to survive. That’s it; I can’t see the point of the supposed false dilemma in the whole meat/vegan stuff. Get the nutrients, anyhow; problem solved, no ideology needed.
I don’t see the point of getting married at all, especially when you’re royally screwed once you’re divorced.
Your best option is to lead from example. Be good enough so people ask you what makes you tick.
Bottom line: Work on yourself first, worry about others later.