shminux

• shminux 13 Nov 2019 5:03 UTC

  6 points

  on: At­tach Re­ceipts to Credit Card Transactions

  I work in the area. In the EMV speci­fi­ca­tion the re­ceipt con­tent is already saved elec­tron­i­cally and is some­what stan­dard­ized, see, for ex­am­ple https://​​www.mas­ter­card.us/​​con­tent/​​dam/​​mc­com/​​global/​​doc­u­ments/​​trans­ac­tion-pro­cess­ing-rules.pdf. What is miss­ing is for the con­sumers and point-of-sale own­ers to be able to ac­cess it eas­ily. The re­ceipt does not iden­tify the product sold, by the way, but enough de­tails to ver­ify the trans­ac­tion’s oc­cur­rence.

  Of course, if your chipped card is stolen and pin­less tap is sup­ported for small pur­chases, no trans­ac­tion ver­ifi­ca­tion helps you to avoid fraud­u­lent charges. And if some­one has your card and knows your pin (which still can be skimmed with card skim­mers), then you are likely on the hook for all trans­ac­tions up un­til you re­port your card stolen.

• shminux 4 Nov 2019 16:42 UTC

  19 points

  on: Elon Musk is wrong: Rob­o­taxis are stupid. We need stan­dard­ized rented au­tonomous tugs to move cus­tomized owned un­pow­ered wag­ons.

  It’s not ei­ther/​or.

  I no longer own a car, just use a ride share like car2go when I need to get some­where. Also, I hate own­ing things. Rent­ing what I need for when I need it and let­ting some­one else deal with the nitty-gritty of main­te­nance frees my time and my mind. And I am not alone. Most cor­po­rate com­pute is rented. Most com­mer­cial space is rented. Most offices are rented. That most houses (in the US) are owned is an ar­ti­fact of the way thing came to be. If land had no in­trin­sic value, and rent­ing was a uni­ver­sally more eco­nom­i­cal op­tion, then real es­tate own­er­ship would drop dra­mat­i­cally over time.

  that a sin­gle product, a sin­gle ve­hi­cle needs to do both the mov­ing and the ac­com­mo­da­tion of the user

  That’s a good point. Short trips only need mov­ing, and longer travel needs to in­clude ac­com­mo­da­tion, though not nec­es­sar­ily of a house-type kind. So, there is some room for what you pro­pose, but prob­a­bly not for the daily com­mute, where split­ting the tug from the cabin is not nec­es­sar­ily eco­nom­i­cal. Still, I can see that stan­dard­ized tugs might be eco­nom­i­cally vi­able in some niche cases.

• shminux 3 Nov 2019 19:16 UTC

  2 points

  on: Where should I ask this par­tic­u­lar kind of ques­tion?

  How likely is it that your ques­tion has not already been asked, an­swered, in­dexed and on the first page of google search with a rea­son­able query? My guess is very un­likely. So a bet­ter ques­tion might be, and it’s some­thing you could ask here, “I’m in­ter­ested in un­der­stand­ing X, but not sure how to find re­li­able in­for­ma­tion about it, what search terms should I try?” The rele­vant part of stack overflow could also be a good can­di­date for such a ques­tion. Even at their un­friendliest, they might close your ques­tion as a du­pli­cate or off-topic, but still provide a link to the similar ques­tions asked.

• shminux 2 Nov 2019 18:57 UTC

  2 points

  on: What are hu­man val­ues? - Thoughts and challenges

  Note that cog­ni­tion comes with no goals at­tached. Emo­tions is where the drive to do any­thing comes from. You al­lude to it in “con­tem­pla­tion of a pos­si­ble choice or out­come”. My sus­pi­cion is that hav­ing a com­po­nent not available to ac­cu­rate in­tro­spec­tion is es­sen­tial to func­tion­ing. An agent (well, an al­gorithm) that can com­pletely model it­self (or, rather, model its iden­ti­cal copy, to miti­gate the usual de­ci­sion the­ory para­doxes), may end up in a state where there is no in­trin­sic mean­ing to any­thing, a nir­vana of sorts, and no rea­son to act.

• shminux 2 Nov 2019 4:33 UTC

  7 points

  on: The Curse Of The Counterfactual

  First, re­ally like your post! I’ve done on­line emo­tional sup­port for some years, and I could clearly see how peo­ple end up in these self-blame and self-pun­ish­ment loops with lit­tle to no im­prove­ment. Some­one called it “should­ing one­self in the foot.” The com­mon de­nom­i­na­tor is peo­ple try­ing to ar­gue with the past, and to change the past, or to pun­ish them­selves (or oth­ers) for the past trans­gres­sions, whether “real” or not. What gets lost is try­ing to af­fect the pre­sent with the goal to im­prove the po­ten­tial fu­ture. Ar­guably, self-blame is an easy and tempt­ing way out, as it lets one avoid act­ing in the pre­sent, and just keep the self-pun­ish­ment go­ing. It also saps the en­ergy out of you, cre­at­ing a vi­cious cir­cle hard to break out of. If you try to point out the loop, and ask if they are in­ter­est­ing in work­ing on im­prov­ing the fu­ture, they (we) tend to find/​in­vent/​cre­ate a lot of rea­sons why self-judg­ment, self-blame and self-pun­ish­ment is the only way to go.

• shminux 1 Nov 2019 1:22 UTC

  3 points

  on: The Si­mu­la­tion Epiphany Problem

  Note that for a simu­la­tion to be use­ful, it has to be as faith­ful as pos­si­ble, so SimDave would not be given any clues that he is simu­lated.

• shminux 31 Oct 2019 4:04 UTC

  2 points

  on: Is Day Zero likely or not?

  There are many many ways some­thing bad can hap­pen. It is nat­u­ral to fo­cus on some­thing you find es­pe­cially scary and that your mind in­sists is a real pos­si­bil­ity. Most of the time, it is you priv­ileg­ing a hy­poth­e­sis through mo­ti­vated emo­tional cog­ni­tion. When this thought pat­tern goes into over­drive, one can end up with a real men­tal ill­ness, not an imag­ined one, an anx­iety di­s­or­der based on a spe­cific if un­founded fear. Con­sider ex­am­in­ing your mo­ti­va­tions, emo­tions and thought pat­terns and figure out why you sin­gle out this spe­cific sce­nario over all oth­ers.

• shminux 29 Oct 2019 3:55 UTC

  2 points

  on: Why are peo­ple so bad at dat­ing?

  If Pho­toFeeler or similar apps dras­ti­cally im­prove your chances, why wouldn’t dat­ing apps offer to im­prove your pic­ture? Surely they are in­ter­ested in more in­ter­ac­tions be­tween users? Snapchat au­to­matic filters show that it is not hard or re­source-in­ten­sive to touch up one’s pic­ture to make it look much bet­ter.

• shminux 26 Oct 2019 19:26 UTC

  3 points

  on: I would like to try dou­ble crux.

  So, has this at­tempt failed? From the com­ment thread it looks like the OP has made an hon­est at­tempt and read up and prob­a­bly learned a fair bit, but I did not see any­thing like “aha, this is where we dis­agree” and, to quote the link in the OP

  If B, then A. Fur­ther­more, if ¬B, then ¬A. You’ve both agreed that the states of B are cru­cial for the states of A, and in this way your con­tin­u­ing “agree­ment to dis­agree” isn’t just “well, you take your truth and I’ll take mine,” but rather “okay, well, let’s see what the ev­i­dence shows.”

• shminux 26 Oct 2019 19:17 UTC

  3 points

  on: What eco­nomic gains are there in life ex­ten­sion treat­ments?

  Eco­nom­i­cally it would be bet­ter if hu­mans were sort of like salmon and died af­ter a pre­de­ter­mined event, with­out suffer­ing through phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive de­cline while drain­ing the lion share of so­cietal re­sources. Some of those po­ten­tial events could be: age 60, birth of a great grand­child, com­plet­ing a pil­gri­mage, writ­ing an au­to­bi­og­ra­phy… Sadly, we are stuck with the evolu­tion­ary lef­tovers like wait­ing to die of dis­ease and old age.

• shminux 26 Oct 2019 2:42 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: reavowed's comment on: De­ci­sions with Non-Log­i­cal Coun­ter­fac­tu­als: re­quest for input

  I sus­pect the real un­der­ly­ing is­sue is that of free will: all de­ci­sion the­o­ries as­sume we can make differ­ent de­ci­sions in EXACT SAME cir­cum­stances, whereas from what we un­der­stand about the phys­i­cal world, there is no such thing, and the only non-du­al­ist pro­posal on the table is that of Scott Aaron­son’s freebits. I have writ­ten a re­lated post last year. We cer­tainly do have a very re­al­is­tic illu­sion of free will, to the de­gree where any ar­gu­ment to the con­trary tends to be re­jected, ig­nored, straw­manned or mis­in­ter­preted. If you read through the philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings on com­pat­i­bil­ism, peo­ple keep talk­ing past each other all the time, never get­ting to the crux of their dis­agree­ment. Not that it (or any­thing else) mat­ters in the uni­verse where there is no free­dom of choice, any­way.

• shminux 25 Oct 2019 1:53 UTC

  2 points

  on: De­ci­sions with Non-Log­i­cal Coun­ter­fac­tu­als: re­quest for input

  The is­sue of so-called log­i­cal coun­ter­fac­tu­als has been dis­cussed here and on the al­ign­ment fo­rum quite a few times, in­clud­ing a bunch of posts by Chris_Leong, and at least one by yours truly. Con­sider brows­ing through them be­fore em­bark­ing on origi­nal re­search:

  https://​​www.google.com/​​search?q=log­i­cal+coun­ter­fac­tu­als+site:less­wrong.com

• shminux 15 Oct 2019 7:59 UTC

  4 points

  on: ML is an in­effi­cient market

  This situ­a­tion, if real, seems self-cor­rect­ing. If you are sure you have a su­pe­rior tech­nol­ogy, and can show you do by mon­e­tiz­ing it (oth­er­wise, how is it su­pe­rior?), then you will gain a lot of at­ten­tion and change a lot of minds pretty quick.

• shminux 14 Oct 2019 19:52 UTC

  2 points

  on: Maybe Ly­ing Doesn’t Exist

  Maybe it is worth start­ing with a core defi­ni­tion of a lie that most peo­ple would agree with, some­thing like “an ut­ter­ance that is con­sciously con­sid­ered by the per­son ut­ter­ing it to mis­rep­re­sent re­al­ity as they know it at that mo­ment, with the in­ten­tion to force the re­cip­i­ent to ad­just their map of re­al­ity to be less ac­cu­rate”. Well, that’s un­wieldy. Maybe “an at­tempt to de­ceive through con­scious mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of one’s mod­els”? Still not great.

• shminux 13 Oct 2019 2:09 UTC

  2 points

  on: A sim­ple sketch of how re­al­ism be­came unpopular

  I still in­ter­mit­tently run into peo­ple who claim that there’s no such thing as re­al­ity or truth;

  This sounds… straw­manny. “Real­ity and truth are not always the most use­ful con­cepts and it pays to think in other ways at times” would be a some­what more char­i­ta­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of non-re­al­ist ideas.

• shminux 12 Oct 2019 21:19 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy's comment on: What do the baby eaters tell us about ethics?

  If I un­der­stood cor­rectly, your ob­jec­tion to Three Wor­lds Col­lide is (mostly?) de­scrip­tive rather than pre­scrip­tive: you think the story is un­re­al­is­tic, rather than dis­pute some nor­ma­tive po­si­tion that you be­lieve it defends.

  I am not a moral re­al­ist, so I can­not dis­pute some­one else’s morals, even if I don’t re­late to them, as long as they leave me alone. So, yes, de­scrip­tive, and yes, I find the story a great read, but that par­tic­u­lar el­e­ment, moral ex­pan­sion­ism, does not match the im­plied co­he­sive­ness of the multi-world hu­man species.

  Do you be­lieve real world hu­mans are “slow to act against the morals it finds ab­hor­rent”?

  Yes. Definitely.

  how do you ex­plain all (of­ten ex­tremely vi­o­lent) con­flicts over re­li­gion and poli­ti­cal ide­ol­ogy over the course of hu­man his­tory?

  Gen­er­ally, eco­nomic or some other in­ter­ests in dis­guise. Like dis­tract­ing the pop­u­lous from the in­ter­nal is­sues. You can read up on the rea­sons be­hind the Cru­sades, the Holo­caust, etc. You can also no­tice that when the morals lead the way, ex­treme re­li­gious zealotry leads to in­ter­nal in­sta­bil­ity, like the frac­tures in­side Chris­ti­an­ity and Is­lam. So, my model that you call “fac­tu­ally wrong” seems to fit the ob­ser­va­tions rather well, though I’m sure not perfectly.

  What­ever ex­pla­na­tion you provide to this sur­vival, what pre­vents it from ex­plain­ing the con­tinued sur­vival of the hu­man species un­til the imag­i­nary fu­ture in the story?

  My point is that hu­mans are be­hav­iorally both much more and much less tol­er­ant of the morals they find de­viant than they pro­fess. In the story I would have ex­pected hu­mans to ex­press ex­treme in­dig­na­tion over babyeaters’ way of life, but do noth­ing about it be­yond con­dem­na­tion.

• shminux 12 Oct 2019 2:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy's comment on: What do the baby eaters tell us about ethics?

  It’s frus­trat­ing where an hon­est ex­change fails to achieve any no­tice­able con­ver­gence… Might try once more and if not, well, Au­mann does not ap­ply here, any­how.

  My main point: “to sur­vive, a species has to be slow to act against the morals it finds ab­hor­rent”. I am not sure if this is the dis­agree­ment, maybe you think that it’s not a valid im­pli­ca­tion (and by im­pli­ca­tion I mean the con­verse, “in­tol­er­ant ⇒ stunted”).

• shminux 11 Oct 2019 1:19 UTC

  0 points

  on: When is pair-pro­gram­ming su­pe­rior to reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming?

  I had a pair pro­gram­ming ex­pe­rience at my first job back in the late 80s, be­fore it was a thing, and my coworker and I clicked well, so it was fun while it lasted. Never had a chance to do it again, but miss it a lot. Wish I could work at a place where this is prac­ticed.

• shminux 9 Oct 2019 6:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy's comment on: What do the baby eaters tell us about ethics?

  I still don’t un­der­stand, is your claim de­scrip­tive or pre­scrip­tive?

  Nei­ther… Or maybe de­scrip­tive? I am sim­ply stat­ing the im­pli­ca­tion, not pre­scribing what to do.

  I don’t un­der­stand what you’re say­ing here at all.

  Yes, we do have plenty of laws, but no one goes out of their way to find and hunt down the vi­o­la­tors. If any­thing, the more hor­rific some­thing is, the more we try to pre­tend it does not ex­ist. You can ar­gue and point at the law en­force­ment, whose job it is, but it doesn’t change the sim­ple fact that you can sleep soundly at night ig­nor­ing what is go­ing on some­where not far from you, let alone in the babyeaters’ world.

  “Univer­sal we!right” is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms.

  We may have not agreed on the mean­ing. I meant “hu­man uni­ver­sal” not some species-in­de­pen­dent moral­ity.

  in a given de­bate about ethics there might be hope that the par­ti­ci­pants can come to a consensus

  I find it too op­ti­mistic a state­ment for a large “we”. The best one can hope for is that log­i­cal peo­ple can agree with an im­pli­ca­tion like “given this set of val­ues, this is the course of ac­tion some­one hold­ing these val­ues ought to take to stay con­sis­tent”, with­out nec­es­sar­ily agree­ing with the set of val­ues them­selves. In that sense, again, it’s de­scribes self-con­sis­tent be­hav­iors with­out priv­ileg­ing a spe­cific one.

  In gen­eral, it feels like this com­ment thread has failed to get to the crux of the dis­agree­ment, and I am not sure if any­thing can be done about it, at least with­out us­ing a more in­ter­ac­tive medium.

• shminux 8 Oct 2019 15:46 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy's comment on: What do the baby eaters tell us about ethics?

  Re “ten­abil­ity”, to­day’s SMBC cap­tures it well: https://​​www.smbc-comics.com/​​comic/​​multiplanetary

  If in­ter­preted in the log­i­cal sense, I don’t think your ar­gu­ment makes sense: it seems like try­ing to de­rive an “ought” from an “is”.

  Hmm, in my re­ply to OP I ex­pressed what the moral of the story is for me, and in my re­ply to you I tried to jus­tify it by ap­peal­ing to the ex­pected sta­bil­ity of the species as a whole. The “ought”, if any, is purely util­i­tar­ian: to sur­vive, a species has to be slow to act against the morals it finds ab­hor­rent.

  Also, the ac­tual dis­tance be­tween those di­verg­ing morals mat­ters, and baby eat­ing surely seems like an ex­treme ex­am­ple.

  Uh. If you live in a city, there is a 99% chance that there is lit­tle girl within a mile from you be­ing raped and tor­tured by her father/​older brother daily for their own plea­sure, yet no effort is made to find and save her. I don’t find the babyeaters’ morals all that di­ver­gent from hu­man, at least the babyeaters had a jus­tifi­ca­tion for their ac­tions based on the need for the whole species to sur­vive.

  I don’t claim claim that leav­ing the Baby-eaters alone is nec­es­sar­ily we!wrong, but it is not ob­vi­ous to me that it is we!right

  My point is that there is no uni­ver­sal we!right and we!wrong in the first place, yet the story was con­structed on this premise, which led to the whole species be­ing hoisted on its own petard.

  it is sup­posed to be a “weird” cul­ture by mod­ern stan­dards), much less an alien cul­ture like the Su­per-Happies

  Oh. It never struck me as weird, let alone alien. The babyeaters are ba­si­cally Spar­tans and the su­per-hap­pies are he­do­nists.