I find it interesting to speculate why those words are not in widespread use. Many of them seem to either have more commonly used near-synonyms (acedia - apathy, indifference or ennui), or be somewhat unwieldy to use (absquatulate would be an useful word, but is way too long and sounds way too pompous).
Some of them, however, combine being rare, accessible and not easily replaced by other words. For example, calumny, copious and crux. I wish to see those words having wider use, as they would be handy to express concepts that generally require longer sentences to get across.
You shouldn't, but it happens. The UI makes it much easier to open a new tab than to close older tabs (unless you close all of them at once). You even inadvertently open new tabs when you click on links and they open on a new tab rather than on the current tab. Unless you consciously choose browse in a way that avoids the proliferation of new tabs, you'll get flooded by them, as that's what the design leads to. Exceptions are browsers that don't save tabs between sessions, or that automatically close tabs after a specific number.
It's not just a public place, but a very specific type of public place: a shopping mall. Were it just a public square with people from your social circle, then it wouldn't be as dangerous.
As a shopping mall, it's full of advertisements, slot machines, games, fast food, sales clerks trying to lead you into the place they want you to be, etc. But it is also the place where almost all your friends are, and almost all the books and newspapers are.
It's hard to leave it because it has valuable things inside (even your office might be inside the mall), but it's also hard to stay in without having your agency taken away by everyone competing for your attention. You could get a book from the bookstore, read it and talk to your friends about it, but it's hard to do that in a mall where everything is designed to take you to their stores, entertainment centers, etc.
An AGI being able to wipe out humanity doesn't necessarily mean that it can take over the universe. The world's governments are already capable of causing extreme suffering through a nuclear war. AGI risk scenarios aren't equivalent to an unbounded intelligence explosion. An AGI only needs to be more powerful than humanity to be a threat. It can be a threat even if it isn't that intelligent, as long as it gives unprecedented power to a few individuals or governments.
Both humanity and a super-intelligent AGI are bound by the laws of physics. Super-intelligence does not imply omnipotence; it simply means that the AGI is orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. If humans can figure out how to colonize the Milky Way in 90 million years, then the answer to the question of why no AGI has done it is the same as the answer to the question of why no extraterrestrial species has done it.
> Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge
Adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge is learning facts. Memorization is making the nodes persistent. Both are important, but they're not equivalent. You need to do both.
You can learn without memorization (you can learn a lot and forget everything you've learned by the next day). You can memorize without learning the subject matter (for example, you can memorize a counting song in Mandarin Chinese without knowing that what you've memorized are numbers).
Flashcards can be used for learning, but they are optimized for memorization. We shouldn't expect them to be the best tool for learning, because that's not what they're designed for. One might get better results learning from another resource, and then using flashcards to memorize the concepts they've learned.
Learning facts, understanding how they correlate and memorizing both the facts and the correlations are all different steps. Memorization is useful and necessary, but it's not equivalent to learning and to understanding. Each step helps with the other steps. They can happen at the same time, but not necessarily.
Find out if your addiction is because you find the world boring, or if you're trying to escape from something you fear.
If it's the former, block the addictive content and replace it with other things you find fun (hobbies, books, movies, etc), paying attention to how it's more worthwhile to do so.
If it's the latter, find out how to overcome such fear / anxiety and to stop using addictive content as a crutch.
Timeless is another skin, which was never made default [1]. The skin that hides the languages and doesn't use the full screen space is the new skin (Vector 2002). There was talk about fixing the language menu on Vector 2022, but they deployed it without fixing it. The a/b tests even showed that the introduction of the language-switching button even reduced the amount of clicks on language links, the opposite of what they expected by introducing it [2]. I don't know if those concerns were ignored or if they plan on fixing it later on.
> I recently came across a term for this. Telic vs. atelic activities [0]. Telic activities are things with some terminal state, e.g. a typical goal-oriented project, or something like the act of getting married.
> Atelic activities are those activities where the continuous process is the goal. Certain types of learning, being a good parent, and so on.
Reading the article, I understand this differently. Telic activities are indeed activities that have a terminal goal. However, the idea of a continuous process being the goal seems orthogonal to the telic/atelic distinction. You can have an activity that is both enjoyable and has a final goal: one can play a video-game both because they want to beat it and because they enjoy playing it. An activity being telic doesn't mean it's not enjoyable by itself. You can also have atelic activities that don't have any goals.
There's no reason, a priori, that making an activity telic should take away from the day-to-day enjoyment. Having a final goal shouldn't stop people from enjoying the journey. It does change the game (from an open-ended sandbox to a more linear game), but it doesn't make it unenjoyable per se. What really takes out the enjoyment of the process is not the introduction of the goal, but rather an excessive optimization toward a goal at the expense of the process.
Such perspective isn't really so surrealistic, when we think about the lengths some governments and institutions go to stop people from talking to each other. Some countries censor the outside internet wholesale. Military conscripts are often chosen from more remote, poorer locations where people are less internationally-minded. Dividing people into ideological bubbles also seems to be a measure to stop people from talking to each other, in spite of sharing the same language and internet.
Essays are often meant not as a measure of understanding, but as a tool for the student to learn, to reflect on how well they understand the material, and for the teacher to be aware of their weak points. Sometimes they're also meant as a tool for training the skill of essay writing itself. In those cases, it's only graded in order to nudge the student into reading the material and studying (and sometimes to cushion the impact of test scores).
They're testing out the new UI in the other language Wikipedias. It adds a nice collapsible topic structure to the sidebar and sets a text width limit, but hides the available languages for the article behind a button on the header. This makes it harder to tell whether the article is available in specific languages, and to switch the language. It's a bit unwieldy as of now, as you now have to jump to the top of the page and click the "languages" button just to check if the article is available in your desired language, but they are showing some effort. They plan to make the header sticky and add direct links to the user's most frequently used languages. I just hope a sticky header doesn't take away much of the space dedicated to the page's content.
Here's a link to the ideas page discussing the change:
> There is a person thinking about the prompt, typing in the prompt, painstakingly selecting the image that matches what they imagined in their head.
Which does make this a type of art. It just isn't the same form of art as digital painting, the same way painting a tree is not the same type of art as growing and 100 trees, choosing one of them and taking a photograph of it. Photography is definitely an art-form, but it's a different art-form from digital painting, even if the end result of the both of them can be a digital image. Not better or worse, but definitely different.
The problem is with the (interpreted) subtext of the question. The question "Is our checkout page not performing well?" might be just a question, but in the context the author was put in, it usually has different implications. Many people would ask such question in order to imply that changing the framework was unnecessary and that the checkout page is already performing well enough. This seems to be how the manager interpreted the question.
There are different ways of asking the same question, with different subtext. He could had started, for example, by saying "We should analyze how our checkout page's performance could improve if we switch to React". This way he would be able to ask essentially the same questions he intended to, but without accidentally implying that the switch is undesirable and unnecessary.
Now, someone working with someone with autism should understand they have trouble with this kind of subtext, and give them more leeway. But most people don't know how to do this, as they're not used to such interactions.
If we define it to be just a human interpretation of an observed physical process, and we believe subjective experience to be an illusion, then the hard problem is not a problem at all. That's comparable to calling an animal a horse: we define "horse" to be a category of animal, but we don't expect it to have any "special" properties for being a horse, and we can relate to lower-level processes all the properties that lead us to define it as a horse. Such properties are empirically measurable and don't behave in any way that would be expected from the laws of physics.
But if we assume subjective experience to be real and to be more than just a description of the physical system, then we do have a problem: we have the burden of explaining where it comes from (which is why theories like emergentism, panpsychism, etc. were created). We can't test such theories empirically, as the only subjective experience we can perceive is that of a fully conscious (in the medical sense) human brain, and we cannot share such experience. That's why the metaphysics of consciousness is not considered science.
> Just because consciousness is a result of information processing, that doesn’t mean all information processing systems are conscious.
Indeed. But if consciousness is anything more than a label to describe a specific sort of system, and subjective experience is real, then we have to show such special "consciousness" (with subjective experience) exists in the first place, and how it can emerge from parts without any form of consciousness. As we're unable to do that in a way that can be empirically tested, such theories are not scientific. Panpsychism is of course no exception to this, as we cannot test whether lower levels of information processing are or are not conscious either.
That's a problem that affects all theories about the metaphysics of consciousness. All of them share the burden of explaining how a world where "consciousness" exists would be different from a world without it. The ones which claim a distinct consciousness does exist then also have to explain how this consciousness either originates from physical parts with limited or non-existent consciousness(emergent theories like panprotopsychism and emergent materialism), exists outside physical matter (dualism), or exists fully in the smaller parts, somehow getting combined into one (traditional panpsychism).
That's part of why it can be attractive to leave aside concerns about metaphysical consciousness altogether.
Some forms of panpsychism (such as panprotopsychism) aren't much different from emergent materialism. Emergent materialism states human consciousness originates from the state of a physical brain, while the constituent parts of the human brain (and its physical interactions) have nothing resembling consciousness. Some forms of panpsychism would argue the physical interactions between the parts are already proto-conscious, and your brain is simply in a state that aggregates these phenomena into human consciousness.
The difference is purely ontological in this case. Both emergent materialism and this form of panpsychism would claim your aggregate consciousness has its origin in your brain and would stop if the parts of your brain were separated: both are compatible with physical reality. The difference is that the former would interpret this as a complete disappearance of such consciousness, while the latter would interpret it as a dis-aggregation of this consciousness into proto-conscious parts.
There are also some versions of eliminative materialism that claim consciousness doesn't exist in the first place, and myriads of other positions.
Extreme situation that could be a counterexample to your claim:
Dr. Evil is 90 years old, his consciousness is slowly fading away, and he is going to die in a week. He is almost ready to release a bomb that will torture kill half of the world population. If you pull the lever Dr. Evil will die today and you will save all those people. You are the only one who can pull the lever. Do you pull the lever, or do you stick to your principle of not sacrificing other people who don't want to be sacrificed?
Some of them seem specially hard to read. I mistook the phone emoji for a "missing character" symbol, the baby emoji for a hand and the dancing emoji for an Among Us crewmate with Elvis hair. The monkeys at the end also looked like some sort of ear at first glance. I like the idea, and most of the emojis featured in the article seem to be mostly fine at small sizes, but some of them don't really seem optimized enough to be recognizable at smaller text sizes.
Above a certain percentage it's going to poison human-generated content too. You will have to discern between ai-generated content, ai-influenced-human generated content and genuine human-generated content.
One could argue it's already happening. How many of the people we talk to everyday get their facts from SEO-spam websites and Google instant answers (which often sources its content from such websites)? Even if we avoid AI-generated content, we might be gettting fed it by proxy.
> I had a similar view as a kid, driven mostly by the fact that I wasn't very good at memorisation. I found that I could get by in maths without it, eg. deriving the quadratic formula by completing the square rather than memorising it. I didn't value memory much as a tool in maths.
Isn't the structure of the school curriculum also at fault here? If concepts like the quadratic formula being presented without context on why you will need to memorize them, and you're able to succeed without doing it, it's clear why you might choose not to memorize it. That wouldn't be the case if they presented you with challenging, applied problems where having the quadratic formula memorized really is actually necessary.
The curriculum seems to be structured under the assumption that the students will memorize the facts for the sake of memorizing (as most students do) in order to get good grades, and only later apply them on more advanced classes. If you're able to derive the results fast enough, and as such you see no point in memorizing them, then that assumption is broken, and the curriculum won't work the way it is expected to. Those students would need to take initiative themselves to adapt their learning style to the way books and classes are structured, as it's not obvious for them that such memorization is necessary.
Some of them, however, combine being rare, accessible and not easily replaced by other words. For example, calumny, copious and crux. I wish to see those words having wider use, as they would be handy to express concepts that generally require longer sentences to get across.