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RivieraKid

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RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
> The crux if it is that if you ever break from "the universe can be fully expressed mathematically", you are stuck in the mud of supernatural beliefs.

That's just not true. I've broken from "science can explain everything" and there's no mud. All of my beliefs are backed with careful reasoning. If there's an unknown, I don't fill it with random garbage.
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
What specifically you mean by "manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals"? The brain is a system of physical particles. Why do I feel pain when the system is in state X but feel happy when it's in state Y? Physics can't explain that.

Do you seriously think that there's any chance that writing a lot of zeros on a piece of paper will create a feeling of pain in some conscious being?
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
Gist of the argument:

If it was true, you can create extreme pain by running a program. You can run the program by simulating a CPU, using pen and paper for memory. So you're essentially claiming that some simulated being is in pain because there are some 1s and 0s on paper. In fact, you can decide to use an arbitrary encoding of the memory, so a sufficiently long sequence of 0s written on paper corresponds to a simulated being feeling pain in some encoding. That is clearly nonsense.
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
Yes, we're stuck at the first step, defining consciousness. My definition, which I am confident to be "correct", is that consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts - my state of mind and my ability to have state of mind.

This means that consciousness is fundamentally subjective and outside the scope of physics and science. That's why physics / science will always struggle to deal with consciousness. In order to understand consciousness, you need to make a huge paradigm shift, that there's something outside of science.

Consciousness can be thought as a window through which we observe the world and we use science to summarize patterns in our observations. But science can't explain or even define the window. Everything in science eventually boils down to subjective observations / perceptions, e.g. we see (subjective perception) that when we drop an apple, it falls.
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
I assign probabilities of zero to all 3. Computer program being conscious leads to ridiculous and obviously false conclusions (think about a person running a program using pen and paper for memory).
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
Yes, this is basically my only issue with SQLite. SQLite with a strict type system would be great.
RivieraKid
·bulan lalu·discuss
Blue Origin's tortoise slow-and-steady approach to development ia increasingly looking stupid.
RivieraKid
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science.

Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations.

All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Why not? How could it negatively affect my life?
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
For example using nested .gitignore files vs using one root .gitignore file. I guess this principle is related to this one:

Imagine the code as a graph with nodes and edges. The nodes should be grouped in a way that when you display the graph with grouped nodes, you see few edges between groups. Removing a group means that you need to cut maybe 3 edges, not 30. I.e. you don't want something where every component has a line to every other component.

Also when working on a feature - modifying / adding / removing, ideally you want to only look at an isolated group, with minimal links to the rest of the code.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Not a law but a a design principle that I've found to be one of the most useful ones and also unknown:

Structure code so that in an ideal case, removing a functionality should be as simple as deleting a directory or file.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I have some of those too, to a limited extent.

Not worried about inequality, at least not in the sense that AI would increase it, I'm expecting the opposite. Being intelligent will become less valuable than today, which will make the world more equal, but it may be not be a net positive change for everybody.

Regarding meaning and purpose, I have some worries here too, but can easily imagine a ton of things to do and enjoy in a post-AGI world. Travelling, watching technological progress, playing amazing games.

Maybe the unidentified cause of unease is simply the expectation that the world is going to change and we don't know how and have no control over it. It will just happen and we can only hope that the changes will be positive.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Ok, so the answer is "they make the existing model worse to make it seem that the new model is good". I'm almost certain that this is not what's going on. It's hard to make the argument that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of such approach. It doesn't give the more market share or revenue.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Really? I think it's pretty straightforward, at least for me - fear of AI replacing my profession and also fear that it will become harder to succeed with a side project.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I don't get it. Why would they make the previous model worse before releasing an update?
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I 100% agree with this take, I find AI completely non-scary, especially in the sense that it's some kind of a conscious entity that will want to take over. I find these people almost delusional. It's a powerful tool, so it can be dangerous if used by people with bad intentions, so there's some real danger here, but my intuition is that it will be fine. The ratio between the power of people with good vs bad intentions shouldn't change too dramatically.

The only scary part is that it could be bad for my future as a software developer. That said, I think it will be net benefit for the average worker - the average person will work less and earn more.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Messy in a way that would affect you?
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I've been increasingly "freaking out" since about 3 - 4 years ago and it seems that the pessimistic scenario is materializing. It looks like it will be over for software engineers in a not so distant future. In January 2025 I said that I expect software engineers to be replaced in 2 years (pessimistic) to 5 years (optimistic). Right now I'm guessing 1 to 3 years.
RivieraKid
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Whether you're excited depends on what do you do for living and how close you are to financial independence.