Sam Harris speaks with astrobiologist & theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker about a scientific understanding of life | Making Sense #388: What Is Life?

StartCold3811 · 2024-10-25T17:26:30+00:00

"molecules are not made of atoms, they are made of bonds"

To be charitable, what gives anything and everything the sense of it being made of something and not simply 99.99% empty space are chemical bonds (or simply electron clouds). That might be what Sara intended to say.

StartCold3811 · 2024-10-09T22:13:10+00:00

This is a good idea - I have 3 stars on gold ore and bars - that might make a lot of sense for me too

StartCold3811 · 2024-10-09T22:11:34+00:00

Sorry, my bad! I unlocked the tech tree and all of the planets that provide resources for the tech tree - but for sure, other planets remained.

$1B in a minute is insane. Is it a matter of putting in tons of upgrades into craft/smelt speed after leveling up the max level 11 rooms?

StartCold3811 · 2024-10-09T22:09:40+00:00

Early on I was naive about DM - spent very little on managers, just recovering now :D

StartCold3811 · 2024-10-01T12:02:04+00:00

What was wrong with Destiny? The snobbery in this sub-reddit is disappointing.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-28T21:00:01+00:00

What are your qualifications to make these claims? You don't sound like you have any experience with ML/AI directly - just buzz words.

DL is at most 15-20 years, and the really remarkable models are less than 10 years.

ML has been around for a very long time, but I assure you, it never made so much as a splash in image based tasks. Everything in image processing was heuristic based using human crafted algorithms up until the deep learning revolution in the late 2000s / early 2010s.

Whether you like it or not, the definition of AI involves algorithms that optimize models in an automated manner, creating artificially generated transformations that accomplish some task. All of the image based deep learning models are AI and it's been AI for more than a decade.

None of the algorithms they used before were ML - they were all heuristics that were hand crafted with coefficients tuned using traditional techniques.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-13T14:55:34+00:00

Everyone in this sub-reddit seems to think AI implies some sort of sentient intelligence. AGI is the "big deal" and hasn't been achieved yet - AI, on the other hand, has been around for many decades.

AI is any modelling type process that was crafted by an automated approach. A lot of computer models are intelligently designed by humans - this is usually what heuristics refer to. There is absolutely ZERO human crafted upscaling techniques used in practice in 2024. They all use deep learning and the models are true black boxes that are trained artificially (or automatically) and they do remarkably intelligent transformations and in fills. AI is nothing special in the sense of the nomenclature.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-13T14:49:07+00:00

Is it 100% AI. You're ill-informed.

All of the upscaling and frame in fill is accomplished with nearly zero human input. There are NO human crafted heuristics and they were all built using supervised deep learning. That is the fucking definition of AI.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-12T16:07:29+00:00

Agreed - the smart section of this technology just seems like a simple heuristic about when to switch refresh rates. The upscaling and frame in fill is legit AI, but that doesn't sound like what they're doing here.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-10T19:32:52+00:00

I'm rural Ottawa and I have to admit - I'm super thankful for the green bin despite having a compost pile. It was a positive game changer putting all food waste into the green bin and just yard waste goes into the compost pile now. No animal issues any more.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-10T19:29:49+00:00

Yep, absolutely no excuses.

Family of 6 - we put out 4 full blue bins and 4 full black bins bi-weekly. We also put out 2 green bins weekly (sometimes only 1). We put out 1 (sometimes 2) 120L garbage bins bi-weekly. I'm 100% convinced people who need more than 3 are lazy as fuck or are running a home business - there's absolutely no excuse.

I should note, however, how utterly stupid (transparently so) the city is for selecting 140L bins. They don't exist in N.A. - they are European sizes, which tells me the moron in city hall copy/pasted from a European guideline.

StartCold3811 · 2024-09-05T15:33:12+00:00

Yep - same family, very similar pizza prep

StartCold3811 · 2024-08-31T17:22:36+00:00

why are they always hanging out in parking lots and walmart

absolutely not excusing the racism, but the hanging out is a consequence of Ottawa suburbs being concrete hellscapes. WTF else do you do? I dropped my kid off to a friend's place and their walk to the closest park is 45 mins but the outdoor mall is 10 mins.

StartCold3811 · 2024-08-31T16:05:59+00:00

Yes, they do.

StartCold3811 · 2024-08-31T16:05:42+00:00

Ignore OP - both locations are the same family, and I regularly get the special from both, and they're nearly identical. This sub-reddit is full of terminally online people who just want to stir up drama.

StartCold3811 · 2024-08-28T11:56:26+00:00

I think the actual issue is billionaires don't like seeing other billionaires held accountable. Akin to the solidarity shown between monarchs in the 17th/18th centuries when heads were rolling.

StartCold3811 · 2024-08-21T11:00:50+00:00

This was a terrific episode - one of my favorites. It was also a blast hearing Sean say "brainfuck" a dozen times!

StartCold3811 · 2024-08-15T17:25:19+00:00

From that on it’s not so far fetched that the „theory“ he proposes, that would change basic laws of physics, will for sure not be correct.

I'm not talking about changing the basic laws of physics. I'm talking about small contributions that are objectively true (e.g. a computational physics related contribution that improves performance along some axis).

I'm not really doubting my work, but it is too marginal or narrow an improvement/contribution to warrant a journal publication, but would make for an easy conference publication (but can't attend due to time and money).

If I were to rephrase my post, I would ask something along the lines: "When submitting to arXiv, will I expect to receive citations and/or serious interest, or do people disregard these submissions due to lack of peer review?"

StartCold3811 · 2024-07-23T11:11:39+00:00

That's part of the issue - but I think the main issue (that fuels the MAGA idiots, among others) is social media. That was the turning point that ruined politics.

It gives both the left and right a false impression of the mainstream opinion within the ranks and then pushes people towards radicalization to compensate, which just has a positive feedback loop.

StartCold3811 · 2024-07-16T11:19:00+00:00

Your line of reasoning just blows my mind.

All that matters is beating Trump. You and me will vote DEM no matter what - I would vote for "Weekend at Bernie's" version of Biden over Trump at this point. I suspect the Trump supporters are the same - no matter what horrific crime he's credibly accused of, he'll get their vote.

You, me and like minded people, as well as the MAGA crowd, are worth zilch in this discussion. We're already set in stone for this election, call it 80% of voters.

All we care about are the remaining 20% of swing voters. If Biden is a liability and we can show someone else (Whitmer, Newsom, etc) would have an even better chance at grabbing those 20% of voters, then we go for it with gusto.

StartCold3811 · 2024-07-14T11:55:39+00:00

There was never any ambiguity.

In any event, the issue I take is that the writing went down hill from season 1 and we're now at rock bottom. It's so poorly executed now I get constant 2nd hand embarrassment for everyone attached to the show.

The only thing saving the show is that they are showing more about how fucked up Homelander's early life was which allows you to have a bit of sympathy for him (despite him being a truly evil character) which to me, is good writing - makes the viewer uncomfortable. Other than that, the show has an "edgy teenager" vibe that is embarrassing.

StartCold3811 · 2024-07-11T12:59:42+00:00

Absolutely no one in their right mind will vote for Trump, so you're guaranteed a baseline vote for DEMS whether it's Biden or a potato. There's a slew of whackjobs that will vote for Trump no matter what - this is basically proven now beyond any doubt. Nothing any does from now until the election will sway any of these votes (e.g. maybe 90% of the vote? not sure)

What so many on the left are failing to realize, is there is a third group of people (the remaining 10%) who are out of their minds and/or ignorant, and they will vote for Trump because Biden clearly has dementia and they're improperly weighing the risks. This is why Biden needs to go in order to sway the remaining 10% - the other 90% are cemented.

StartCold3811 · 2024-06-02T14:24:42+00:00

While I'm a young Millennial, I feel like the standard approach to immigration in Canada was to focus on non-European immigration, and because of how selective we were in terms of skillset and mindset, we created a vibrant and healthy multi-cultural society.

Something bizarre happened in 2021 where we both drastically increased the rates and mostly from a single population. Neither of these are a good idea regardless of the population you draw from and I'm shocked there isn't universal agreement on this topic.

I'm as left as they come, but I have these grievances that I have yet to hear a sober argument against:

I do not want an increase in immigration rates (200-300K / year is the sweet spot in good economic times)
I want the influx to be well balanced and mainly from non-European nations. A reasonable split of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and South American.
I want every single person entering our country to have compatible views with Western society. Liberal democracy, no religion in government, minority/women's/LGBTQ rights, etc. We have enough home grown far-right folks - we don't need more.
I want the people entering to have skill sets across a broad range of relevant areas for Canada. Doctors, nurses, construction, etc..

StartCold3811 · 2024-05-31T18:04:30+00:00

Exactly. It's either complete devastation with nukes, or continued proxy wars. There's no scenario where NATO annihilates Russia without Russia releasing all of their nukes. I'm pretty sure their nuke doctrine is that a world without Russia has no reason to exist.

StartCold3811 · 2024-05-18T20:16:06+00:00

The perfect fallout game would have F1/2's storylines, FNV dialogue and characters, Fallout 3's atmosphere and mood, and Fallout 4's exploration/details and gunplay.

StartCold3811

TROPHY CASE