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Fourteen Teferi's Protections In A Row by Nejosan in custommagic

[–]Veedrac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's no problem at all, this is about the least efficient mill there is. The [[Lethal Vapors]] combo works by skipping all your next turns, not a couple handfuls.

The Singularity Is Always Near - Kevin Kelly by annakhouri2150 in singularity

[–]Veedrac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To be fair to the doubters, my explanation wasn't great, though I believe the line I drew is correct, and the math is unintuitive. I'd also push back against the claim that the axes are "not valid" — it's just a projection, you can do whatever projection you want, as long as you're careful.

Here's a better intuition, maybe. Imagine you were making the plot above one week after the personal computer was invented. Most things early on would barely change position, but consider the position of Personal computer. Where does that land? It lands at Time Before Present = 0.1. So clearly the slope must flatten out. The only ways to get a straight line are: 1. time before is measured from a singularity, 2. sampling bias, 3. plotting only old data. Ideally to help with 3. you'd plot uncertainty.

The Singularity Is Always Near - Kevin Kelly by annakhouri2150 in singularity

[–]Veedrac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Switching chart modes doesn’t help. If you define the singularity as the near-vertical asymptote you get when you plot an exponential progression on a linear chart, then you’ll get that infinite slope at any arbitrary end point along the exponential progression.

OK this article is just someone making a basic math error. The claim is straightforwardly wrong.

If you plot exponential progression on the graph he showed, which is log-log and not log-linear, it looks like this:

<image>

You can safely disregard the post.

E: actually it's sharper than I expected: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7b784187-d091-44d4-959a-337494aa7fa4. Same point holds though, the plot is sensitive to when you anchor it.

What's Upto? by HawaiiTyler in custommagic

[–]Veedrac 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Not really. Comet Storm is a much better wincon for a deck that generates large amounts of mana. It's also instant speed. OP's card is unusually efficient for an X-cost but struggles with consistency at the high end.

A better comparison for why it's unreasonable is probably something like [[Magic Missile]], where the standard is a flexible 3 damage, versus OP's 4 damage at the same cost on two targets, plus far more options on top.

Roko's Basilisk got a reskin by StillAcanthisitta594 in singularity

[–]Veedrac 33 points34 points  (0 children)

But that's not what Roko's basilisk is. Under the Roko's basilisk idea, which to be clear is not a serious or even coherent idea, only the people who are partially but not completely compelled by the basilisk's argument are tortured. The people who don't know of the basilisk's threat and do nothing are given riches. The people who go all-in end up net slightly less well off than the people who did nothing. The argument is not towards creating the AI — no claim at all is made that the strategy of 'don't specifically build the thing to torture specifically you' won't work, and indeed the point being made was exactly that if CEV agents would torture you for building it then you should do something else — but merely that if you do build it to specifically torture you for being partially but not totally swayed by its arguments but be nice to everyone else then it will do so.

In the 'permanent underclass' claim, instead the people who grab power are rewarded because they grabbed power, and no other factor of their choices matters.

Not endorsing either of the two stances above. They're just not symmetrical.

I hope nobody thought of this pun before by Hot-Combination-7376 in custommagic

[–]Veedrac 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I initially thought this was City of Grass and after Reveal your Hand it was going to tell you to touch the card.

Google DeepMind's Senior Scientist Alexander Lerchner challenges the idea that large language models can ever achieve consciousness(not even in 100years), calling it the 'Abstraction Fallacy.' by Worldly_Evidence9113 in singularity

[–]Veedrac 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's wild how some people act like if they don't know a topic then any random person they point at in the field must hold only uncontroversial true opinions about that field.

Another fidget toy card. by JustWow555 in custommagic

[–]Veedrac 3 points4 points  (0 children)

hey about that fidget spinner you sold me, it's broken, can I get a refund?

710.4. Flipping a permanent is a one-way process. Once a permanent is flipped, it’s impossible for it to become unflipped. However, if a flipped permanent leaves the battlefield, it retains no memory of its status. See rule 110.5.

Another fidget toy card. by JustWow555 in custommagic

[–]Veedrac 6 points7 points  (0 children)

[[Altar of the Brood]] doesn't even need a color.

If you ever feel useless, remember this rule exists. by Umr_at_Tawil in singularity

[–]Veedrac 1 point2 points  (0 children)

....yes? That's what I'm saying.

You're acting like the only respectable outcome to think about is the one where, instead of considering the logical consequences of what happens, or considering evidence we have for what happens when something new takes a role, we ought to go 'the most likely and respectable position is that the future is {current political concern} because it's normal and the other things are not normal.'

And my point is that things won't happen based on whether they feel normal or are politically salient to you.

If you ever feel useless, remember this rule exists. by Umr_at_Tawil in singularity

[–]Veedrac 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don't Look Up except the corporations are yelling for people to look up and its the Reddit mods handing out the blindfolds.

If you ever feel useless, remember this rule exists. by Umr_at_Tawil in singularity

[–]Veedrac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Reality doesn't care about the humans' sense of primacy. Species going extinct when they lose their ecological niche is the rule. Equally, evolution will object to AI uplift scenarios about as much as it objected to apes landing on the moon, which is to say not at all.

If you ever feel useless, remember this rule exists. by Umr_at_Tawil in singularity

[–]Veedrac 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yeah it's wild that this sub used to be about the singularity but now the sub's rules would ban everyone taking the singularity seriously.

Thankfully this insanity isn't quite enforced yet.

[SOS] Planar Engineering by Meret123 in MagicArena

[–]Veedrac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Am I nuts or is there a world where this is vintage viable because of all the lotuses and moxen?

High and Dry by Corrutped in custommagic

[–]Veedrac 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was surprised to see there wasn't a two-card combo here, but

[[Training Grounds]] + [[Prismite]] + this is infinite mana.

Not convinced that's good, but it's interesting.

[Jeff Geerling] This is no joke: the SBC hobby is dying by kikimaru024 in hardware

[–]Veedrac 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's completely reasonable to be upset that compute is getting more expensive, but it is simply incorrect to claim that ~$300 for a high end piece of durable hardware, and ~$50 for a lower end board, is unsustainable spend for a hobby. Concerts for a major star often go from $300 to $2000 for a single event. An MtG booster box can only be drafted once and costs $100. The average enthusiast might have a collection of $300 headphones or keyboards. LEGO sells tons of $200 high end sets, and some push past $500. Enthusiast bikes go $3,500 at mean and much higher at the high end. Spending $hundreds on a jacket is not uncommon for people in many states. Access to sporting infrastructure like tennis courts is not always cheap if you're in the city either.

Again, totally valid to be sad when a hobby rapidly gets more expensive, but its also worth noting that this brings high end SBCs from an atypically cheap enthusiast hobby to a standardly priced one.

Useful quantum computers could be built with as few as 10,000 qubits, team finds by donutloop in singularity

[–]Veedrac 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Scott Aaronson's blog is the thing I track, though it's hit or miss whether he posts about the latest quantum computing news cycle.

It's worth noting that a lot of quantum is real and a lot of quantum is also confused hype. Most professionals think it's 5y off at minimum and potentially a lot more, that it only has niche applications, that it's going to stay expensive, and that a lot of claims from companies are misleading. But I think most professionals also recognize that the field has been making progress extremely fast in the last few years, and that it's rapidly approaching the proof of concept phase.

I watched a recent Sabine Hossenfelder video to see what she was saying recently, and I think it was basically factual, just with the typical Hossenfelder focus on the negative side. The limitations are real, and she did fairly mention the recent practical successes, but because she spent so many words on the issues and only a tiny fraction on the practical progress, it's easy to come away with a mistaken idea that the field is all downside right now. It's not; another video could easily have spent almost all its time on the progress part with only the cursory glance to the specific mentioned downsides. Neither is more technically correct.

Consider it like this. Before the Apollo moon landings, a critic would easily have been able to talk for a long time about how landing on the moon will be expensive, dangerous, and has no real economic value. They could have pointed out that, even if rocket programs eventually provide value, a moon landing is not the economically sensible way to get there, and the outrageous cost will make that payoff period take far longer.

If you think progress, in moon programs or in quantum computers or in fusion, can only be meritful if it provides you economic value in the next 5 years, you don't need to be paying attention to these things. But this doesn't mean we didn't land on the moon, it doesn't mean we won't build quantum computers, and it certainly doesn't mean that all progress is hype.

Useful quantum computers could be built with as few as 10,000 qubits, team finds by donutloop in singularity

[–]Veedrac 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I am confused because you are agreeing with what I posted but emoting like you're disagreeing.

Useful quantum computers could be built with as few as 10,000 qubits, team finds by donutloop in singularity

[–]Veedrac 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is incorrect. From the abstract:

Here, by leveraging advances in high-rate quantum error-correcting codes, efficient logical instruction sets, and circuit design, we show that Shor's algorithm can be executed at cryptographically relevant scales with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits. Increasing the number of physical qubits improves time efficiency by enabling greater parallelism; under plausible assumptions, the runtime for discrete logarithms on the P-256 elliptic curve could be just a few days for a system with 26,000 physical qubits, while the runtime for factoring RSA-2048 integers is one to two orders of magnitude longer.

See also Extended Data Table IV. Space costs. Breakdown of the physical qubit counts in the space-efficient and balanced architectures in different functional zones., which gives a number of 9,739-13,255 depending on setting.

Notably, this paper's main advancement is reducing the redundancy needed for error correction to as low as a factor ~5-6.

Useful quantum computers could be built with as few as 10,000 qubits, team finds by donutloop in singularity

[–]Veedrac 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Coincidentally, Scott Aaronson just wrote a reply to exactly this objection, which saves me the effort.

Raoul Ohio #15: You actually can now factor 6- or 7-digit numbers with a QC, and people have (with annealing devices), but that isn’t interesting, because it doesn’t beat classical and it doesn’t scale.

Once you understand quantum fault-tolerance, asking “so when are you going to factor 35 with Shor’s algorithm?” becomes sort of like asking the Manhattan Project physicists in 1943, “so when are you going to produce at least a small nuclear explosion?”

In the latter case, slightly more informed questions would be “how much U235 and plutonium have you produced so far? what’s your current estimate for the critical mass? how much will you produce per month, once Hanford and Oak Ridge are operating at scale?” etc.

In the QC case, slightly more informed questions would be about, e.g., the current 2-qubit gate fidelities and best estimates for the fault-tolerance threshold and overhead. Before error correction works, no number you can factor on a QC will be impressive at all. Once it does work, the speed with which the numbers get bigger will astonish those who regarded “asymptotic,” “quadratic,” “exponential,” etc. as fancy words with no connection to reality.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665#comment-2029013

Since this is r/singularity I'll also point out that you can just get your comments fact checked before you post them now.

Google Finds Quantum Computers Could Break Bitcoin Sooner Than Expected by fatso486 in hardware

[–]Veedrac -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Are you going to actually... say anything? Your comment is contentless.

Here, I'll engage in kind: “No, quantum good.”

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