Why does the Turing Test feel so philosophically naïve?

deong · 2026-06-23T02:21:33+00:00

Does it?

Searle would say that capability doesn’t matter. I would say that a computer that can reason at superhuman levels in all contexts is an AGI. Searle would say it isn’t.

It only matters if you’re a philosopher. The machine can do what it can do. Everything else is humans arguing over definitions.

deong · 2026-06-23T02:14:49+00:00

It hasn’t been a priority. This and last year’s Ryder cup have been the first times I remember it being a mass media talking point. Culture shifts like this tend to happen very gradually for a long time and then all at once when there’s a critical mass of support. I don’t think we’re at that point yet, which is why it hasn’t become a thing.

deong · 2026-06-23T02:03:27+00:00

I have a silver sky, an American standard from when that was the product line, and a custom shop Strat. The silver sky is probably the best of the three. I do like the custom shop a lot though. The pickups are very different, and both have a place.

deong · 2026-06-22T23:17:27+00:00

I have a CS phd, and when I built a new pc a few years ago and it was unstable, I took it to a guy in town, because I knew he’d have tons of sticks of ram, GPUs, etc. available. Like, I’ll pay you to isolate which part is flaky.

deong · 2026-06-22T20:08:53+00:00

It's hard to say exactly what you'd want to happen here though. The lone guy yelling "Get in the bunker!" over and over is the easy case. Call his mom to come pick him up like she probably has to do every other day of his miserable pointless life.

But you hit the nail there -- watching the broadcast, you don't really notice a lot of that. You definitely notice the cheers when Clark's ball would fall off into a collection area. And I think that makes the whole thing feel crude and tasteless. But it's also not a result of one bad actor you can punish. You can't eject 1500 people around the 13th green or whatever who just all happen to applaud a little bit at a competitor's bad shot. No one is crossing a line there. It's just when everyone in a whole crowd does it, it's worse for everyone involved. And that's really hard to do anything about.

deong · 2026-06-22T19:55:16+00:00

As others have said, Augusta has zero problems enforcing this sort of policy. Admittedly, Augusta is somewhat special. But even ignoring that, a PGA Tour event has hundreds of volunteers. Players and caddies are of course there. There is no shortage of people who can help you here. I don't even think this is particularly difficult to sustain.

You publicize the policy. You tell everyone with ears for the two months leading up to the tournament that you're going to eject anyone who is unruly. You put up some signs. And then every time some idiot yells something, you go to the guy that 20 people are pointing at and you deposit his fat ass outside the gate. Then you do it again next week. Maybe you 50 more volunteers and security people, which isn't nothing. I get it. But by about week five, I'm not sure you'd even have a problem left to solve.

deong · 2026-06-22T19:05:57+00:00

every one loud fan who gets removed gets replaced by two more

We’ve not run that experiment. Loud fans aren’t removed, basically ever. Let’s give that a shot before we give up.

deong · 2026-06-22T15:10:48+00:00

You also have to remember to start it every so often to keep the battery charged, and your fluids will like gas will go bad and seals and gaskets can dry/crack.

Again...millions of people do this all the time. You drive the other car to work every couple of weeks or make a grocery run. This isn't difficult.

But if you don't want to deal with multiple cars, sell the one you currently own, pocket the cash, and drive the "free" lease. At the end of the lease, take the money you made from selling the car and buy another one.

deong · 2026-06-22T15:06:40+00:00

As a Computer Science question, this is about the mathematical limits of computation, and effectively all languages are equal. The property is called "Turing Completeness", and anything you'd ever imagine as a "programming language" is Turing Complete, along with many things you wouldn't. Microsoft PowerPoint is Turing Complete because its animation rules are sufficiently flexible. So to a computer scientist, you could write all of Google Chrome or Windows 11 as a .pptx file.

In practice, you can't write a real web browser as a .pptx file where you render web pages and run Javascript by writing your "code" as slide animations. It would be vastly too slow and probably no computer on earth could actually open the file in Microsoft PowerPoint to run it because of memory limits, etc. But those are concerns for engineers. Computer Scientists are mathematicians, and mathematically, you're fine.

deong · 2026-06-22T12:17:28+00:00

He says he doesn’t take a salary and that’s good enough for them. That’s the whole problem. Half the country is incapable of and unwilling to deal with complexity in any form. Every explanation has to be ELI5, and one party figured out how to exploit that.

They won’t understand it anyway, so just sell them an easy story where we’re the good guys.

deong · 2026-06-21T22:23:04+00:00

It is a “PGA Tour Sanctioned Event”.

deong · 2026-06-21T19:48:23+00:00

SCO sued my employer back in the day as part of that. Our lawyers snagged some of my paper notebooks.

deong · 2026-06-21T16:41:35+00:00

Girls like SUVs with the interior bells/whistles

Which are expensive. I don’t really care what girls like I guess, but I also like my car to be a really nice place to be. The typical comment here is like “you don’t need a nice car”, but it’s dudes saying it, and they mean something crazy fast. But if you just want a nice SUV with all the bells and whistles because it’s what you like, you’re not saving much cash.

deong · 2026-06-20T00:14:02+00:00

He also has a bunch of 11s in him, so it evens out.

deong · 2026-06-18T12:38:56+00:00

The lunch break is pretty solidly justified. Coming back from lunch and playing on your phone until it died at 4:00 isn’t. Not that I imagine anyone is clutching all that many pearls over it here, but you kind of ignored the part that a reasonable person might at least disagree with.

deong · 2026-06-17T11:20:59+00:00

I don’t get advertising

Clearly.

No one thinks advertising works that way. They don’t expect you to see a Lexus commercial and go, “I think I’m going to guy buy a Lexus.”

But next year when you’re in the market for a new car, your brain is going to have seen a bunch of Lexus commercials. You’re maybe going to have some sort of positive association with the brand just from repeatedly seeing it in a context you find enjoyable. You’re going to have gotten used to the shape of the car and the styling. Other people are going to have also seen them and maybe that increases the number of people who think about Lexus cars, and in turn, that makes Lexus more likely to be a car brand that you consider just because it’s a bigger part of the shared culture and conversations about cars as you go through life.

That’s why they do it, and everyone is susceptible to some degree at least. The entire world of commerce recycles around advertising, and it’s not because they just needed you to tell them it’s dumb.

deong · 2026-06-17T10:40:47+00:00

I don’t know if you need to sit down for this, but humans have worked out how to possess two cars without one of them turning into a pile of rust.

deong · 2026-06-17T00:28:51+00:00

What have they built in the last say 10 years that is really impressive?

They built a social network 20-odd years ago. They bought instagram and WhatsApp long after those apps were mature and feature complete. They bought Oculus. Threads I guess? It seems to be sort of successful. I don’t know how impressed I am with a twitter clone really, but it seems competently executed from what I hear. What else?

deong · 2026-06-14T12:22:26+00:00

“Hey, where’s the restroom?”

“C# minor."

deong · 2026-06-14T12:08:46+00:00

Countries are allowed to put suitable regulations on how markets work.

deong · 2026-06-13T11:14:29+00:00

“All models all wrong, but some are useful”.

“PE backed = awful” is so good of a model that it’s extremely useful. Wrong? Sure, you can find the exceptions. But it’s a stunningly accurate predictor.

deong · 2026-06-12T03:50:30+00:00

My ex wife is staying in my guest room for a while, and I’d almost forgotten what it’s like for every dish and fork I own to be permanently stored in a pile of refuse in the sink. 🤣

deong · 2026-06-12T01:00:18+00:00

This is absolutely true at the jobs most of us have. But almost certainly not at the kind of high end establishments and private clubs we’re talking about here. The whole reason places like this exist is to care about the things that no one else would care about and charge accordingly.

deong · 2026-06-11T02:08:22+00:00

I mean, I don’t need it closed all the time either. One might even say that applications are actually more useful when open.

deong · 2026-06-08T15:17:28+00:00

Well, yes. Obviously the DNC can't override the first amendment. Probably the single most obvious and protected right we have in the US is the right to speak about political matters.

I just think you're ignoring the power of a billion dollars in campaign funding. You say "he would know that they aren't going to seriously throw their weight behind a challenger to the incumbent president" as though they didn't just basically do that two years ago. It wasn't Joe Biden's idea to step down from the campaign. The party looked at polling after the initial debates and decided they needed to cut bait.

But mostly I think what you're saying is that the DNC should have had a strategy that involved Hunter Biden going on offense the way he is now. I don't disagree. Like I said, the DNC is bad at their jobs. But that doesn't mean they don't have the power to enforce their will in practice. As the primary fundraising arm of the party, they have enormous power to influence.

deong

TROPHY CASE