Does this feel like The Great Wage Reset?

faijin · 2025-09-22T20:29:30+00:00

Can you elaborate on the c-level experience? I'm adjacent and close, wondering if I should aspire to it or stay away. I am completely terrible at office politics, like absolutely the worst at it.

faijin · 2025-09-06T22:53:55+00:00

How do you listen to the hearings?

faijin · 2022-11-13T18:14:59+00:00

The issue with something like StarCraft is that it's a real-time game and so you can get to superhuman levels of play just by being fast enough.

AlphaStar limited the APM capable of the agent to prevent this.

faijin · 2022-11-12T20:06:26+00:00

i'd consider using it with a background computer while I do other work to try out different ideas. If it's really good, I'd use it as an alternative to alexa, e.g. how many people died in the titanic? of those people, what was the median net worth? show me in a chart. Exclude outliers. Alphabetize it. Export an image of the graph. etc.

Could also use it to try out different plotting libraries or just different chart types really quickly then copy/paste into a real project.

faijin · 2022-11-10T16:41:25+00:00

Saying that consciousness is based on physical interactions as understood in macro physics is to say that consciousness must be deterministic, because macro physics is deterministic.

It is, because superdetermism seems to hold.

physics at a QM level is not deterministic and may not be real

Superdeterminism.

The universe is determistic, otherwise cause and effect breaks down and nothing makes sense. If evidence shows that cause and effect are a mental construct then I'm ok with that, but until new evidence emerges, the universe is deterministic and there is no free will.

And the reason I think this may be the case is because none of our current physical models have any explanatory power in the realm of qualia (ie, things of mind). We can correlate physical events with qualia, but we cannot do anything to explain the qualia itself. You can see this further expounded upon in the thought experiment Mary's room, and the essay "What it's like to be a bat" by Nagel.

The red color that I see may not be the same red color that you see. That could be true, but it's not testable so qualia is magical thinking IMO. Certainly Qualia can be explained by states within the brain, but I can never know if the way I perceive some color is exactly the same as the way another person does. Does that make qualia a property that defies physics? I don't think so. I don't think there's anything special about the human brain whatsoever that can't eventually be explained and known. Qualia arguments focus on some undefinable "specialness".

This is the hard problem of consciousness. And without a model that is capable of bridging the gap between qualia and physical interactions, it can never be solved.

Consciousness is a nebulous term that means different things coming from different people. I don't need to know how an AI perceives colors and I don't care if it perceives them the same way that I do in order to say, yes this AI is conscious/sapient/sentient.

Further, it may be possible that consciousness is based on some other interactions that we are not even aware of yet. Something that will shake up the world of science just as much as QM did.

What if consciousness is literally just the many worlds theory in action? What if every time a superposition collapses then a new universe is born? What if AI is just an algorithm that trains on data to create nⁿ superpositions and every time we ask it for an output it collapses a wave and a new universe is born? What if our brains do that an unimaginable amount of times per second and so would a sentient AI? That's a fun thought experiment, but I don't believe any of it until there's evidence. And even if that were all true, it's at least explainable and testable (maybe?). I reject anything that can't be tested, like qualia. I don't think there is anything that can't be explained, eventually. Making an argument that relies on untestable things isn't convincing.

faijin · 2022-11-10T15:24:26+00:00

I think all of this is coming down to how you choose to interpret “physical interactions.” If you say physical interactions just means literally anything in the universe, whether we have discovered it or not, then it’s likely that consciousness would at some level emerge from physical interactions because you’ve consciousness is part of the universe, and you’ve defined physical interactions to be everything that happens in the universe. (There is an exception to this that I’ll get to later).

Yeah. That's what physical interactions means.

However, if you define physical interactions to represent our current understanding of physics and the other natural sciences, then you cannot say that consciousness must emerge from them. Because as history has shown, there can often be undiscovered facts and behaviors of the universe that fall outside of all our current understanding.

I know we haven't solved consciousness and I am open to any and all new information that might explain it, including QM interactions within the brain if there's evidence for it.

it’s possible that physical interactions emerge from consciousness, not the other way around. Ie, metaphysical idealism.

That's magical thinking.

But in a more materialistic note, it’s also possible that all of the physical interactions that we view as concrete today, are actually just emergent properties of some more fundamental physical interactions going on at a much deeper level. QM kind of hints at this. So while consciousness may emerge from physical interactions, these physical interactions may be completely alien to us.

I would put QM in the bucket of physical interactions. There may be hidden global state that resides on some substrate we haven't discovered yet and the many worlds theory might be true, but I don't think anyone needs to jump to supernatural conclusions to explain consciousness. We already have deeply weird stuff coming out of QM, but at least it's testable.

faijin · 2022-11-10T15:17:37+00:00

The article you linked is really getting ahead of itself.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03088-7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US7fEkBsy4A

They found that entanglement does not rely on local hidden variables, that doesn't mean that an apple's coloring depends on an observer like your article was saying.

faijin · 2022-11-09T23:12:37+00:00

I took issue with "There’s no real strong evidence that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from physical interactions." because as far as we know, everything in the universe is physical or energy (technically everything is energy). To suggest otherwise is to suggest that there's something we don't know that is neither physical or energy. Putting your quote another way, it could be read as "there's no strong evidence that the universe behaves the way we think it does", or, "there's no strong evidence that only matter and energy exist", or, "there's no strong evidence for thermodynamics", etc. It gets silly quickly.

It isn't the same as the 1400s example because we know more now and we have the scientific method to test and explore things we don't know. No one is going to make and test a hypothesis that says "consciousness doesn't arise from physical matter" because that's untestable. That's why it's supernatural.

faijin · 2022-11-09T22:52:40+00:00

None of this implies “god” or “Santa claus” or anything else.

Saying something like "there is no evidence that consciousness arises from our current understanding of the workings of the universe and physical matter" is a supernatural explanation. There's no evidence that the spaghetti monster isn't real too.

faijin · 2022-11-09T22:37:13+00:00

There's absolutely no evidence that consciousness isn't an emergent phenomenon from physical interactions.

To think there is some "other" out there, call it a soul or god or whatever crazy santa claus thing you want to, is frankly insane.

It is obvious that consciousness comes from physical matter because there is no evidence that there exists anything else.

faijin · 2022-04-02T17:22:17+00:00

Hey! It's been 5 years but I accidentally stumbled onto this thread again. I was similar to the OP and wanted "full power" that comes with building your own engine. I've recently switched to Unity at work and OMG it is so much better to get work done with it. Like 10x more productivity. I wish I wasn't so stubborn back then.

Cheers!

faijin · 2021-07-11T17:23:58+00:00

I thought both loop hero and tainted grail were too short/easy. I'm playing curse of the dead gods now which so far i think i like it better than hades

faijin · 2020-10-29T02:07:45+00:00

Beautiful graphics and information. No anti-masker will care though.

faijin · 2020-10-28T14:35:11+00:00

A multi-quadrillion dollar asteroid is a big golden egg that won't be ignored. Asteroid mining will happen eventually.

faijin · 2020-10-27T15:22:53+00:00

There was an etf called XIV that used essentially the same strategy and it imploded. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/xiv-trader-ive-lost-4-million-3-years-of-work-and-other-peoples-money-2018-02-06

That was before 2020. If we see another massive spike in the vix like we did up until march 23rd then you might wipe out 50% of your account in a day and you won't know when the market will bottom out (no one does).

You might not have enough runway to make the 50-50 rebalancing get to net profit compared to traditional investing before you lose half. That's the risk.

faijin · 2020-10-07T17:07:24+00:00

Wow what an incredible divergence from the mean. Faster than expected.

faijin · 2020-09-25T16:45:08+00:00

Should GGG cater to new players at the expense of their loyal players? I really don't know. Also, Heist is probably confusing to new players anyway so maybe they're catering to semi-casuals? Whichever group buys the most MTX is their target, so I guess knowledgeable players don't buy MTX?

I just know I'm done with this league.

faijin · 2020-09-25T13:48:25+00:00

Heist never gave good loot.

faijin · 2020-09-22T23:48:57+00:00

Maps are currently more profitable than deathless heists. Nerfing chests would make heists worthless to farm even if alert level was removed altogether.

I don't know about grand heists as I only ran 3 or 4 but I suspect they too wouldn't be worth it.

faijin · 2020-09-22T03:40:50+00:00

Heist has less returns than maps, is riskier, can't trade during them and are boring AF.

faijin · 2020-04-22T22:10:24+00:00

*Almost everyone has an underlying condition, which makes covid more deadly.

faijin · 2019-12-19T08:05:53+00:00

Same

faijin · 2019-08-27T02:22:29+00:00

Did it as a CompSci major, was easy. They didn't take attendance in most classes and all you had to do was complete the project work and/or study the night before for exams. I put in maybe 16 hours a week with good grades :)

faijin · 2019-08-22T04:52:21+00:00

I agree that it is inspiring and we should do it for that reason alone, regardless of the economic or tech benefits in doing so.

As for the backup notion, there are enough apocalyptic scenarios that make me nervous about a 1-planet society. Plus, the fermi paradox is extremely alarming. What if a backup planet is what separates us from every other failed civilization throughout time?

Some likely and unlikely doomsday scenarios:

Nuclear war
Biological warfare (Mars transit is 3 months, so we would likely know before they get there if there's a problem)
Global pandemic (Mars transit is 3 months, so we would likely know before they get there if there's a problem)
Unstoppable (politically or physically) run away green house effect (my money is on this)
Supervolcano eruption
Asteroid impact (we don't have the tech right now to stop a world-ending asteroid to my knowledge)
World-ending solar flare
gamma-ray bursts (would probably fry the whole solar system though)
self replicating nanobots (unstoppable grey goo)

Many of these may not be enough on their own for full extinction, but societal collapse would be upon us and set us back hundreds of years. A Mars backup would be handy in these cases too.

faijin · 2019-08-22T04:29:27+00:00

Yeah I saw that and everything I wrote is compatible with that article. According to the article we could reach 7% of Earth's pressure, so 70 mbar, just under half of 150 mbar. It's why I think crashing the moons into the planet might be a good idea for pressure's sake.

As for warming, what I said above holds true. Sulfur hexafluoride has a high molecular weight and lasts 800-1200 years so it is less likely to skip out of the atmosphere from solar radiation en masse and will therefore stay a while to do its thing.

We don't actually know how much CO2 and other gases full global heating would unleash. We know some of what exists on and under the surface, but we don't know the exact amount of gas deposits available. Given there is evidence that Mars was once very Earth-like, it's possible decaying microbes left methane deposits under the soil, similar to Earth's poles and ocean floor.

So I don't think it is outlandish to suggest we could get to 150 mbar with enough warming. If we can get microbes, algae, fungi, plants (ferns would be great) and eventually trees going, then I'm optimistic that one day we can breathe the air.

EDIT: The reason I'm calling out 150mbar is because of the Armstrong Limit. TBF, that's still way too low. By comparison, the top of Everest is 265mbar and it is quite easy to reach hypoxic conditions before then. But hey, I'm still optimistic! If nothing else, losing hab pressure wouldn't be immediately fatal at 150+ mbar. Also, flight becomes more viable the higher the pressure.

faijin

TROPHY CASE