• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 1st, 2024

help-circle

  • Haven’t you identified this casino as an element of the universe, and observed how it works? I can’t predict exactly where the ball will fall, but i don’t think roulette is supernatural. I can understand the non-deterministic process and chacterise the probability density. And test and observe over many trials to confirm the stochastic model is right.

    Uncertainty, randomness, even entaglement and action at a distance can be observed right? with some degree of preision? When you start to pin them down with experiments and describe the probability distribution experimentally, repeatedly, testably then hey presto; I’d call that a “natural” obsrervable random or non-deterministic process.

    Maybe it’s natural with some more uncertainty than usual , but as you said about Heisenberg everything is at least a bit uncertain, so it’s really just a matter of how big is the variance of the probability distribution of your explanation or prediction.

    I know you’re just trolling by trying to use “supernatural” as a term for, unknown / uncertain / not fully explained / non deterministic. For me supernatural might be be predicting that the roulete wheel will come up 6 black next time. A way to determine the exact oucome of a process we believe to be non-deterministic.

    Of course that supernatural thing (like magnetism was back in the day) will become mundane if and when science can pin it down experimentally. Develop a model with a lower variance estimator.

    I’d argue entanglement has beein going through a process from supernatural and spooky when it was only theoretical. To natural now that it’s been proven, but theres still a lot of uncertainty. so you might call it peri-natural?

    I see the whole process of scientific explanation being moving our understanding of phenomena out of the mystical magical and supernatural realm, into the mundane natural world once we understand more about them and have some well understood (even if weak and incomplete) predictive power.


  • The “god” part becomes an unnecessarily complex explanation. I prefer simpler explanations when they fit the data just as well as the complex ones. It also reduces te risk when trying to broaden out to other lines of enquiry.

    As johsny said It makes the god explanation redundant for the large topic of species of life. There’s no need to waste time or energy “disproving” god. The whole concept of god is simply useless to understanding - and so is a waste of time or mental energy.

    But the so called explanations referncing god are typically such bullshit anyway nothing testable, no evidence, just “god did some shit”, “isn’t god cool/powerful”. So they never were actually useful to scientific reasoning. However much they may pretend otherwise religions are so much more aligned with laws and social structures and norms of behaviour than they are about advancing science.



  • Britain left of centre ? . . . these are blairites, “labour” in name only , they literally propped up the second homes buy to let market through the 2000s. and they’d gladly privatise every public service we have left if they can. I’ve already heard shit like “individualised healthcare” being mentioned in their “think tanks”.

    They’re probably not worse than the tories, and they probably will fuck it up less, that’s about all you can hope for them.

    They aren’t going to tackle anything fundamental like bank regulation, promoting domestic investment, industrial strategy or developing public services.

    I hope France gets a lot better.


  • Yes agreed. It also seems to change very often. so as soon as you do figure out how to do something, it changes.

    I also wish it didn’t allow shared documents at all, it’s actually worse than sharepoint at that. The number of people who think it works though, then you have talk them through how to find the shared ducument (as if i can remember) and actually share it effectively. Waste of time because its pretendng to do something that it is quite bad at.

    It was so much more usable when it was just skype/lync and it just did calls, screenshare and chat.







  • You’ve probably not infringed the copyright, only the court can decide though; if you were to be challenged by the rights holder.

    I think there are lots of factors in your defence:

    • you’re not selling it , your use is an example for education
    • I don’t think you’re reducing the market value for the original(s) in any way
    • you’ve not included substantial verbaitim sections of the original works , but I think you have used more than just facts and ideas (not sure though).

    But add in some more quotes, flesh it out, and then try to sell it . . . each step weakens the ‘fair use’ defence.

    This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit, then eventually the collective derived works might add up to commercial, substantial reuse, and might include enough to have copied a substantial portion of the original. Very hard to determine I’d think. Each individual use might be fair, but did the LLM itself go too far at some point?

    Copyright holder probably struggles to challenge the LLM on the basis of all the things infinite mokeys might use it for in future.





  • I think it is in the drake equation effectively, it factors into the length of time that the civilization might send and receive detectable signals - It doesn’t say why the Civilisation might collapse, but the planet becoming uninhabitable is surely one reason. On wikipedia for Drake Equation the Carl Sagan specification of L is in terms of the “fraction of planetary lifetime”.

    I think a missing factor might be how directional transmission and receiving is, if we can’t broadcast to and listen to the whole sky equally then we might have a 1/r-cubed type issue with the chances of both listening and transmitting with enough strength/energy at the same time.





  • Perpetual motion machines are one of the mothers of all snake oil. Maybe AI can turn base metals into gold too. Do these AIs even really have a demonstrable understanding of thermodynamics yet? It needs to prove itself with a usable output for a clear observabe application on a small scale scale before anyone should start chucking vast amounts of energy at it in hope of what it can “maybe” do. I’d much rather chuck all that energy into trials of tokamaks or something like that.