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https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk1hZOjYirE56CWIPKfy3XpkOLmZGaHtuk

  • Commented on Artificial Stupids
    Human-like AI is basically another prism for examining human behavior, like the rubber-forehead aliens of TV. This can be great storytelling, but I think it's unlikely as futurology*. I think that real, existing AI is a great stand-in for the...
  • Commented on Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl
    Sure, there are lots of ways it could be campaigned against and lots of ways that it wouldn't even be attempted in the first place. The most obvious reason it might not happen is if there's never enough design work...
  • Commented on Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl
    I am enough of an optimist to think that, within the decade, wind turbines and possibly photovoltaic systems can offer cheaper electricity (dollars per megawatt hour) than any coal plant if: 1) They're ideally situated, in the sunniest or windiest...
  • Commented on Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl
    Renewables (is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, but anyway) are great. Let's have them where they make sense, but lets not forget the central american strip mining for the rare-earths in PVs, for example. Pet peeve alert: debunking of...
  • Commented on Two months on
    I don't object to figures of ~40% thermodynamic efficiency. It's the transmission and distribution losses that were reported too high. They're an order of magnitude smaller than the heat engine losses, not roughly the same. Unless your local grid's electricity...
  • Commented on Two months on
    Decades ago when I studied this, the typical efficiency of electrical transmission about about 1/3. Meaning 3 units of electricity are generated for each 1 unit that is actually consumed by the end user. Do you have a source for...
  • Commented on Last time I did this, I lied ...
    Your model gets history terribly wrong. Why should it be trusted to predict the future? You jumped straight from Christian takeover of the Roman Empire to very recent and narrowly observed history, conveniently ignoring centuries of declining piety and religious...
  • Commented on Last time I did this, I lied ...
    This is nonsense, a logically-and-historically blind extrapolation of the sort that projects Earth will be converted to yottagrams of yeast by next month based on what's happened in my petri dish over the last 2 hours. Why aren't conservative Amish...
  • Commented on Last time I did this, I lied ...
    If fundamentalism's success or failure is simply a matter of biology, how do you explain the existence of a secularized world for the fundies to aspire to conquering? Piety should have never waned in the first place. I think this...
  • Commented on You probably already saw this, but ...
    Do you have a cite for that 40x figure? Apollo has an estimated cost of $170 billion in 2005 dollars. At 40x, $6.8 trillion in reasonably recent money is a lot to account for, even spread over 40-50 years. Most...
  • Commented on Obsolete before it ships
    I agree that publishers are historically and currently important to the financial well-being of authors. I was prompted to respond by this: "My grandfather wrote a collection of stories from his life as a doctor in the rural Midwestern US,...
  • Commented on Obsolete before it ships
    Charlie writes blog entries here several times a month, and the entries are readable, engaging, and generally free of egregious grammatical, spelling, and formatting errors. Is there a paid editor responsible for that outcome? Or to put the point even...
  • Commented on PSA: Gorgon Stare
    There's already plenty of traffic on the internet that is encrypted. Even if you assume that three letter agencies have a basement full of quantum computers (or rendition teams and friendly torturers) to decrypt selected messages, how do they choose...
  • Commented on PSA: Gorgon Stare
    You might want to reread that paper. If I understood it right, by feeding an ammonium solution into peat, they got out nitrates. That's nitrogen in, nitrogen out. Right, that's what I said. It is why I mentioned it as...
  • Commented on PSA: Gorgon Stare
    I think your numbers for the nitrate farms are a bit high, and considering the nitrate wars of the 19th century, it's an interesting issue. BTW, if we do truly go post-oil, global nitrate production will fall precipitously, and that...
  • Commented on PSA: Gorgon Stare
    There is quite a bit of lore in older books about gunpowder (now online free thanks to large-scale scanning projects) describing optimal environments for bacteria to convert urine, ammonium salts, or other nitrogen sources into nitrates. This was how saltpeter...
  • Commented on PSA: Gorgon Stare
    It's not exactly a 3D printer, but I've heard that cheap CNC machine tools make it easy to build the parts that can convert semiautomatic firearms to fully automatic (machine guns). A trained gun smith could always do it, but...
  • Commented on Reasons to be Cheerful
    I'm not even that sorry that the most dramatic gains went to those near the bottom instead of those near the top. Diminishing returns means that increased prosperity near the bottom does a lot more good than a continued increase...
  • Commented on It's made out of meat.
    I'm much less convinced that a robot/AI economy will end in a crapsack world due to the deprivation of the unemployed. If AI is just software and robots can build more robots from raw materials, all it takes is one...
  • Commented on It's made out of meat.
    I'm not understanding your point here. The size of the inputs and outputs matter, because we are conducting a test that takes a finite length of time. But why does the size of the insides of the machine matter? That's...
  • Commented on It's made out of meat.
    The flaw here is that you're assuming that humans (or indeed any finite-state automata) could produce as output a string of infinite length. Not true. And more practically still, the length of time to administer these tests is finite. So,...
  • Commented on It's made out of meat.
    The lookup table you need to pass the Turing test isn't merely big, it's of infinite size. For example, anyone should be able to tell you the sum of a given integer and 1. But the integers are infinite. You'd...
  • Commented on It's made out of meat.
    Yes, the Chinese Room argument is the same sleight-of-hand trick. Assume that the hard part of the problem has been done outside the boundaries of a system you define, then demonstrate that there is nothing remarkable left within the boundaries....
  • Commented on It's made out of meat.
    I've never bought this one for the reason that it's trivially easy to get a machine to pass the Turing test using only a lookup table. It would be trivially easy if you had a lookup table of unlimited size...
  • Commented on Interdependency
    There are many different kinds of flash memory: NOR, single-level-cell NAND, and multi-level-cell NAND, optionally made at different lithographic process nodes, with different storage controllers, and with different error-correction schemes. Camera memory cards and thumb drives are usually made with...
  • Commented on Julian Assange, defending our democracies (despite their owners' wishes)
    The USA's Espionage Act of 1917 was used to lock up socialists for distributing pamphlets against the draft. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously compared the dangerous pamphleteers to men "crying fire in a crowded theater." I think it is ironic that...
  • Commented on Invaders from Mars
    "This is a very interesting metaphor, and it certainly touches on many essential points, but there's something that creeps me out about it - you've absolved the population from any political responsibility." Agreed. When the USA first lowered the national...
  • Commented on Utopia
    The means of the Culture are science fantasy, but I'd unreservedly call the ends utopian and Where I'd Most Like to Live if it Weren't Impossible. If the Minds are so good at peaceful and democratic persuasion that they've effectively...
  • Commented on Julian Assange, defending our democracies (despite their owners' wishes)
    I read the NYT, FAS's Secrecy News, and Arms Control Wonk among others. You're right that this information is not new, but having it confirmed from the horse's mouth (or rather the horse's written correspondence) seems like a positive development...
  • Commented on Julian Assange, defending our democracies (despite their owners' wishes)
    I forgot another useful one: Wikileaks has revealed that the US government knows that the US-backed government of Afghanistan is incompetent and steeped in corruption top to bottom. This is no surprise to anyone outside the US government either but...
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