AGMS

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• Commented on Place your bets
  That being said, I'd be extremely surprised if there wasn't already some form of steganographic info embedded into the various generators simply to identify their own generated content compared with an opposition system. No need to be surprised, it...
• Commented on Place your bets
  One thing that impresses me about ChatGPT is that it can understand requests, commands, suggestions etc, and actually do something relevant in response. Could that be harnessed to do real world actions rather than just generating text? Combine that with...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  ... when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an algorithm that actually DOES take human happiness into account? Is that just a different distopia (as portrayed in ‘Friendship is Optimal)? A utopia? I think that's...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  DeMarquis wrote: Ahem. But the reply button only seems to allow you to reply to one person at a time, which annoys me. I try to provide context with quotes, but if you think that's inappropriate, I am open to...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  Why waste CPU cycles on running a box of accountants, lawyers etc? You truly underestimate the power of a lazy programmer to slap together something from existing parts rather than doing actual coding. Particularly if it’s off the shelf pre-made...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  Another possible “Why” for uploading Humans is of course easier programming. Bunches of Humans and support data systems would be packaged up as “functionality libraries”. For example, here’s one that does income tax returns. Several accountants, a couple of lawyers,...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  Is continuity important? That’s one of the behind the scenes things Queen Elizabeth II does. She talks to almost all the heads of state of the world at various diplomatic functions, and is privy to at least the British side...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  I was going to suggest a solar to electricity converting umbrella would look less out of place in your visit to China. However, the technology hasn’t evolved much from a 2011 student project where they tried various techniques and ended...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  It’s kind of like paying back a loan. No economic gain, unless you value the ability to keep on playing the game. Actively removing carbon and stashing it underground takes a lot of energy. Unless we figure out something cute...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Nice idea, that Halo Drive, until the black hole stops spinning from over-use. But I want to convert matter into energy as efficiently possible. And with less equipment mass than a Dyson Sphere around a sun or around a heavy...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  That much energy, so quickly? That suggests pulsed very small black hole creation and subsequent destruction, adding a bit more matter each time than what’s needed to create the next black hole. The drawback is that you now have to...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  That anti-matter planet was a real hypothetical! They won’t last very long in our part of the universe, or at least the part swept out by our normal matter galaxy. Though Niven had the nifty idea of the anti-matter ablating...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  … coal, oil, gas, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and then something black hole related is what I expect for the future of energy. Small black holes evaporating via Hawking radiation (mass a few hundred kilograms, supposedly they don’t form under...
• Commented on Omicron
  Ottawa Public Health has ordered all hands on deck to man the vaccine clinics. So that means new early morning and evening time slots have appeared at their existing mass vaccination clinics (usually Indoor hockey rinks). By the way, the...
• Commented on PSA: Publishing supply chain shortages
  JBS writes: They could take a blank U.S. (North America?) map [and Europe/Asia as needed] and insert the place names as from the different timelines. A reader could superimpose the maps to see the geographic relationships How about adding a...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  It did say that it was counting females with the name Nevada. Adding a “state of” before Nevada gave a more plausible answer....
• Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
  That’s correct, not allowed to sell electrons to the USA, in the sense that it wasn’t economical to build new infrastructure to generate and move more electrons. It’s likely that reliable “green” electrons will get a better price, so it’s...
• Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
  Hydro‑Québec has realised that their hydro electric power dams are also storage devices. Before, they just had surplus power (Bitcoin mining opportunities:-). With wind power, they have even more reliable power, green power, which they may now be able to...
• Commented on A Quick Infomercial
  Actually blockchain cryptocurrency does have a border based on the speed of light. Bitcoin has a 10 minute block cycle time. Light travel time from Earth to Mars varies from 3 to 22 minutes, depending on orbital positions. You need...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  That’s ship sized magnetic shielding which has such high energy density. Larger fields don’t need to be so strong since they have more time to move incoming particles aside. But if you have 10’s of kilometres of space for coils,...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Funny you should mention PaperClip 64; I’ve been archiving some Commodore 64 floppies and extracting things like my 1985 essay on the future of work and leisure for anthropology class. YouTube and cat videos sort of predicted for 2020! Along...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Yes, lots of multiple forms. 4 digit years are one special case I had to do. First decade is read as X-thousand and Y (like the film two-thousand and one), then the rest of the century is century and decade...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Funny you should mention that. I recently finished “RealCount” a weekend project (that took a month) to expand scripts for voice actors into readable words. So $85.20 becomes “Eighty-five dollars and twenty cents”. As you may suspect, they’re paid by...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Or the difference in translation lengths could be due to not having time to edit the text down to a shorter version. Famous quote about that apparently originally from Blaise Pascal: Mes Révérends Pères, mes Lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de...
• Commented on What happens now?
  With Kolmogorov complexity, the universe could be represented relatively simply as the initial big bang conditions with physics being the instruction set. Assuming it is deterministic (probably not), you could compute the state (with rather a lot of expense) of...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Funny you should suggest logarithmic linking of money to happiness (doubling money only increments happiness). I started with a logarithmic scale in my Story Points Ethical Calculus, but decided it wasn't quite a good enough fit. In #488 Damian talks...
• Commented on Submarine coming through!
  Speaking of balloon based, how about tying one with a string to a quad-copter? With careful flying (always towing the balloon, not pushing it in front) it can be positioned upwind of the area you want to photograph, then glide...
• Commented on Upcoming Attractions!
  Rogers here in Canada has a 30 day time limit, reset every time you put a few dollars (minimum $10) into the pay-as-you-go mobile phone account. They also charge $0.50 per minute for talk. If you don't add more money...
• Commented on The Laundry Files: an updated chronology
  Huh, that exercise in wishful computation makes my Story Points Ethical Calculus look practical. In #StoryPointsEC, you lossily (implies a target audience) compress the story of the Universe and see how big it is. Rather than maximising paperclips, you try...
• Commented on Update to Public Appearances in a time of pandemic
  2dot, just in case you missed it, see "Public appearances in a time of pandemic" #1269 with my tip on having the iPad remember where you were reading, avoiding the scrolling....