What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
The fact that it is on top demonstrates that it is doing the trick.
> The fact that it is on top demonstrates that it is doing the trick.
Demonstrate? Really? What about the other possibilities?
- An uncatched click-ring pulled it up.
- The HN crowd has been tricked to upvote something that do not "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" (would not be the first time).
- This "intellectual curiosity" is misunderstood. I remember a friend's friend who had a big collection of porn. He told us blantly that he did watch them only out of curiosity and interest... Yes. But, you know, I also feel mildly titillated when checking gossips about some topic I am interested in, eg. Mr Facebook wedding pics, and could easily mistake this for "intellectual curiosity gratification", but it is not, or anything is and the filter becomes useless.
Anyone whose thinking is wishful can safely be disregarded, of course.
But this utopian resurrection and transcendance story is just one version of the singularity. There are many people who think AI is not physically impossible, nanotech is not physically impossible, and so recursively self-improving AI with strong abilities to act in the physical world is a possibility. Many of those people think that is a very dangerous possibility.
You can agree or disagree with the detailed arguments, but you cannot accuse these people of allowing wishful thinking to cloud their judgements.
I like MacLeod as a writer, but that slogan is damaging because many people hear it, laugh, and stop thinking.
There are many forms of wishful thinking. Apocalyptic disaster is also one.
You seem nice; forgive me if I get too dismissive here.
As a software practitioner it seems to me obvious that we are so many light years away from the kind of software the Singularity people are talking about that the whole thing is all a fantasy club, and a little embarrassing. It's like the detailed debates 19th century radicals used to have about society after the Revolution.
Also, the Singularity people always seem to do that moving target thing where as soon as you say one thing, they go: But that's not the Singularity, that's a misunderstanding of the Singularity. Leaves me thinking: it must be awfully subtle.
A software practitioner, you say? As a researcher in machine learning, I think you're wrong. I agree that recursively self-improving AI is not around the corner, but I think it could happen in a few decades.
Even if it has a 1% chance of happening in the next century, I would still allocate resources to thinking about how to mitigate the risks (and maybe look foolish if it never happens) than leave things to chance and end up regretting it. By which I mean, a runaway AI destroys humanity or other bad outcomes.
As for the moving target -- since a singularity, if it happens, would be very important, it definitely makes sense to talk about lots of different scenarios. Anyone who dismisses a plausible scenario just because that's not what Vernor Vinge said, or what Ray Kurzweil said -- well, they can safely be dismissed.
The singularity (as conceived pre-Kurzweil) is the horizon beyond which we can't make any reasonable predictions about the future. Recursively self-improving AI is merely one potential path to that. But GP is right that the meme that the singularity is ridiculous tends to go along with the meme that intelligence is ineffable and can't be reduced to an algorithm in a computer.
If you are going to call something out as fallacious, you should name which fallacy it is. Otherwise your statement is just as good as saying 'you are wrong!'
This is a fair point, but I think its also fair for the parent to point the potential for bias out, given that some people may have perused the article quickly without realizing that its posted to the blog of a company with a large stake in the issue at hand.
If the brand is using Facebook, Facebook is in the right. It's their platform. They can do what they want. I don't understand why brands feel so entitled.
"Racism is usually defined as views, practices and actions reflecting the belief that humanity is divided into distinct biological groups called races and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior."
"and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior."
That's the important part. "Using race as a classification upon which you base your actions" is not by definition racism. Just as using sex as a classification upon which to base actions is not sexism. There is a requirement that those classifications must be used to discriminate or suggest that another group is superior in order for it to be racism or sexism.
Thus your definition is wrong because you selectively ignored a key part of the actual definition.
"The result–being able to blindly trust the things you own–is intensely liberating."
It seems somewhat pathetic that psychological liberation should come from choosing the correct personal possessions. I think a better form of liberation would be to shift focus away from possessions entirely.
