In other news today...
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@boomzilla the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. In related news, the economic gurus have predicted 8 of the last 4 recessions.
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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11928331
Boy, 8, squeaks when he breathes after swallowing toy whistle
There's a video on the site that absolutely no one should laugh at.
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"Currently."
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@pjh said in In other news today...:
"Currently."
But who knows, he may decide he's feeling happy and try to get up and walk. (Oh, and I know I'm a horrible person for making jokes about this. Not news to me).
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@boomzilla From the article, it seems they have no particular reason to believe it actually happened, they're just reporting it might.
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@pjh said in In other news today...:
"Currently."
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This post is deleted!
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No word on ginger beer...
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
No word on ginger beer...
Maybe a German could explain something to me. According to the article, the employer just provided the bread rolls without spreads. Unless you were starving, I don't understand how anyone could eat bread rolls without some kind of spread (butter, jam, etc.).
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@chozang I agree that it's not a full breakfast, but a fresh roll even without a spread is a pretty darn good thing (and a common breakfast across the world if paired with fruit or something similar).
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@chozang said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
No word on ginger beer...
Maybe a German could explain something to me. According to the article, the employer just provided the bread rolls without spreads. Unless you were starving, I don't understand how anyone could eat bread rolls without some kind of spread (butter, jam, etc.).
Good rolls can be really tasty even without anything on them.
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@dreikin said in In other news today...:
@chozang said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Maybe a German could explain something to me. According to the article, the employer just provided the bread rolls without spreads. Unless you were starving, I don't understand how anyone could eat bread rolls without some kind of spread (butter, jam, etc.).
Good rolls can be really tasty even without anything on them.
I guess I'm more spoiled than I realized. Or I've never had a good roll. In before:
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@chozang said in In other news today...:
@dreikin said in In other news today...:
@chozang said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Maybe a German could explain something to me. According to the article, the employer just provided the bread rolls without spreads. Unless you were starving, I don't understand how anyone could eat bread rolls without some kind of spread (butter, jam, etc.).
Good rolls can be really tasty even without anything on them.
I guess I'm more spoiled than I realized. Or I've never had a good roll. In before:
If you haven't had a roll that good before, you're less spoiled than you realize.
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@chozang said in In other news today...:
Maybe a German could explain something to me. According to the article, the employer just provided the bread rolls without spreads. Unless you were starving, I don't understand how anyone could eat bread rolls without some kind of spread (butter, jam, etc.).
The guys then probably brought their own stuff to put on the roll. In a company I worked in, they did just that: Some of the employees (usually the ones who had a birthday recently) would provide jam, meat and other assortments and the company provided the rolls. It was a regular occurence every Wednesday.
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Prices are tipped to start at $1,199 USD (approximately $1,497 CAD) and end at $1,749 USD ($2,184 CAD) depending on configuration.
For the price of one Chromebook, I can buy two gaming laptops at Best Buy.
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
For the price of one Chromebook, I can buy two gaming laptops at Best Buy.
It's the Apple business model: pay more for less
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@masonwheeler Uhm... am I the only one who sees a problem with this line of reasoning? It seems to me that assuming that "the underlying structure of the universe can't be a form of simulation because computers built within that universe can't simulate the universe they are in due to physical limitations" is begging the question.
My guess is that they aren't actually claiming this, though; the article very clearly, if subtly, shifts the argument, presenting the actual topic of the assertion after going off on a tangent following their click-bait title's premise. The 'scientific proof' is just a statement of what should be obvious: that future simulations of the sort predicted by some Transhumanists (though not all; I certainly never mentioned them before myself) could not be all-encompassing because that would lead to a Cantor paradox (where you are trying to map a countable infinity to an uncountable infinity).
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First a little tutorial for the oldies among you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxVyB4i-3_4
Now the news (or at least how I first read it):
Study Shows the Danger of Dabbing...
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@masonwheeler eh... they've proven that our computers couldn't simulate the universe. That seems to me like a straw man.
this notion of creating a massive-scale simulation using classical computers is “impossible.”
If the universe was a simulation, it very likely wouldn't be running on anything we'd consider to be a "classical" computer. It would also probably contain lots of optimizations, many that we probably haven't even discovered yet -- fractals, for example, produce an infinite degree of apparent complexity and yet they only require a fairly small amount of real data. Some of the stuff that science has found is almost just too bizarre to believe that it's really real -- i.e. not a simulation. Like the uncertainty principle, for example... or this general impression that some subatomic particles (electrons, photons) behave more like "waves" generally, and do not exist at fixed points until they're observed closely (and thus, required to exist at a fixed point)... they're assuming that subatomic particles would need to be simulated at full complexity, when in fact they'd probably be replaced by generalized particles -- until some wise-ass inside the simulation decided to examine them closely and necessitated replacing them with the "detailed" models. (Thanks a lot, scientists. Maybe the increasing cost of storing detailed models for all the subatomic particles that you're studying necessitated devoting less resolution to modeling temperature and that's why we're getting accumulated rounding errors aka global warming. Yes, I'm totally making this up. No, I'm not seriously suggesting it. Shut up.)
In fact, if our universe is a simulation, there's no particular reason why the very rules of physics as we know them must translate into whatever universe contains the computer that's simulating ours.
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@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
eh... they've proven that our computers couldn't simulate the universe. That seems to me like a straw man.
To prove computers as we know them couldn't simulate the universe, they'd have to prove the universe isn't turing-computable. That's not a simple efficiency question - it's a huge conceptual gap. Skimming the article, I don't get the feeling they've proved this.
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@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
Like the uncertainty principle, for example... or this general impression that some subatomic particles (electrons, photons) behave more like "waves" generally, and do not exist at fixed points until they're observed closely (and thus, required to exist at a fixed point)... they're assuming that subatomic particles would need to be simulated at full complexity, when in fact they'd probably be replaced by generalized particles -- until some wise-ass inside the simulation decided to examine them closely and necessitated replacing them with the "detailed" models.
So you're saying that the simulation is lazy-evaluated?
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@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
Like the uncertainty principle, for example... or this general impression that some subatomic particles (electrons, photons) behave more like "waves" generally, and do not exist at fixed points until they're observed closely (and thus, required to exist at a fixed point)... they're assuming that subatomic particles would need to be simulated at full complexity, when in fact they'd probably be replaced by generalized particles -- until some wise-ass inside the simulation decided to examine them closely and necessitated replacing them with the "detailed" models.
So you're saying that the simulation is lazy-evaluated?
It also seems to have some kind of anti-debugging code pasted somewhere in there.
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@dragoon said in In other news today...:
Looks like dreams of thought crimes is coming true:
The idea of jailing people for watching/reading wrong things isn't exactly without precedent - pretty much all countries in the world double down on child porn, and in many of them (eg. Poland) this extends to drawings, so the idea isn't just to avoid harming children in the process of creating the content.
So it's not really scandalous as much as it's silly - good luck figuring out who should be exempt from that law, from government officials through watchdog groups and researchers up to journalists and probably many more groups for which looking at terrorist contemt does not translate to an actual intent to join the ranks.
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@maciejasjmj said in In other news today...:
The idea of jailing people for watching/reading wrong things isn't exactly without precedent - pretty much all countries in the world double down on child porn, and in many of them (eg. Poland) this extends to drawings, so the idea isn't just to avoid harming children in the process of creating the content.
The problem in this instance is the rather fuzzy line between political speech and terrorism, when the people creating a rather sharp line in that grey area are the politicians themselves.
And the unenviable opportunity for this to be a slippery slope and/or thin end of a wedge to censor other things under threat of incarceration.
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@scholrlea said in In other news today...:
Uhm... am I the only one who sees a problem with this line of reasoning?
TFA article is idiocy all the way down.
Research published by physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin in Science Advances suggests that this notion of creating a massive-scale simulation using classical computers is “impossible.”
You also can't simulate the universe in a toaster oven. I should publish!
But just in case that wasn't inane enough for you:
“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following,” Musk said at a conference last year. “40 years ago we had Pong—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following,” Musk said at a conference last year. “40 years ago we had Pong—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were.
I literally downvoted your post just for containing those words before the rage haze cleared. What a fucking idiot.
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@pleegwat said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
eh... they've proven that our computers couldn't simulate the universe. That seems to me like a straw man.
To prove computers as we know them couldn't simulate the universe, they'd have to prove the universe isn't turing-computable. That's not a simple efficiency question - it's a huge conceptual gap. Skimming the article, I don't get the feeling they've proved this.
No... simply because something is Turing-computable does not mean it can be computed on a computer with a finitely-sized memory.
It also makes no guarantee that it can be computed at a "fast enough" rate, though in this case that's not relevant -- the speed of the simulation from outside needn't be the same as the simulated speed inside of it.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
But just in case that wasn't inane enough for you:
“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following,” Musk said at a conference last year. “40 years ago we had Pong—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were.
Of course that sounds silly if you stop there, stripping out all the context. Read the rest of what he said--that if you look at the progress from there to here, and then extrapolate further, it's conceivable that we could invent universe-simulations within a few decades--it makes a lot more sense... until you run into exponential complexity issues, as detailed in the article.
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@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
But just in case that wasn't inane enough for you:
“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following,” Musk said at a conference last year. “40 years ago we had Pong—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were.
Of course that sounds silly if you stop there, stripping out all the context. Read the rest of what he said--that if you look at the progress from there to here, and then extrapolate further, it's conceivable that we could invent universe-simulations within a few decades--it makes a lot more sense... until you run into exponential complexity issues, as detailed in the article.
It gets zero percent better with more context.
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@boomzilla Why?
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@masonwheeler Yes, why do you think it looks better?
Eh, maybe it is the best argument for that hypothesis. It's still not a very good argument.
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@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
No... simply because something is Turing-computable does not mean it can be computed on a computer with a finitely-sized memory.
True, though the typical model of a turing machine has an infinite data tape it can only traverse it at a fixed speed, and thus can only access a finite part of it in finite time.
However, as far as I know, space, time, and energy are all thought to be discrete. Time is finite. Space may or may not be infinite, but observable space is bounded by light speed. So as the number of variables is finite, and the number of values each variable can take is also finite, the total body of state is hence still finite.I'll admit you might have a point if you assume a universe which is infinite in space. However you could probably still simulate this on an infinitely large cellular automaton since the interactions are still local and thus the list of rules for the automaton is still finite. And I think the game of life still counts as turing-computable even though its field is conceptually infinite, and the entire field updates on every tick.
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@pleegwat yeah, but the whole point of the article was that the universe is orders of magnitude more complex (with respect to the amount of data that would be required to fully simulate it) than our (current sized, finite) computers could possibly handle. So whether it's Turing-computable is kind of beside the point, because Turing-computability sidesteps the whole issue of those constraints.
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@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
The published paper says absolutely nothing about us living in a simulation, and is much more technical and non-crackpot than all of the news reports about it. Essentially, it says that certain quantum systems seem to require exponential resources to simulate on classical computers. Not impossible, but infeasible for large systems. Then again, presumably a universe simulator would be implemented on a quantum computer.
Here's commentary from Scott Aaronson, an actual expert in quantum computers.
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@pjh said in In other news today...:
@maciejasjmj said in In other news today...:
The idea of jailing people for watching/reading wrong things isn't exactly without precedent - pretty much all countries in the world double down on child porn, and in many of them (eg. Poland) this extends to drawings, so the idea isn't just to avoid harming children in the process of creating the content.
The problem in this instance is the rather fuzzy line between political speech and terrorism, when the people creating a rather sharp line in that grey area are the politicians themselves.
How different is that from the child pornography vs. non-child pornography line? I.e. who decides that a given picture (drawing etc.) is pornographic or not, or whether it depicts a child or not? It's as fuzzy, if not more, than political speech vs. terrorism.
And the unenviable opportunity for this to be a slippery slope and/or thin end of a wedge to censor other things under threat of incarceration.
Again, exactly the same applies to child pornography.
Is it worrying that same laws are policing what we watch/read? Yes. Is there a danger of abuse and more restrictions to individual rights? Yes again. Is it something new about terrorism? No, not a bit.
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@pleegwat said in In other news today...:
True, though the typical model of a turing machine has an infinite data tape it can only traverse it at a fixed speed, and thus can only access a finite part of it in finite time.
Systems inside the simulation cannot observe using any time metric other than time metrics within the simulation, and so cannot observe how long it takes for the simulator to do anything or how much effort it requires. All that is information that is simply not available.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
How different is that from the child pornography vs. non-child pornography line? I.e. who decides that a given picture (drawing etc.) is pornographic or not, or whether it depicts a child or not?
Because the analogy, if one were to be drawn, would in this case have either paedophiles or paedophile chasers drawing the line and making the decisions.
@remi said in In other news today...:
And the unenviable opportunity for this to be a slippery slope and/or thin end of a wedge to censor other things under threat of incarceration.
Again, exactly the same applies to child pornography.
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@dkf Infinity is tricky.
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Ms Staton's view on Ms Welsh using her song remains, sadly, unreported due to presumed lack of space.
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@pjh said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
How different is that from the child pornography vs. non-child pornography line? I.e. who decides that a given picture (drawing etc.) is pornographic or not, or whether it depicts a child or not?
Because the analogy, if one were to be drawn, would in this case have either paedophiles or paedophile chasers drawing the line and making the decisions.
OK, good point. Although one might argue that the child pornography laws are heavily influenced by the paedophile chasers, but then all laws are influenced by "bad guys"-chasers, so that's not so specific.
@remi said in In other news today...:
And the unenviable opportunity for this to be a slippery slope and/or thin end of a wedge to censor other things under threat of incarceration.
Again, exactly the same applies to child pornography.
Yes, and this is why the comparison with child pornography laws is very relevant! The same argument about possible abuse or slipping of child pornography laws, and it is starting to come true (or at least, some people are wanting to go in that direction). So it is at least as likely that the same will happen with anti-terror-speech laws.
To make it clearer, my point is that anti-terror-speech laws are not really a new thing, and that previous examples of similar laws are proving that the fear about abuse of them is not just a fear. So, while I'm not against these laws per se (in the same way as I'm not opposed to the idea of child pornography laws), clearly they need some strong safeguards.
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@mzh said in In other news today...:
Essentially, it says that certain quantum systems seem to require exponential resources to simulate on classical computers. Not impossible, but infeasible for large systems. Then again, presumably a universe simulator would be implemented on a quantum computer.
Of course, if we're in a simulation then there's no reason why the computer running the simulation should exist in a universe that follows what appear to be our physical laws.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Of course, if we're in a simulation then there's no reason why the computer running the simulation should exist in a universe that follows what appear to be our physical laws.
Morpheus: The entire world around you exists for the sole purpose of reducing you, and all of humankind, to this. *holds up a battery*
Neo: Wait, wait, that's impossible! By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Machines can't possibly get more energy out of us than they expend on feeding us and maintaining basic life support.
Morpheus: And just where did you learn the Laws of Thermodynamics, Neo?
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@masonwheeler my favourite explanation for that little gaping plot hole