Real world

The fight between an ambitious novice and an old master is a well-worn cliche in martial arts movies: the novice is a blur of motion, flipping and spinning. The master is mostly still. But somehow the novice’s attacks never seem to quite connect, and the master’s eventual attack is decisive.

taking YAGNI as the ultimate design principle: above single-responsibility, above choosing the best tool for the job, and above “good design

We’ve all seen codebases with hacks stacked on top of hacks, and they definitely don’t look like good design. But are hacks simple? I actually don’t think so. The problem with a hack or a kludge is precisely that it isn’t simple: that it adds complexity

the proper fix is almost always much simpler than the hack

Figuring out the simplest solution requires considering many different approaches. In other words, it requires doing engineering

Simple systems have fewer “moving pieces”: fewer things you have to think about when you’re working with them Simple systems are less internally-connected. They are composed from components with clear, straightforward interfaces

tiebreaker: simple systems are stable. If you’re comparing two states of a software system, and one will require more ongoing work if no requirements change, the other one is simpler

the cardinal sin of big tech SaaS engineering is an obsession with scale

you don’t know ahead of time where all the bottlenecks are going to be. At most you can try to make sure you’re ready for 2x or 5x the current traffic

It’s fun to decouple your service into two pieces so they can be scaled independently (I have seen this happen maybe ten times, and I have seen them actually be usefully scaled independently maybe once

Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky (Chicago, 11 settembre 1979) è uno scrittore, teorico dell'intelligenza artificiale e teorico delle decisioni statunitense, noto per aver divulgato l'idea dell'intelligenza artificiale amichevole,[1][2] rendendola popolare

i sistemi autonomi e adattivi siano progettati per imparare un comportamento corretto nel tempo

Egli afferma che la gentilezza (un desiderio di non nuocere agli umani) dovrebbe essere progettata fin dall'inizio, ma che i progettisti dovrebbero riconoscere sia che i loro progetti possono essere difettosi, sia che il robot imparerà ed evolverà nel tempo

lavorare per specificare gli agenti software che convergono su comportamenti predefiniti sicuri anche quando i loro obiettivi sono mal specificati

IA potrebbe fare un salto apparentemente brusco nell'intelligenza puramente come risultato dell'antropomorfismo, la tendenza umana a pensare allo 'scemo del villaggio' e a 'Einstein' come gli estremi della scala dell'intelligenza, invece di punti quasi indistinguibili sulla scala delle menti in generale

Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens. Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization. Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press. Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer. In less than thirty years, it will end.

life as we know it" is over, and everything we know goes out the window

The most-quoted estimate for the Singularity is 2035 - within your lifetime! - although many, including I, think that the Singularity may occur substantially sooner.

That's The AI Advantage:  Simple tasks carried out at blinding speeds and without error, conscious tasks carried out with perfect memory and total self-awareness

the laws of physics as now understood would allow one gram (more or less) to store and run the entire human race at a million subjective years per second

That means, using only this planetary mass for computing power, it would be possible to support more people than the entire Universe could support if biological humans colonized every single planet.  It means that, in a single day, a civilization could live over 80 billion years, several times older than the age of the Universe to date

the human cognitive architecture is universal.  We all have the same sorts of underlying mindstuff.  Though the nature of this mindstuff is not necessarily known, our ability to communicate with each other indicates that, whatever we are communicating, it is the same on both sides.  If any two humans share a set of concepts, any structure composed of those concepts that is understood by one will be understood by the other

The great breakthroughs of physics and engineering did not occur because a group of people plodded and plodded and plodded for generations until they found an explanation so complex, a string of ideas so long, that only time could invent it.  Relativity and quantum physics and buckyballs and object-oriented programming all happened because someone put together a short, simple, elegant semantic structure in a way that nobody had ever thought of before.  Being a little bit smarter is where revolutions come from.  Not time.  Not hard work.  Although hard work and time were usually necessary, others had worked far harder and longer without result

The essence of revolution is raw smartness

Two and a half millennia of trying to solve it and nothing to show for it but "I think therefore I am."  The solutions seem to be necessarily simple, yet are demonstrably imperceptible.  Perhaps the solutions operate outside the representations that can be formed with the human brain

Our semantic primitives even determine what we can know.

Might there be states of existence beyond mere consciousness - transsentience?  Might solving the nature of reality create the ability to create new Universes, manipulate the laws of physics, even alter the kind of things that can be real - "ontotechnology"?  That's what the Singularity is all about

A Perceptual Transcend occurs when all things that were comprehensible become obvious in retrospect, and all things that were inventable become obvious.  A Perceptual Transcend occurs when the semantic structures of one generation become the semantic primitives of the next

If you're not sure what conscious experience a.k.a. "qualia" means, the short version is that you are not the one who speaks your thoughts, you are the one who hears your thoughts

This number is far larger than most people's conception of infinity.  I know that it was larger than mine.  My sense of awe when I first encountered this number was beyond words.  It was the sense of looking upon something so much larger than the world inside my head that my conception of the Universe was shattered and rebuilt to fit.  All theologians should face a number like that, so they can properly appreciate what they invoke by talking about the "infinite" intelligence of God

until you understand the hollowness of the words "infinity", "large" and "transhuman", you cannot appreciate the Singularity.  Even appreciating the Singularity is as far beyond us as visualizing Graham's number is to a chimpanzee

Even if a thousand novices try to solve a problem and fail, there's no way to say that a single expert couldn't solve the problem casually, offhandedly

One of the very deep truths about the human mind is that evolution designed us to be stupid - to be blinded by ideology, to refuse to admit we're wrong, to think "the enemy" is inhuman, to be affected by peer pressure

Variations in intelligence that fall within the normal design range don't directly affect this stupidity.  That's where we get the folk wisdom that intelligence doesn't imply wisdom, and within the human range this is mostly correct (8).  The variations we see don't hit hard enough to make people appreciate what "smarter" means

I am a Singularitarian because I have some small appreciation of how utterly, finally, absolutely impossible it is to think like someone even a little tiny bit smarter than you are.  I know that we are all missing the obvious, every day.  There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence.  Move the smallest bit upwards, and some problems will suddenly move from "impossible" to "obvious".  Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious.  Move a huge distance upwards

I've never been through the Singularity.  I've never been to the Transcend.  I just staked out an area of the Low Beyond.  This page is devoted to communicating a sense of awe that comes from personal experience, and is, therefore, merely human

2035.  Probably earlier

For example, population growth is hyperbolic.  (Maybe you learned it was exponential in math class, but it's hyperbolic to a much better fit than exponential.)  If that trend continues, world population reaches infinity on Aug 17, 2027, plus or minus 1.8 years

Waiting for the bus is a bad idea if you turn out to be the bus driver

Every species - at least, every species that doesn't blow itself up - sooner or later comes face-to-face with a full-blown superintelligence

(The details which follow have been redesigned and fleshed out a bit (by yours truly) from the original in Mind Children.) A neuron-sized robot swims up to a neuron and scans it into memory. An external computer, in continuous communication with the robot, starts simulating the neuron. The robot waits until the computer simulation perfectly matches the neuron. The robot replaces the neuron with itself as smoothly as possible, sending inputs to the computer and transmitting outputs from the simulation of a neuron inside the computer. This entire procedure has had no effect on the flow of information in the brain, except that one neuron's worth of processing is now being done inside a computer instead of a neuron. Repeat, neuron by neuron, until the entire brain is composed of robot neurons

4e.  The biological neuron is discarded

consciousness is strictly a function of neurons

At this point it is customary to speculate about how one goes about eating, drinking, walking around.  People state that they are unwilling to give up physical reality, worry about whether or not they will have sufficient computational power to simulate a hedonistic world of their wildest desires, and so on and so on ad nauseam.  Even Vinge himself, discoverer of the Singularity, has gone on record as wondering whether one's true self would be diluted by Transcendence

Eventually, you will die, go into an eternal loop, or Transcend.  In the long run... the really long run... mortality isn't an option

emotions like "selfishness" and "resentment" do not spontaneously appear in artificial intelligences

Resentment is a complex functional adaptation which evolved in humans over the course of millions of years; it does not simply appear out of nowhere.

Even the tendency to evaluate your own group as more valuable is an evolved one, along with the tendency to think in terms of "us" and "them" in the first place.

If infants could choose whether or not to leave the womb, without knowing what lay at the end of the birth canal - without knowing if anything lay at the end of the birth canal - how many would

Mitchell Porter calls it "The race between superweapons and superintelligence

Have you ever stared into the hard problem of ethics, or consciousness, or reality, and realized that there is no humanly-understandable justification for subjective experience, getting out of bed, or anything existing at all?  How can we do anything, set any goals, without knowing the Meaning of Life?  How can we justify our continued participation in the rat race if we don't know why we're running

The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street.  It is no longer necessary to look nervously away, repeating the mantra:  "I can't solve all the problems of the world."  We can.  We can end this

Why rationalize this life?  Why try to pretend that it makes sense?  Why make it seem bright and happy?  There is an alternative

Organizations tend to perpetuate themselves, rather than solving problems

But what I care about is the Singularity, not Singularitarianism

whether an idea is intelligent or stupid takes logical precedence over whether it's pro- or anti-Singularity.  (You'd think that this would all be blatantly obvious - unless, of course, you'd ever read a history book, or talked to other humans, or turned on a television set or something

Don't describe Life after Singularity in glowing terms.  Don't describe it at all.  I think the all-time low point in predicting the future came in the few brief paragraphs of Unbounding the Future that I read, when they described a pedestrian being run over and his hand miraculously healing.  That's ridiculous.  Pedestrian?  Run over?  Hand?  Cars in a nanotech world?  Why not just have a bunch of apes describe the ease of getting bananas with a human mind

Leave the problems of transhumanity to the transhumans.  Our chances of getting anything right are the same as a fish designing a working airplane out of algae and pebbles

playing the Nazi card,[1][2] is an attempt to invalidate someone else's argument on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.[3]

"You know who else...?" with the deliberate intent of impugning a certain idea or action by implying Hitler had that idea or performed such an action

I like the Retro Game Mechanics channel on YouTube. What was possible was limited by the hardware, and in a weird way it forced games to be good. Skill was apparent by a quick viewing, and different skill is usually highly correlated. Good graphics meant good story – not true today

What if the Internet was a mistake? I feel like it’s breaking my brain

not having the Internet with you will be a choice, not a real barrier. There’s nowhere to hide

Chris McCandless wanted to be an explorer, but being born in 1968 meant that the world was already all explored. His clever solution, throw away the map. But that didn’t make him an explorer, it made him an idiot who died 5 miles from a bridge that would have saved his life

The TikTok brainrot kids will be nothing compared to the ChatGPT brainrot kids

It will be whatever it is

No other signal like it has been detected before or since.

the signal was much more powerful than had previously been predicted at 250 Janskys, four times larger than had previously been estimated.

We propose that the Wow! Signal was caused by the abrupt brightening of the hydrogen line of these clouds triggered by an intense radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater

firmitas (solidità e permanenza); utilitas (funzione, destinazione d’uso); venustas (perfezione di bellezza).

equilibrio e proporzioni sono elementi caratteristici della natura

Canone di Policleto, l’applicazione del modulo architettonico all’anatomia: partendo da un’unità (come un dito o la testa) si ricavano proporzionalmente le misure di tutto il corpo.

Alice

>> Make cheese expensive again << Non è un paese per caci

è un modello che concettualizza i meccanismi di conoscenza e auto-conoscenza delle persone; in altre parole, spiega in che modo l’Io si relaziona con sé stesso e con gli altri, attraverso diversi livelli cognitivi e relazionali

Scientists recently discovered a microbe with one of the tiniest genomes on Earth. More surprising, the creature is almost entirely dependent on its host

Merlin displays what he knows so shamelessly that he throws everyone off

the “shameless” approach is becoming a dominant strategy today. It was first popularized in modern canon by Paris Hilton, who played the “dumb blonde heiress

people were dismissive of Paris because validating her playbook would mean admitting that they were playing an inferior game

Today, it seems like punishing shamelessness only increases social rewards to the transgressor. What’s changed?

In the past, if the size of your community was finitely bounded (like a village, or an aristocratic social class), people didn’t enter or exit these communities as frequently. Under these conditions, sanctions are probably still effective, because members of the community want to be liked and accepted.

But the borders to online communities are much more fluid - perhaps even nonexistent

will backfire, because they just serve as a signaling boost for the transgressor, attracting outsiders who resonate with that person’s message.

forms the basis for an entirely new community.

A common critique of shameless people is questioning their intelligence

it doesn’t actually matter how aware that person is

The shameless person is simply a host for a set of ideas, which, like any virus

Ai sensi dell’art. 24 del Regolamento di Polizia Urbana, l’esercizio dell’attività artistica di strada non è soggetta alle disposizioni in materia di occupazione di aree e spazi pubblici

Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

I didn't start running until I was in my late twenties, and even so I would end up in a pattern where I'd get motivated and go on a couple of runs, take a few days off, go on another run the following week, and next thing you know it's been a month since I last run. Rinse and repeat.

2024 was going to be the year that I finally did social media. Regular posting, a content calendar, a strategy, a plan for growth

I had a book coming out in April 2024

There are very few things that an author can practically do to make a book a success