You can force modern standby to disconnect from networks (connected standby vs. disconnected standby). This helps with stopping the system from waking up randomly.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146593-enable-disable-ne...

Scarcity itself does not imply value, something can be scarce but if no one wants it it still has no value. So the question needs to be what really drives the value of something like Bitcoin?

In my opinion, I think that Bitcoin derives its value from the idea that one day it will become a widely used currency that can be exchanged universally for real-world goods and services. This has what has driven it to become a speculation tool; because at the end of the day when Bitcoin finally becomes a "universal" currency, everyone wants to be left holding a lot of it. But what if Bitcoin never becomes a currency, what happens to it's value then?

This doesn’t really make any sense. Bitcoins wild fluctuations make it terrible for a currency and its fluctuations have only gotten worse over time. It’s just a speculators game. If it became a universal currency, you would just convert whatever you have to it. There’s really no path for bitcoin to become a universal currency, because that would require stability. And there’s no path to stability with the current speculation interest. If the speculation interest dries up it would plummet, but that would just continue the cycle. It won’t ever stabilize unless it crashes and people stop caring about it.

What drives the valuation is pure speculation, partly by massive vested interests, and then of course by the masses of cultish believers who own a couple coins and are in on the Ponzi mania. The same things that excites people in Amway.

Who is to say what to legitimate use and what is misuse of a creation if not the creator?

Obvioysly the world at large.

Would you consider your use of fire (e.g. for cooking) "illegitimate" if the creator of fire said so? ("No, must eat food raw! Fire is meant for heating only! Ugh!").

The people who use it.

It's like the inventor of gif declaring it is pronounced 'jif'. Who cares, basically nobody else says it like that.

> But those heuristics and hardcoded biases were developed through brute force optimization over the course of billions of years, a massive amount of energy input and many organisms being devoured.

This is true in the context of the universe as a whole, not by the organism itself.

Except no organism is born a blank slate. Parent is correct in that our prior was massively expensive to construct

So we can expect our ANN’s to yield AGI in a few million or billion years? That doesn’t sound like a good place to put our current efforts then.

That does not necessarily follow, as I imagine you well know.

Why wouldn't it follow? Human intelligence evolved in the real world with all its vast information content. Deep learning systems are only trained on a few terrabytes of data of a single type (images, text, sound etc). Even if they can be trained faster than the rate at which animals evolved, their training data is so poor, compared to the "data" that "trained" animal intelligence that we'll be lucky if we can arrive at anything comparable to animal intelligence by deep learning in a billion years.

Or unlucky, as the case may be.

You elided the "necessarily".

One can rationally argue either way over the speculative proposition that reinforcement learning will yield AI in less than a few million years, but that it took evolution half a billion years is hardly conclusive, and certainly not grounds for stopping work.

Not grounds for stopping work[1], but perhaps grounds to explore other avenues[2] to see if something else might yield faster results.

I’m no expert, but my personal opinion is that AGI will probably be some hybrid approach that uses some reinforcement learning mixed with other techniques. At the very least, I think an AGI will need to exist in an interactive environment rather than just trained on preset datasets. Prior context or not, a child doesn’t learn by being shown a lot of images, it learns by being able to poke at the world to see what happens. I think an AGI will likely require some aspect of that (and apply reinforcement learning that way).

But like I said, I’m no expert and that’s just my layperson opinion.

[1] if the goal is AGI, if it’s not then of course there’s no reason to stop

[2] some people are doing just that, of course

Fair enough, though I do not think the evidence from evolution moves the needle much with respect to the timeline. For one thing, evolution was not dedicated to the achievement of intelligence.

Sounds reasonable.

>> You elided the "necessarily".

Well, if it follows, then it follows necessarily. But maybe that's just a deformation professionelle? I spend a lot of time working with automated theorem proving where there's no ifs and buts about conclusions following from premises.

If I am not mistaken, it does not necessarily follow unless it turns out to be a sound argument in every possible world.

Ah, so you are making a formal argument? In that case you should stick to formal language. And probably publish it in a different venue :)

No, I am simply responding to your rather formal point, in kind. Unless you are aguing for it being an established fact that the time evolution took to produce intelligent life rules out any form of reinforcement learning producing AI in any remotely reasonable period of time, then that original point of yours does not seem to be going anywhere.

In your work on theorem proving, am I right in guessing that there are no 'ifs' or 'buts' because the truth of premises is not an issue? In the "evolution argument", the premises/lemmas are not just that evolution took a long time, but also something along the lines of significant speedup not being possible.

You might notice that in another comment, I suggested that we might still be in the AI Cambrian. I'm not being inconsistent, as no-one knows for sure one way or the other.

I didn't make a formal point- my comment is a comment on an internet message board, where it's very unlikely to find formal arguments being made. But perhaps we do not agree on what constitutes a "(rather) formal point"? I made a point in informal language and in a casual manner and as part of an informal discussion ... on Hacker News. We are not going to prove or disprove any theorems here.

But, to be sure, as is common when this kind of informal conversation suddendly sprouts semi-formal language, like "argument", "claim", "proof", "necessarily follows" etc, I am not even sure what exactly it is we are arguing about, anymore. What exactly is your disagreement with my comment? Could you please explain?

"Necessarily" has general usage as well, you know... why would you read it otherwise, especially given the reasonable observation you make about this site? And my original point is not actually wrong, either: whether reinforcement learning will proceed at the pace of evolution is a topic of speculation - it is possible that it will, and possible that it will not.

Insofar is I have an issue with your comment, it is that it is not going anywhere, as I explained in my previous post.

>> Insofar is I have an issue with your comment, it is that it is not going anywhere, as I explained in my previous post.

I see this god-moding of my comment as a pretend-polite way to tell me I'm takling nonsense, that seems to be designed to avoid criticism for being rude to one's interlocutor on a site that has strong norms against that sort of thing, but without really trying to understand why those norms exist, i.e. because they make for more productive conversations and less wasting of everyone's time.

You made a comment to say that unless I claim that X (which you came up with), then my comment is not going anywhere. The intellectually corteous and honest response to a comment with which one does not agree is to try and understand the reasoning of the comment. Not to claim that there is only one possible explanation and therefore the comment must be wrong. That is just a straw man in sheep's clothing.

And this is not surprising given that it comes at the heels of nitpicking about supposedly important terminology (necessarily!). This is how discussions like this one go, very often. And that's why they should be avoided, because they just waste everyone's time.

"Necessarily", when read according to your own expectations for this forum, made an important difference to my original post (without it, I would have been insisting that the issue is settled already), so it was reasonable for me to point out its removal. The nitpicking over it began with your response to me doing so, and you have kept it going by taking the worst possible reading of what I write. This is, indeed, how things sometimes go.

Meanwhile, in a branching thread, I had a short discussion with the author of the post I originally replied to, in which I agreed with the points he made there. Both of us, I think, clarified our positions and reached common ground. That is how it is supposed to go.

I did not set out to pick a fight with you, and if I had anticipated how you would take my words, I would have phrased things more clearly.

I think the point huh is being mad is that individual people (or models) dot learn that way. It’s not like models training models, all the way down.

Individual people are not trained from scratch. ML models often have to be (modulo fine-tuning) since the field is still young.

That's already changing. That we have only relatively recently moved beyond always starting from scratch might indicate that we are still in the Cambrian of AI, however...

"I was only following orders."

Edit to add: If you are being asked to perform illegal or unethical acts as part of your employment, then perhaps termination is an ideal course of action? Unless of course your personal enrichment outweighs legalities or ethics in your worldview?

And I wasn't implying engineers should be entirely blameless. Everyone has a limited understanding of legal systems too complex for one person to fully grasp. And workers far below the level of decision makers should be judged according to evidence of their knowledge and responsibility. Likewise those who give orders should bear more responsibly.

All these "companies take on a life of their own" arguments sound a lot like executives priming the pump of potential jurors with excuses. If decision makers cannot bear responsibility because of a company size or organizational structure then we can make some sizes and structures illegal before they stumble/march into devastating incompetence.

> ...then we can make some sizes and structures illegal before they stumble/march into devastating incompetence.

Was with you until this part. Just hold them personally liable if someone gets hurt should they create an uncontrollable system and predictably fail to control it.

Right. My point was in response to excuses being made elsewhere that the nature of large companies mean these executives cannot be personally liable. So if we accept that the nature of huge companies is no one can be liable (I'm not convinced yet) then it would be time for capping sizes or outlawing structures.

Keep in mind the US already has laws around corporate structures and conflicts of interest. (Even if they're selectively applied.)

The nature of any size corporation is to have one person in charge. In terms of assigning responsibility I'd think that works better than the alternative you'd get by breaking it up. Namely a bunch of cooperating smaller firms only doing part of the job each, and able to point the blame at each other.

We heard the "too complex to understand" excuse a lot regarding the pricing of subprime debt. Except a lot of people did understand it was a problem. It's basically the "I'm too stupid to know what I was doing" defense. If we accept that defense and try to make regulation to protect them from failing (as was done in finance back then), we basically allow stupid people to continue to be in charge rather than being replaced as they need to.

If a person is skirting responsibility at the expense of a structure, it isn't he fault of the structure but the one skirting responsibility.

Structures can and should be changed in this case. But shouldn't be outlawed.

It may be fine in some countries, but saying that you’ll make some organization sizes and structures illegal, barring other criminal activity, smells like a violation of the freedom of association.

Why is that a good freedom?

It doesn't matter if it's a good freedom, the chances of the US repealing the 1st Amendment any time soon are basically nil. You'd have a better chance of getting Apple/Amazon/Google to voluntarily split up their own companies out of the goodness of their own hearts -- it just isn't going to happen.

The only argument that actually matters here is whether or not restrictions on corporate structure actually do violate freedom of association or not.

I'm reasonably skeptical that they do, given that the 1st Amendment hasn't stopped us from enforcing antitrust and monopoly legislation in the past. Yeah yeah, Citizens United and all that, but we regulate companies all the time.

But I'd still want an actual lawyer to weigh in on that, I wouldn't feel confident saying that there aren't limits on how far we can go in that direction.

Antitrust doesn't violate the first amendment, so clearly limits on corporate scale aren't unconstitutional, so the legal defense is insufficient and the moral question stands.

Like I wrote:

> I'm reasonably skeptical that they do, given that the 1st Amendment hasn't stopped us from enforcing antitrust and monopoly legislation in the past. Yeah yeah, Citizens United and all that, but we regulate companies all the time.

> But I'd still want an actual lawyer to weigh in on that, I wouldn't feel confident saying that there aren't limits on how far we can go in that direction.

It doesn't necessarily hold that because one thing is legal, everything is legal. For example, we have 1st Amendment restrictions on threats and libel, but in the US hate speech is still protected speech. 1st Amendment exceptions are generally pretty narrow and specific in the US.

In the same way, clearly some corporate regulation is OK. It does not follow that there's literally no limit on what the government can dictate about how a company can operate. I would prefer to get input from a lawyer before asserting that so confidently.

Because it allows people to associate with whom they choose to. Remove that and you’ve opened the gate to legal racism, legally institutionalized homophobia, banning of religion; the list is endless. The five freedoms are the pillars of our Constitution. Without them, we are no better than China or Russia or even any third-world hellhole you care to mention.

I don't see that even a little bit, your cause effect isn't explained.

I should phrase it differently. Why is an absolute freedom of association more important then the freedom from being harmed by large associations with amoral machinations. The original argument asks that if large corporations inherently obscure moral outcomes, maybe they are immoral, which is an argument that puts these two moral axioms in conflict. Simply stating that one side wins is thought terminating; its important to argue for why its better.

Morality is highly variable, depending on the observers beif system. Legality is the only framework that we can establish in common. Ethics comes in second as it can be established by a group and does not bind those outside the group.

I’m under the impression we already don’t have freedom of association if it’s inconvenient enough. (Please see Portland moms.)

> However, as you go further and further out from our galaxy the metric expansion of spacetime begins to dominate the relative motion of all bodies, leading to observing progressively redder and redder light curves. A galaxy billions of light years away is perceived to be moving away from our reference frame at a significant percentage of the speed of light!

Is this not because there is simply more space between things that are farther away and therefore more expanding space? So, more space = more magnitude of expansion?

I think that's exactly the idea. But if space expanded at the same rate everywhere and forever then the relationship would be linear. But it seems that further objects seem to be moving away slower than linear relationship would suggest which might mean that earlier space expanded slower.

Look there: http://irfu.cea.fr/dipolerepeller

I’m literally describing creating more flow lines which would cause an exponential growth in acceleration measured without really exceeding certain values.

Don’t understand the downvoted when I asked for more information and said my maths are probably wrong.

Animals have killed other animals for food since the dawn of life. You can't get more"natural" than that. Eating meat is hardly a human invention.

The problem is not eating meat. The problem is the horrors of factory farming, which is as “unnatural” as it gets.

I know for a fact that McDonald's beef burgers, at least in North America, have a single ingredient: beef. They go directly from source grind to patty maker to freezer, nothing is added.

Sorry, I meant that the chemical makeup of beef is distinct from that of plants. I wasn't referring to additives. I meant the proteins/enzymes, etc.

This can actually vary depending on where you are in the world. There are places, like Canada, where the term engineer has a specific definition under the law, and it includes things such as professional ethics and liability.

You are correct. And if two crews in 5 months had the same issue either identifying or dealing with the same problem, then perhaps there is an design or training problem error here.

No need to choose, it seems like design and training can share the spot light, with their third friend sensor failure.