It’s funny though you can learn to visualize in chess through solving puzzles. I couldn’t do it at all at first but after awhile it clicked and I could just move pieces in my head.
I suggest using kind or minikube to simplify the setup but make sure you supply --nuclear option to create Nukernetes cluster. Also setup scheduled batch of jobs to dump nuclear waste, we wouldn't want to have that overflowing in our laptops, do we?
Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.
I don't think distributing within the solar system is going to do much for us. What takes out the Earth will probably take out everything else - we'll be backstopped on Earth for centuries after we have spaceborne civilization.
I think opening up a new frontier however, is valuable - in fact specifically, the transition which would be good would be to move heavy industry out of the biosphere entirely. You can imagine a nearer future where a place like Earth is treated as the paradise it is, and the idea of polluting it when we have all the rest of the uninhabitable space of the solar system to do that in is thought of as ludicrous.
And this isn't really unreasonable - beyond a certain point, the resource and energy availability of space is far greater then the places we can reach despite the advantages of the biosphere - whether we do it by robots or with manned exploration.
There's a zeitgeist change that I think would accompany having enough people working frequently in space: where its a couple of degrees of separation from someone who's looked at the pale blue dot and gone "you have no idea how valuable this is" (I do think we should have a program which sponsors any world leader who wants to on a trip around the moon: send the people making the big decisions out past the dark side, where the thing bubble of air, steel and alloy is the only thing keeping them alive - might not always work but at least then we can know they've had the opportunity for that perspective).
Self-sustaining human colonies in space or on other celestial bodies are very distant dream, probably it will take several centuries or millennia to happen. The main reason is human body: we haven’t figured out reproduction in low gravity yet. Unless some fascist state will do it, we will never experiment with it until full confidence in safety for the mother and the child.
It's a very distant dream that will always remain distant if we don't work on it. We have a lot of things to test before we get to testing the gravitational requirements of human reproduction. As it stands, we don't even know our basic gravitational needs. All we know is that 0g is too low. It's entirely possible that it turns out we can function relatively fine at something low but non-zero, like 0.1g.
That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.
I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.
> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.
To be kind of blunt, even an extinction-level asteroid hit with near-total biosphere destruction is probably still more conducive to human life than any other planet or satellite in the solar system, as evidenced by the continued existence of at least a few forms of life past the extinction event. And many of the events people worry about are far less destructive than even that (nuclear winter, for example, would probably roll Earth's climate back to pre-industrial temperatures, maybe as far as Little Ice Age, which is, uh, nowhere near extinction-level threat to humanity).
It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to do closed ecological studies without the expense of running it in space (e.g., Biosphere 2). The only thing you need space for studying in that regard is "what is the effect of non-1g environments on biological forms?" (to which existing studies suggest the answer is somewhere between "bad" and "horrible").
It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just an excuse to engage in fantasy.
But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly, and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere scrubbers and water reclamation.
I recommend taking a look at the article I shared. It might help you gain more insight on the topic, rather than continuing to post critical comments without all the information.
>> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids.
> This is the lamest of all excuses.
> It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years.
He said "like astroids". Quite frankly we don't know how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of close calls[1] already.
We could just build giant bomb shelters. It’s cheaper, holds more people, and doesn’t require nearly the investment in a completely closed ecosystem. But that ain’t sexy.
If you want something that uniquely requires leaving the planet for somewhere you have truck in literally everything except rocks, you’re pretty much limited to the sun becoming a red giant. That and gamma ray bursts. That’s pretty much it.
A gravity tractor is the simplest solution with enough lead time. It's theoretical, but doesn't involve any exotic technology or materials.
Essentially you have a spacecraft park itself beside an asteroid. It's gravity will minutely change the asteroids trajectory. With enough lead time that's all you need. Since you're not blowing up, or applying a large focused amount of energy to the asteroid it doesn't matter what the targets composition is. You won't break it up.
> Don't understand this lefty obstinance against preparing for the unexpected when the negative outcome is the death of humanity. Is it because you don't like Elon?
No, it's merely incredibly difficult. Sustainable living off Earth is far beyond that.
Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and have no idea how they could ever do.
So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are terrible. Mars is by far more hostile to life than anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end?
Live here, or die here, those are your options and you should get used to it.
It's difficult, but I don't think it is _that_ difficult. Ecologies, like any living systems, can self-heal and regenerate. There are practices that allows us to tap into that regenerative power as societies. They may not happen fast relative to our individual human lifespan, but 50 years is more than enough time to restore wastelands or reverse desertification.
I don't have a good answer to how sustain an economy based upon mining, refining, and manufacturing things out of mineral resources. Many of us have gotten used to modern conveniences (at its own cost related to mental and emotional health, and social cohesiveness). I think what most people balk on are on the perception of having to go back to barely surviving off the land, or having to alter lifestyle. Lifestyle may have to change, but the same regenerative power of ecologies also gives us significantly more resiliency.
To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for those that enjoy humanity existing.
Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never left the city/state/country you were born in?
> To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth
Nothing the universe has thrown at Earth in the past 3 billion years has been capable of ending all life. And nothing that could happen in the next million years seems possible of doing that either.
When we say life on earth we mean human life and civilization. Prokaryotes, while alive, are not really what people mean. Yes they would survive asteroids, nukes, possibly nanobot swarms.
Maybe we can find alternatives besides those industries.
As far as cleaning up pollutants themselves, there are some amazing work by Dr John Todd for cleaning up pollution. Two examples of his work — a system capable of breaking down DDT within 40 days. Another where he cleaned up a superfund site that had all ten of EPA’s top toxic pollutant list.
The best compression relies on understanding. What LLM is is mostly data how humans use words. We understand how to make this data (which is a compression of human text) and use it (generate something). AKA it’s “production rules”, but statistical.
The only issue is ambiguity. What can be generated strongly depends on the order of the tokens. A slight variation can change the meaning and the result is worthless. Understanding is the guardrail against meaningless statement and LLMs lack it.
That's a fascinating insight and it sound so true!
Can you compress for me Van Gogh's Starry Night, please? I'd like to send a copy to my dear old mother who has never seen it. Please make sure when she decompresses the picture she misses none of the exquisite detail in that famous painting.
Okay yes so not really having an artists vocabulary I couldn't compress it as well as someone who has a better understanding of Starry Night. An artist that understands what makes Starry Night great could create a work that evokes similar feelings and emotions. I know this because Van Gogh created many similar works playing with the same techniques, colors, and subjects such as Cypresses in Starry Night and Starry Night over the Rhone. He was clearly working from a concise set of ideas and techniques which I would argue is understanding/compression.
Fine, but we were talking about compression, not about imitation, or inspiration, and not about creating "a work that evokes similar feelings and emotions". If I compress an image, what I get when I decompress it is that image, not "feelings and emotions", yes? In fact, that's kind of the whole point: I can send an image over the web and the receiver can form their own feelings and emotions, without having to rely on mine.
Simple reasoning is a side effect of compression. That is all.
I see from your profile you are focused on your own personal and narrow definition of reasoning. But I’d argue there is a much broader and simpler definition. Can you summarize and apply learnings. This can.
To clarify, what I have in my profile is not my "own personal" definition of reasoning. It's how reasoning is understood in computer science and AI, and I am an expert on the subject through my doctoral studies and my current post-doc research.
That's important to understand. What I have in my profile is not some idiosyncratic idea about reasoning, it's the standard, formal understanding of what reasoning means, as it has developed in practice, in AI research in the last many decades.
I appreciate that there are many people who opine about reasoning who are not aware of that prior work and come up with their own ideas about what "reasoning" means, and some are even AI researches which is very concerning but I can't do anything about that except push back against such uninformed opinions.
Academics have gotten AI wrong since its inception and now are relegated to the trailing edges of the field. Mostly because increasingly insist on theory-as-fact in soft arenas that are clearly still in motion. Reasoning has been one thing, it can continue to grow to be another. But even from your defition, I can provide abductive, inductive, and other examples of it reasoning to this degree just fine. However tour examples are a bit... silly to be honest.
But keep lecturing everyone -- its very common for post-grads to be so up their own behind in their research that they've closed their world off until they are the only ones right in it.
Unfortunately I'm used to people on the internet wearing their ignorance on their sleeve like a badge of honour and so I'm not surprised by the insults in your comment. Just a bit sad to be honest :(
One of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language
(obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY would we just have adjective modification for that word and none other) and colonel. You have to know a lot about so many different culture when a language should be self contained. I don't tell the Chinese what name to use for my country (I think they call USA something like Beautiful Land) in their language or the Spanish or another group for any word.
Dang, never thought about that. Must be really hard.
That joke out of the way, as a dual-citizen and polyglot my observation is that it is usually Americans giving other Americans shit about pronunciation. It’s perhaps (like you say) a form of jostling around how virtuous you are. Perhaps layered on top of some insecurity around how much of the world you got to see.
It's the same in every language. When you take words and particularly names from another language, you have to make choices. Do you borrow the spelling or the pronunciation? Do you use a local version of the name? Or do you translate it?
Suppose an American guy named John comes to Finland. Should he still continue spelling his name as "John"? Or should he take the pronunciation as given and start spelling his name as "Dzon"? Or should he adopt an equivalent local name, such as Juha, Janne, or Jani? Or should he go with a traditional version, such as Johannes or Juhana? And what happens if he changes the spelling but his American passport still uses "John"?
It's less about being the dominant language and more about sharing the same writing system (the Latin alphabet) with most of the world. So, however a Vietnamese name is written, since it's already in Latin characters, the characters are imported verbatim (well, usually diacritics don't survive, but what can you do).
The opposite extreme would be cases like Korean, with its own writing system not used anywhere else. Therefore, once an American name is written in Korean letters, there's no ambiguity in how to read it. So Los Angeles is 로스앤젤레스 ro-seu-aen-jel-le-seu, and everyone who can read Korean knows exactly how to read it.
Except... how do you determine which spelling to use? The sound systems are so different that there are usually no clearly correct matches. Also, how do you really know how these names originally sounds? Should Nevada be read with a long "a" or short "a" in the middle? You see a name Charles in an article, is he an Englishman or Frenchman (with different ch sounds)? Should we consider Einstein a German physicist, or an American one?
Two book publishers make two different choices, and you end up with the same people's name written in two different ways.
So, basically, there's no easy solution. You either pay the cost when you're reading (as in English) or when you're doing the transliteration (as in Korean).
I mean part of it is we don't really have a central language authority so when immigrants try to transliterate a word from their language, they go with their best guess based on what letters they understand to be equivalent, and sometimes they get it a little wrong, but by the time anyone realizes a convention has been set and it's incredibly hard to shift conventions.
It also feels very silly to change the spelling of a word or name when two languages share an alphabet, even if it makes it a little less phonetic.
You might find Japanese interesting, they invented a whole alphabet for loan words, and Japanese doesn't always have the phonetic range to pronounce things as it would sound in the language it was loaned from, and they also make certain aesthetic decisions when loaning it. You COULD say Smart Phone as Sumarto Fuon or a few different ways, but it is Sma Ho in Japan, because that's just ehat caught on when it was introduced. Probably by a marketing campaign for that word in particular.
I should say a lot of this is internal as a form of social signaling about worldliness. Also not against loan words its just that you should adjust loan words and concepts to fit the phonetics and grammar of the language.
What exactly are these first principles everyone keeps talking about? Kind of like how everyone keeps talking about updating Bayesian priors without ever actually using bayes rule.
> In philosophy and science, a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.
In that sense the OP's comment might read as Carmack partnering up with someone who has a strong foundational understanding of hight level mathematics (if my understanding of the term and OP's post is correct).
As an amatuer I think Markov chains are explicitly a crude frequency association whereas what exactly a neural network is storing to predict the next token involves stored representations in neural weights which can be far more nuanced.
Thank you, this is a good compressed and less-salty response. I appreciate your contribution to the conversation and will use aspects of it when trying to explain the matter in the future. <3 :thumbsup:
