Another angle on this is that there’s many formal axiomatic ways to define computing.
Everything is just a Turing machine. Everything is just a function. Everything is the Conway’s game of life.
The fact that all of these forms are equally expressive is quite a surprise when you first discover this. Importantly, it doesn’t mean that any one set of axioms is “more correct” than the other. They’re equally expressive.
>where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Real development IMX is not much different. People just have low standards for "interesting" nowadays, and also have vastly increased access to previous solutions for increasingly difficult problems. But while modern programming languages might be more pleasant to use in many ways, they have relatively little to do with the combined overall progress developers have made. Increased access to "compute" (as they say nowadays), effort put into planning and design, and the simple passage of time are all far more important factors in explaining where we are now IMO.
It is a simplification that makes easier to grasp a paradigm. Sure, it could be taken to extremes and pretend nothing else exists outside this ‘everything is a … “ bubble. Luckily we can learn from others’ mistakes and not fall into traps too often.
How is not endorsing a candidate “antithetical to independent journalism”? I understand that Bezos stepped in to perhaps overrule an endorsement but in what sense is maintaining neutrality antithetical to independent journalism?
I didn't say not endorsing a candidate is antithetical to independent journalism. I said the way this decision was made was completely antithetical to independent journalism, i.e. the decision not to endorse was not made by journalists independently. Rather the opposite - the journalists' decision was overruled.
How is endorsing a candidate journalism? Sure journalists will have opinions on candidates, but that's not journalism. From what I've read this is from the opinion section of the paper, so it's not journalism in the classic sense anyway.
Independent journalism isn't "whatever journalists want". It means unbiased. Endorsing candidates is by definition biased. They were corrected in their ways because the editorial board became too biased.
they changed the policy of endorsing a candidate by fiat from above at the last minute before one of the most important elections in American history... do we really need to spell out for you how this isn't about endorsement but about how the decision played out?
That reputation is more or less fabricated in order to shield the right from genuine critic. WP is not very left-leaning, I would consider them center. It's just that in the past 8 or so years the right has gotten much more radical, so it doesn't always seem that way.
My take is that WaPo has been exceptionally gentle with Trump, not at all holding him to the same standards they held Biden and Harris. From headline framing, to article vocabulary, to count of articles, fact checking, to associated photos, they've treated Trump quite hospitably.
I think the big motivation is now "embedding", i.e. using servo as replacement for webview/cef/etc. So for example you could think Tauri+Servo as Rusts answer to Nodejs+Chromium in Electron.
Mozilla didn't "scrap" it (it was an open source project from the start, so they coulnd't have scrapped the project even if they wanted to), but they laid off the Servo developers in 2020. The project moved to the Linux Foundation and then apparently languished for several years, but at the end of 2022 (https://servo.org/blog/2023/01/16/servo-2023/) it was picked up by Igalia, and since then it has made considerable progress again. This presentation has a lot of details: https://servo.org/slides/2024-04-16-seattle-rust-user-group/
The fact that many such businesses have become cashless suggests that the ROI of accepting cash is not worth the cost/burden. Therefore it’s not a fundamental “cost of doing business” and instead just a mechanism to reach a subset of customers that prefer cash.
I agree that mandating businesses to support cash is unnecessary regulatory burden. After all, shouldn’t it be the shopkeeper’s right to do business how they please?
On the other hand, enabling the judicial and executive branch to overcompensate for this disfunction also seems problematic - particularly as the former groups aren’t elected (except for the President, of course).
I think everyone agrees congress being dysfunctional is problematic. The question is if it’s better for the other other branches to pick up the slack or if we should just let the government do nothing
The framework of materialism posits that there’s a physical universe and consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. This view is so prevalent in the western world it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else.
As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea).
In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary.
To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.
>I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence
The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain.
Stated a bit differently:
All events must have a cause, therefore consciousness must have a cause. The brain is the most likely candidate for the cause of consciousness. The brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material.
What role do you think the brain plays in consciousness? Do you believe that events must have causes?
> The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material
This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true.
How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness.
It’s not necessary true that these appearances are giving you a window into an objective material universe. Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.
The point is that we simply don’t know what’s at rock bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an alien’s dream. Therefore the “arrow” of causality might flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to the other way around.
>it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.
Ok. But that is equally true for any observation. For example, I don't really know that the computer I'm using to write this post actually exists under that proposition, as perhaps by brain is imagining it. So you are really rejecting observations in general here. My point is that given that observations in general are correct, then it is clear that the brain is the cause of consciousness.
If observations imply that there’s a material universe that you are inspecting then I agree with your conclusion that the brain creates consciousness and it seems possible to replicate that consciousness artificially.
However, I am rejecting the idea that observations necessarily imply the existence of a material universe.
Actually rather than “rejecting”, I’m suggesting that it’s logically possible to take the “reverse” position: that consciousness is primary and we are experiencing what appears to be a material universe within that conscious experience. In this model it doesn’t make logical sense to be able to replicate consciousness with materials because materials seem to exist within consciousness as opposed to the other way around.
My overarching point is that most people here seem to believe that we’ll obviously replicate consciousness with more understanding of biology and I think that’s a bold claim because it’s not obvious that materialism is the “correct” framework to describe existence.
In any case, these frameworks are in the realm of non-falsifiability (axiomatic) so you can’t really claim either is fundamentally correct.
>Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.
Ok, well in that simulation materialism is true and I can make an AI with emergent consciousness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s not clear that the material world of the simulation is of the same kind of the material world we seem to observe. Further it seems definitely not clear that we can interact/modify the simulation’s material at all.
The arrow of causality flows from simulation to consciousness and there might be no mechanism to artificially create consciousness from within consciousness.
Whatever reality is, humans have sex and make new conscious agents all the time. If they can be created by birth, why not by building?
My point was that however the subjective reality I perceive came about, the laws of it still seem to allow for the creation of new non-biological conscious agents.
The Two Generals Problem is a great thought experiment that describes how distributed consensus is impossible when communication between nodes has the possibility of failing.
Distributed consensus within a quorum is possible. With only two nodes there is no quorum. With three nodes and at most one offline, consensus is possible.
I wonder how hard it would be for Apple to rebuild Shortcuts around an AppleScript backend to allow power users the ability to edit the scripts directly.
Everything is just a Turing machine. Everything is just a function. Everything is the Conway’s game of life.
The fact that all of these forms are equally expressive is quite a surprise when you first discover this. Importantly, it doesn’t mean that any one set of axioms is “more correct” than the other. They’re equally expressive.