Someone should start a competing service then. My recommendation would be to have a "maximum karma" limit, at which point the account (mod or not) and all of its activity are deleted, and the owner has to sign up again and work their way back up from zero.
You get paid in power, money, fame, access ect for being president. Providing content for free to make someone else money doesn't have the same appeal that could tolerate term limits.
You'd lose any privileges associated with a high number of karma points, also all of your previous content would be removed, so people could cover the same territory in possibly new ways with less fear of being called redundant.
It basically compensates for first-mover advantage in forums.
As a thought experiment, your idea is interesting!
I see a few problems though. This wouldn't work for just any karma-based site. For example, on StackOverflow where there are good "canonical" answers to tech problems, and these get heavily upvoted (because they are useful), having them removed and later rephrased (possibly incorrectly) by a new user would be detrimental. So any system where "good" posts are archived and referenced wouldn't benefit from this.
Even when there are no canonical/permanent answers, the thought that every "good" post you make takes you nearer to account deletion is not exactly enticing. Why not simply get rid of points and make all posts ephemeral, kind of like Instagram stories? What good do points even do in a system where your account and posts will get inevitably deleted?
Also, wouldn't mediocre/bad accounts stick longer than "good" accounts, making the whole system worse? I don't mean terrible or troll accounts -- I understand the point system would still be used to ban or hide them -- but mediocre accounts which post mediocre/bad posts. Wouldn't they dominate in this kind of system?
If upvoting a post/comment (which gives the author karma points) would risk triggering its deletion (by making the author cross the karma threshold), then is that not effectively turning the karma system on its head?
Under such a system, if I think a post is valuable, I would then try to "protect" it and its author's account by downvoting it. Similarly, if I think a post is not valuable, I can help trigger its eventual deletion by upvoting it.
That would only really matter if the poster were really close to the threshold. Moreover the gaming of the system would be unlikely to work forever, requiring too much coordination of effort.
But to answer your question, yes, it is turning the karma system on its head for people near the top of the standings; the idea being that having "titans of karma" in the community becomes detrimental at some point.
I think deletion would be counterproductive, but maybe a karma limit after which you no longer accrue any points.
Say it's arbitrarily 1000 points (or whatever makes sense, as long as it's low enough it can be earned after a medium term of active contributing, but high enough very new users will have to learn the ropes of the community in order to reach it). After you reach this, people can tell you're a good contributor, but you can't earn any more points. Anything you do from that point cannot be done solely to earn points, removing that part of the "game".
It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination of [model, clock_speed, num_cores].
Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by not giving a shit, which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.
After GHz stopped mattering (and maybe to some extent it never did)... I lost track of all things CPU and what matters.
Anytime I looked into it I felt like I got a lot of truisms and mixed advice, and the PC enthusiast crowd seems equivalent to the 'pixel peeper' crowd of photography, obsessed with misc stats that I'm not sure will matter to me, or anyone.
These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget. Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better.
It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.
And sometimes your new machine is slower than the old one. Ive seen that a couple times with laptops people purchased. They replaced a 2-3 year old laptop that cost $2500 with one that cost $1200 (but lighter thinner) and the new one had the same number of cores, and ran slower.
Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing 1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.
Can you check chrome://gpu and make sure that Video Decode: Unavailable does not appear? Video decode should be handled by your GPU, not the CPU. If this is Linux, then you might not be using the GPU at all, which would explain both symptoms.
Hardware protected video decode and out-of-process rasterization are the only ones unavailable. Everything else is Hardware accelerated. Another thing I notice is that GPU stays a steady 20% and rarely every shoots up, which I believe is what contributes to video player lags. No matter what I try in Windows 10 - performance mode, gaming mode it still won't go beyond 20% when playing videos.
The new Ryzen 4000 laptop APUs are quite an improvement over last year. It's important to note that the APUs of each generation are always an architectural generation behind (so, the 3500U is actual a Zen+ architecture, not Zen 2).
They might be, but I am talking about the situation RIGHT NOW. LTT also talks about this here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfz46HXvPLc It was very noticeably janky out of the box but with updates it became better but IMO it's still not at Intel's level yet. Also battery life is better on Intel side and will only improve with the 10nm chips they are shipping now. I have yet to try Linux distro on this machine but looking for something with decent touch support, so it's all Windows 10 right now.
Some of the biggest factors for the average person that get disregarded are video cards and cooling. Modern CPUs absolutely need good cooling or they will throttle and create stutters and hiccups. A separate video card makes high res interfaces more fluid (4k hooked up to a monitor or TV) _and_ takes that heat off the CPU which is usually trying to boost and throttle inside a laptop or poorly cooled PC.
Noctua makes some really good heatsinks. It's my understanding that most users don't need liquid cooling. When would you say someone needs to switch to liquid cooling?
My guess is that a big noctua heatpipe heatsink would keep a CPU from throttling most of the time and do well cooling it, but it would probably be loud when it has to get rid of a lot of heat. The great thing about liquid coolers is they can get rid of more heat with less fan speed and end up quieter (if the pump isn't loud).
You also need good air flow inside the case. Something like big tower with plenty of empty space and additional case fans. If your case is tiny, liquid cooling might be better.
I agree, but I thought it was just a factor of me getting older. 25 years ago we used to sit around at lunch and discuss the latest CPU technology and argue which one was better. Now it just doesn't matter (for the most part) apart from supporting one manufacturer over another or choosing based on price.
I don't have the time nor inclination for digging into the minutia around CPUs and their names. It's no longer fun or really even necessary, unless you're into HFT or some other activity that requires every last processor cycle. meh
I don't know why Intel has continued down this path so aggressively. The article says that they introduced 32 new processors. This is a small incremental update to keep the same architecture and process size from lagging behind the rest of the ecosystem and now there are 32 new cpus that don't perform much better than what came out half a decade ago.
What do you expect Intel to do? Keep selling the same CPUs? Declare themselves bankrupt? Switch to TSMC for chip production? They are doing what they can in this situation. And I'm sure that their sales are far from zero.
I think there is a middle ground where they don't release 32 brand new CPUs. Have you looked at the lineup of Intel CPUs? There are now hundreds with extremely minor differences.
it's really not that hard for the consumer parts. until you get into the hedt range, each processor has better single threaded performance than all the price tiers below it and possibly more cores too. this get more complicated if you want to compare across multiple generations, but that's always the case.
> It does not, however, sound like an attacker can establish arbitrary TCP connections
Maybe not, but what if the ports you have open actually are HTTP servers for development purposes? In that case wouldn't a website be able to crawl your unreleased work, and/or mess with what you're doing, with requests seemingly "out of nowhere"?
Why should society accommodate "the gifted" instead of the other way around? Highly talented individuals almost intrinsically less in need of society's assistance.
I want a poor, black child with outstanding talent to be able to have that talent identified, nurtured, developed, and maximized. Based on what I see in my fairly progressive town (Cambridge, MA), I don’t think we’ve gotten to even this basic level of equality of opportunity.
It is not about society’s accommodation/assistance of specifically the gifted but rather about ensuring that people of all conditions can develop their potential. Society should care about this because it’s the long-term flywheel that improves the human condition.
The pie can get bigger, too. It’s not just about dividing a fixed pie most evenly.
I agree on the basics, but society provides 2 things: a very comfortable salary to get good and services, but even more important than that: it alleges boredom
The practical world is full of interesting problems. Gifted humans need to really feel useful (to put their gift at use) more than they need the matching income.
there's a lot of evidence in the open source community that people don't necessarily need to be paid (a lot or at all) to do work they find interesting. it's great that some people are willing to do this, but I don't think it's fair in general for society to benefit from the work and have the only reward be the satisfaction of a job well done, unless the people doing the work are okay with that.
furthermore, there may be a lot of overlap between useful/important and interesting work, but I doubt they map perfectly. there probably needs to be some material reward for important work so that it gets done even if it's boring.
I certainly don't think we have a great state of affairs today. some people get paid huge amounts of money to do work that I feel is harmful. imo the goal should be to take care of everyone's basic needs, but also to reward people proportionately for their contribution to society.
I've never understood this line of reasoning. If consciousness, in the sense of subjective experience ("qualia"), is an illusion, that what is being fooled? It seems to just push the question one level deeper without providing any insight.
It's our understanding/perception that is fooled. We feel like we are the conscious authors of our thoughts when really they are summoned from within and calculated for us. We feel like pilots but really we're riding coach.
I feel like there is a chance I'm misinterpreting your question though, apologies if so.
I think you're combining consciousness and free will into a single thing. Consciousness lies in the subjective experience (in fact it seems like you allow for perception); whether you have any agency or are just a subjective experiencer "riding along" with deterministic fate is a separate matter.
You make a good point. As for me, its really hard to think of consciousness as real because it's similar to other things I'm forced to observe while previously I used to think I was somewhat in control. So I think thoughts or awareness are just like external forces making whatever happens from all the previous forces.
I guess I'm wondering if we would still think we're conscious if we someday prove we're no different than a character in the video game the Sims. We currently think of the characters in the Sims as not having a conscious. But I guess we could be wrong if electrons somehow had a state being received and from everything that's happening in the universe for making it experience similar to what we do. Thus, the theory of panpsychism. But to me that just seems like consciousness is an illusion in the traditional sense because awareness has always felt like requiring more than a video game character being controlled by external forces.
Consciousness, at least to each of us individually, is demonstrably real.
Consciousness is a perception and perceptions are not illusions, even if we misunderstand what we are perceiving.
If I send you a message that says "I am not sending you a message", we can argue about what it means, but not that you got a message from me, no matter how much you trust (Edit: Or distrust) what I say to you.
Even if you don't believe you have consciousness, if you perceive you disbelieve in consciousness, then too bad: you have it.
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In contrast, free will is a completely different and easily explained kind of phenomena.
Questions and opinions about free will predate any discovery of evidence for such a thing. (There is no evidence yet!) That is a critical clue.
Free will is just a typical case of motivated reasoning. We believe some things without any rational support because they make us feel better about ourselves, the universe, allow us to focus on more practical matters. Not because they are true, or even a valid concept.
But understanding that free will is a product of motivated reasoning suggests that explaining free will is just evidence-free motivated reasoning will not settle the issue. Because people will continue to be motivated to want it to be true, they will find it hard to simply label it as self-serving, often-useful irrationality and move on.
That’s just an illusion to me. The word conscious is a subjective construct and awareness has always been associated with it as a necessary role in expressing consciousness exists. Well if a person is just metaphorically a domino like everything encompassing his/her existence and there can be conflict between the parties to a significant degree. Then it’s arguable that neither person is truly aware but just similar to a character in a cutscene of a video game. All of us just acting out without any control to what the story entails. Similar for the discussion at hand. I think it’s a philosophical issue and where human language attempts at making it seem more possible than it being an illusion but is in fact not the case.
Your domino reference suggests you continue to confuse free will with consciousness.
Free will is the idea that out minds might somehow have a self-generated non-deterministic ability to make decisions that is unmoored or constrained from causes that others can see or investigate.
This is either trivially not true (as in the "many worlds" deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics), or trivially true in a weak sense (quantum mechanics non-deterministic interpretation) i.e. our decisions are controlled by quantum randomness, but not by any special property of our minds.
There is zero evidence of "free will" and yet people have conjectured they might have it for as long as we have records of people's introspection. This phenomenon is easy to understand: it is a typical example of motivated reasoning. We have a biological imperative to desire freedom of action and though. "Free will" is the ultimate fantasy of freedom of thought. So regardless of all lack of evidence, people will be drawn to, and depending on rationality, adopt a strong belief, in their "free will".
So we can dispense with that self-motivated "illusion" based on good science.
In that sense, there is an illusion as you say.
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That leaves your point (if this rephrasing of your point is acceptable to you) that self-awareness in a functional sense does not necessarily imply an entity has the qualia of self-awareness, i.e. consciousness.
I also agree with that. Somewhere between us and a deck of cards saying things like "I am conscious" is a mechanism we could build that had some level of self-referential ability, could say things to you or me that looked like consciousness to us, but which didn't really understand itself. And therefore could not actually be conscious.
We can agree that their can be an illusion of consciousness. But note the illusion is to external observers. The limited entity itself has no subjective awareness of the illusion or anything else.
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Which is why consciousness cannot be an illusion to an entity that experiences it. It is one of the very few (the only?) completely direct experience we have, with no intermediary.
If you have the qualia of self-awareness, then you have it. There is no illusion of having it. If you don't have consciousness, you cannot experience the qualia of an illusion of consciousness.
I appreciate you writing all that for me. I'm now uncertain where I fall with my position. I don't really think I'm aware because everything is predetermined and even if randomness is thrown into the equation it doesn't matter. I know you think I'm mixing free will with consciousness but I just think a person cannot be aware if they're always going to process a certain way because of the starting point of the universe. It just seems like I'm a sim in a video game. Where everything is completely programmed out for whatever to happen and I cannot say that either a character in a video game or I, would be resembling what consciousness means for me. In any case I'm undecided now.
"The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe."
Another explanation for the Fermi paradox I had heard, which certainly is less rigorous than the linked article but easier to understand is:
The root of the paradox is that with so many planets in the universe (in the order of 10^24), there must be more life in the universe. But even with this unbelievably large number of potential planets, if creation of intelligent life on a planet requires only 24 independent parameters to be favourable, and each of them are favourable with a probability of 10%, then we should expect intelligent life in just one planet: ours.
Of course. But if we didn't have this evidence, the logic of the Fermi paradox would lead to conclusions that we just can't be the first ones because the probability for it is so impossibly low.
Low probability compared to what though? This makes less sense to me on closer inspection. I agree that there may be some meaningful observation in there, but it's hard to even figure out what the paradox or observation is.
An individual (or hive mind, whatever) living in the year 300,000 AD may very much dispute the claim that progress has stagnated. It's entirely possible that civilization has continued an exponential expansion (within limits) from now until then. As such, history is one continued exponential.
Provided that this civilization still is not bumping against the thermodynamic computational limits of space by several orders of magnitude, then the Fermi paradox is still a paradox.
That's how an exponential works, every point sees itself as a privileged point, right before it increases massively.
Right, on one hand I feel blessed to be alive, as with all of you, in what is certainly the most important time in human history. Beside the effects of every technological advancement which currently exists at a transitional period, the greatest moment of birth and rebirth in history could be upon us, thanks to the Holocene extinction event we have triggered. Whether or not we capitalize upon our special place in history remains to be seen.
But I also know I'm missing out on the true space-faring age, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Quantum Age where we begin to fully exploit the laws of QM, the Last World War, extra-solar colonization, etc.
Eventually, if we don't kill or exhaust ourselves with impatience, technology will be solved with respect to providing enough energy and resources for every conceivable human. Then, the real challenge begins. Providing for a population beyond its basic needs becomes an entirely political affair. We may be arrested on the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for quite some time.
Will humanity observe a similar exponential advancement in humanitarianism as it has with technology? How important is humanitarianism to Fermi's Paradox and the Drake Equation?
Enough energy for every human individual is already a solved problem, although not necessarily sustainably. It's not even economically prohibitive to switch to sustainable options, there's just insufficient incentives at this time. The great travesty is that, when incentives are put in place, the Holocene damage will be difficult to stop and impossible to reverse.
Our own survival chances seem to be a fraction not close to unity, but not close to 0 either. Give it 75% to be optimistic. After that, robotic seed space ships could be a buffer to protect from subsequent cataclysms. That does nothing to answer the questions of Fermi's paradox, unless you low-ball to 1.0e-6% chance of survival. Doomsayers guessing such a number are not generally taken seriously.
Looking elsewhere, we have almost unlimited wiggle room in the chance of photosynthesis evolving. Traits that evolved multiple times in Earth's history are inadmissible to this discussion, but several critical traits evolved only once. Fertile but desolate planets are, based on current science, probably abundant. As a typical reasonable human, this is a perfectly sufficient speculative answer.
I'll tell you this much - if there were a good alternative to Logic that ran on Linux, I'd stop buying MacBook Pros. But I can't adjust to any other workflow, so I bought a new MacBook this year.
This sounds like some kind of "cognitive homunculus" looking at itself in a mirror. Does it explain anything, or just push the question of what is perceiving the subjective experience one level deeper?
