I'm building a different system (which will be a lot cheaper, and is not a milling machine).

Any link or way to keep informed about this? I really want to use surface-mount components, but making the PCBs are a major obstacle.

That looks really interesting! Can you cut thin copper, for doing your own PCBs? Or is any kind of metal impossible?

Videos/podcasts and similar formats are definitely not for every setting, but they do allow you to get to know a person a bit better than a simple transcript does. In a video, you can see a person's facial expressions, you can hear emphasis, and you may be able to make more of an emotional connection. For a podcast, you can listen in the background, during your commute, etc. Each format has its advantages/disadvantages.

I agree a transcript would be awesome though; sorry that I've not gotten around to that yet (I do these in my spare time and suggested to Roblimo that he might want to run a shorter version). If you want to help, I've set up an Amara import here. In general, Passionate Voices is a community project (the videos are under CC-0, i.e. free to reuse), and help is always welcome, including with doing itnerviews.

A few days ago, Sumana released this video, Pipeline, a critique of the tech industry's treatment of women. It's relevant to the overall discussion re: hospitality and worth watching (the main point being, "getting women into tech" doesn't really solve any problems if the actual experience in the industry is a terrible one).

So, you were offered to go to a restaurant that offers whale meat. And as it's against your principles, you declined. Just as the woman simply should have declined the sauna.

Uhh, precedent. Double the resources, double the ability. This is well known.

That is magical thinking. It has no place in proper engineering practice.

There are zillions of reasons that interfere with ability to work faster in larger problems - yet they can be summarized with the words "non-linear growth". Try solving the Travelling salespeople problem twice as big with merely twice as fast hardware, it will slow to a grinch.

It's not like AI is going to run on some unknown substrate.

We know the substrate of brain power, gray cells. This doesn't mean that we understand the way they work together to create intelligence. If we ever create an AI, it will be so complex that we'll likely be in the same situation with respect to how it works.

You follow the local accepted customs, whether you think they are ridiculous or not.

Let's take a parallel situation: In some countries, such as Australia I believe, you wear your shoes indoor. In some countries, such as Japan or my native Sweden, you always take them off.

If you come to either country, would you find it acceptable to basically say "In Australia we always wear our shoes indoor. If you want to take them off, no issue. Why should I be forced to take them off?". Then proceed to try to walk in wearing your outdoor shoes? Would you be surprised if you were (politely in Japan, not so politely in Sweden) thrown out as a result?

You don't bring swimwear into a sauna. If she isn't comfortable being nude there are multiple other ways to refresh yourself, in the pool, showers or wherever. Nobody forced her into the sauna in the first place.

"We" don't have to make one. All we have to do is set an AI towards self improvement/production of better AIs. THAT is where superintelligence comes from. All we have to do is make one that is an idiot savant geared toward AI design.

We do that with every new generation of babies, and it hasn't produced a super intelligence yet. What makes you think doing it ON A COMPUTER would make any difference?

Let me guess. It involves the hunch of the elephant, the baking temperature of the refrigerator and the airspeed velocity of the unladen plane?

I'm not really sure how to respond to this comment.
.

There is no external "system" system entity that works or does not work for us. We are all part of what I what would rather call "democratic society". It's true that there are entities with lots of money and influence, but "regular people" tend to severely underestimate their ability to achieve anything. We won for a large part because we were not cynical enough to "know" that we could not win anyway.

You are never alone. Of course you have to find like-minded people. But as my simple email demonstrates, even an action by one person can achieve a lot (it doesn't mean that it always does), of course).

I did not waste anything, it was a very enlightening and educational experience, that went way beyond my professional area (both in terms of experience and in terms of effect).

We were maybe 4 Belgians in a core group of about 50 people. We were from all over the EU, including from Portugal.

You said that your condition "simply does not allow me to have that influence in communitary law-making". That is what triggered my reaction, because I know from experience it's not true.

Petitions can help, but only if accompanied by "real action": starting actual discussions with MEPs by mailing them, setting up websites collecting information and presenting it in a clear form, analysing amendments etc. Those petitions can then be used to attract attention to the "meat" that you have to offer. Note that personally, I have no real opinion on vaping, since I'm a smoker nor a vaper (I do wonder what the long term effects are of inhaling liters of formaldehyde though).

And the people *those people* get their input from. Getting elected does not make you all-knowing. Being an advisor, or group of advisers, to a politician doesn't either. It is part of our democratic duty to help inform those that have been elected ("duty" in the sense that if you don't do it, democracy doesn't work). While in part this is done by unions, NGOs, lobbyists etc, individuals also have an import part to play here.

Maybe you don't mind, but the erosion of privacy rights is definitely harmful to society as a whole. Even if only because if companies are allowed to get away with it, then the extremists in the "intelligence community"/police a fortiori will get their way (if only by requiring those companies to give up all the data they collected, or hacking into it).

Additionally, putting everything down to personal responsibility, especially in an environment where it's impossible to have full control (since Facebook also tracks people who don't have Facebook accounts) and where they make it difficult on purpose for users to control their privacy settings, is just not healthy for society.

As a 25 year old PhD student, together with a bunch of like-minded people that had no political clout or connections (many of which were students or PhD students), I managed to help block the EU software patents directive back in 2009. This directive had the full support of the European Commission, and initially also of the majority of the largest groups in the European Parliament (the Christian Democrats and the Socialists). Big IT companies (IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, ...) spent over 4 million euro on lobbying. And yet in the end (after 7 years of procedure) they all decided to go for cancelling the directive rather than risking it might get amended do something we may like and they might not.

For me, it started in a very silly way: I sent a mail to all Belgian MEPs, explaining them my view on the directive and on software patents. A week later, I got a call from an assistant of a number of MEPs telling me it was the first mail on the topic that made any sense to her, and asking me (a random student that just mailed them) how they should vote on the report that was being tabled the next week. I kind of panicked, told her I'd get back to her, looked on the Internet who could help me with that, ended up at the FFII and the rest is history.

Seriously, politicians and their aides are also also just people, and if you say something that makes sense, many of them will pay attention. There are of course always those who have made up their mind and won't care, but in my experience of 5 years of talking with them, I did not come to the conclusion that it's the majority of them. Not even close. Especially at the European level, where they are often happy that finally someone from the home country actually cares about what they're doing (as long as you're not sending template mails).

And yes, in the end it did cost lot of effort. But it is patently (hah!) false that there is nothing you can do influence or achieve at the EU level.

That is just one part of democracy. It's an important one, but still just a part. A functional democracy requires way more effort than just voting every couple of years. And you can do it just as well as anyone else.

>NOMINATE scales people based on their choices relative to contemporaries

That's exactly *why* it works across decades. Because it allows a continuous chain of comparison even between people who never served together. (E.g, person A served with person B, person B later served with person C, person C later served with person D, etc)