Actually I have an F150. I'm willing to replace it with a cyber truck (if my finances permitted). But puzzle me this. What is better for the climate? Me holding on to the old F150 and rarely driving it. Of selling the F150 to someone who most certainly will drive it far more than me and me owning a cyber truck that perhaps I drive more because it doesn't cost as much for gas?? I'd like to know how much carbon goes into making a cyber truck.

The huge problem is if consumers don't consume there is no economy. The other huge problem is that if a decision that negatively affects a group that finds their employment affected they'll never accept it no matter how "green" it is. But they'll certainly be sure to fly in to the local climate conference!

The solution?? Small scale nuclear everywhere. Make repairability easier. And tax the heck out of things forcing an upgrade. Coincidentally, I consider all these concepts to be conservative.

From the summary, it seems Apple is asking them to train a model that will run on Apple's private servers, thus maintaining privacy.

Given the state of the laws on Technology, we should see that come to pass where Anonymity is legally banned. While other smaller companies may be able to set up shop, or you can deploy your own VPN somehow without tracing it to yourself, any public for profits will have to comply with the law. So this is a neat tech implementation that may not end up mattering much in the near future.

Ok, but evolution requires selection as well as variation. Generally one should select several from each generation to modify, and filter out a bunch that don't measure up. (Note that the evaluation function is a very strong determinant of what you'll eventually get.) Selecting "one from each generation" just looks like an extremely bad approach. Perhaps it should read "one batch from each generation".

Not always, but they tend to me more ... project-centered ... than most.

That's a real problem Python has survived Guido's retirement quite nicely, though. But there was lots of pre-planning. I haven't attended to whether such pre-planning is happening in the kernel, but there were a few obvious candidates the last time I looked.

If that's really what they're doing, they're doing it wrong. Probably to save on compute time. Evolution needs a large and varied population to work well.

You underestimate the cost. Even among those that survive for a few generations, most will eventually succumb to changing environmental conditions. Consider trilobites.

OTOH, that's judging by assuming that the present is the correct time-frame to evaluate from. Why should that be true? Trilobites lasted a lot longer than we're likely to. (But we've got the *potential* to last until the heat death...*IF*... But what are the odds?)

It's actually a very good approach. Unfortunately, it depends on having a good and ungameable evaluation function.

Thinking about this more, my first response was so incomplete as to almost be a lie.

You *cannot* know reality. All you can know is a model of reality. So when you say "reality" you're actually using a abbreviation for "in my model of reality".

And when I said "physics is physics" I was so oversimplifying as to almost be lying. Consider "flat earth" vs. "spherical earth". How do you know which belief to accept? The direct sensory data seems to imply that "flat earth" is the more appropriate belief. There are lots of arguments that "spherical earth" is a better model, but those are nearly ALL based on accepting what someone else says. We are told of experiments we *could* do that would validate it, but very few people have, themselves, done the experiment. So for just about everyone the "spherical earth" model is a "social reality".

Similarly I accept that I have a spleen, but I do this because others have told me it's true. I'm also told my tonsils were cut out, but I was unconscious when this was supposed to have happened, so I'm taking other people words for it.

Reality, as we know it, it largely a social construct. We don't know just how completely it's a social construct, but that's hugely what it is.

That's what this article is about.

Reality is largely a social construct, how much nobody knows. (Yeah, physics is physics and biology is biology, but that's not social reality.) What you believe is largely a feedback process, and when one of the sources of feedback is disconnected from reality...beliefs will drift. This is classically known from sailors who ended up marooned on an empty island. They had physical feedback, but no social feedback, and after awhile their beliefs shifted in weird ways. This seems to be a lot faster process, but it's being driven by a feedback system that's disconnected from reality, so that seems plausible. And it seems to avoid negative feedback effects. Systems dominated by positive feedback are known to run out of control.

The thing is, she's "reading from a script". If the script could handle the problem, the "AI"s at the lower levels of the tree would have handled it. What her *purpose* is, often, isn't to solve people's problems, but just to let them blow off steam so they don't quit, or run berserk in the downtown office. This lets the company continue to extract money while providing broken service.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.