• 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 16th, 2023

help-circle





  • You’re not wrong, but arguably that doesn’t invalidate the point, they do drive better than humans because they’re so much better at judging their own limitations.

    If human drivers refused to enter dangerous intersections, stopped every time things started yup look dangerous, and handed off to a specialist to handle problems, driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.

    That said, you’re of course correct that they still have a long way to go in technical driving ability and handling of adverse conditions, but it’s interesting to consider that simple policy effectively enforced is enough to cancel out all the advantages that human drivers currently still have.






  • Technically, the kernel doesn’t compile with pure standard C, they require strict aliasing to be disabled, so that alone doesn’t seem to be strictly required.

    Not saying that standards aren’t useful, but they’re not some dividing line separating the true languages from the joke languages, they’re just a useful document that earns a language a few “good language” points, but those points can be earned other ways too.

    For example, rust has pretty good versioning, so even if the devs did totally wreck the language in the next version, it’d maintain compatibility with older code just fine, which sort of invalidates your point, unless you’re worried that the devs turn malicious, but the language is open source, so I imagine that would get it forked pretty quickly.




  • A: That’s true until it isn’t. Preparing for/predicting things before they happen is our best hope for not sticking our collective heads into a guillotine any time soon.

    B: corporations are only very weak analogues of superhuman intelligence, they’re different from us in “wisdom of crowds” sense (and ofc in the “too many cooks” sense).

    But they’re basically just distilled from human intelligence and match our own style of intelligence somewhat closely as a consequence. Also, we’re pretty good at the alignment problem for corporations, they do largely what the combination of their investors, government, society, and workers want because they’re inner workings are fed through human brains at every stage and those humans even if incentivised with money will alter the behaviour of the corporation towards human preferences.

    The fact even corporations that have thousands of intelligent human filters (most of whom are presumably in the middle of the human bell curve) monitoring every single mental process still manage to occasionally do terrible things is not a particularly compelling reason to think that a mind that has barely any human understanding or oversight into it’s internal function will be very safe to keep around.


  • Not OP, but regardless of it being ugly, it is novel and kind of goofy look, which has some appeal. Like buying a car designed by a child it’s sort of “fun”.

    Otoh, I don’t have the cash to throw away on “fun”, and regardless, funding a nazi definitely ruins the fun, so even if I won the lottery, I’d have to find my fun elsewhere I suppose.

    Also worth noting, ignoring all of that, the fact it was built so poorly and is clearly just flawed in ways that go well beyond the aesthetics also ruins it, even if musk wasn’t a nazi and the car wasn’t ridiculously expensive.


  • No, but I will acknowledge where some democratic elements exist within even the DPRK, though they’re very thin and weak.

    There are other forms of government that are a better match for describing the DPRK. One party dictatorship, for example.

    If you want to apply the same logic to the US, calling it simply an oligarchy rings hollow, though there’s a stronger argument than DPRK+democracy I’ll admit. It’s a democracy with flaws, but those flaws are smaller than the democratic elements they weaken, so it still gets to be called a democracy.