What if the bombs were designed to kill everyone, not just those in some region? Like, to release polonium in the upper atmosphere or something?

nuclear winter doesn’t discriminate based on region

There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube, even if there was no doubt that humanity would in this way survive until the sun expands and makes the earth uninhabitable.

> There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube

Even in a hypothetical world where AGI can do everything that humans do better, this would still be a choice to make, not an inevitable consequence for everyone.

And life doesn't require suffering to have meaning.

Huh? Why bring up suffering? I was responding to the question of “Why is it a problem if people don’t understand things?” .

I was saying that human pursuit of understanding of things provides value beyond survival and resources.

Joint pursuit of a common goal is a way for people to better be-in-relation-with one-another.

You can still pursue understanding of things, full automation doesn't preclude that.

What it does is make it a choice rather than a survival necessity. The latter is where the "suffering" comes from.

My experiences with the DMV have actually been pretty decent. I think a lot of their negative reputation is from how it used to be, but that they have improved substantially since then?

DMV is a state level agency and varies a lot depending on where you are. It's partially privatized here in Oklahoma and mostly painless (you only need the actual DMV for driver's tests, CDL background checks, etc.) but when I lived on the Illinois side of St. Louis I routinely heard of people spending hours in line.

Normally I'm not a huge fan of privatization but the way it's done here works great. The fees are set by the state and the agency gets a percentage, so if an area is underserved someone just opens another one.

Naturally, it varies by state. But yes, the Department of Licensing in WA state is also one of the least onerous bureaucracies I interact with

By "every particle" do you mean like, every type of particle?

If you mean individual particles, fundamental particles don't really have distinct individual identities (as shown by fermi and bose statistics).

As for types of particles: Well, photons surely move at the speed photons move at.

Special relativity is derived from the assumption/observation that light travels at the same speed in all inertial reference frames, and generally that the laws of physics work the same in any inertial reference frame.

What you are proposing sounds pretty vague and unclear to me, but, is what you are trying to say compatible with this?

It did. We are currently on the fourth or more reinvention of capitalism. It's like ethernet - every time networking technology changes, the new one is called the same thing as the old one. The current fiber-optic switched Ethernet has absolutely nothing in common with the original vampire-tapped coax with media attachment units clamped onto the cable and a serial-port-looking AUI interface running down from the ceiling to the computer. Same for capitalism.

Most of the time someone uses a urinal, they didn’t purchase it. The customer is different from the user in this case.

That's often true in software as well. Perhaps it's actually the etymology of the term.

Within a given inference system, one can define concepts. This doesn’t add any axioms. It is, in essence, just a way to abbreviate things.

ok, you now added some unknown inference system in addition to zfc

No, it is the same inference system. They are just abbreviations.

and what is that system?

ZFC

zfc is a bunch of axioms and not inference system. It is commonly assumed that it is built on top of some unspecified first order logic which commonly assumed to include bunch of inference rules. There is no ground truth in my understanding where this all is formally defined.

If you want to use “ZFC” to refer to the axioms without any rules of inference, I guess you can do that, but when someone refers to “ZFC” when they are filling a slot that needs a (axioms + rules of inference), the obvious interpretation is that they are referring to the usual system of ZFC.

> when someone refers to “ZFC” when they are filling a slot that needs a (axioms + rules of inference), the obvious interpretation is that they are referring to the usual system of ZFC.

its bro-math. In formal math you need to be specific what inference system you use. There are many of them. Then you need to have formal proof that in that system you can derive concept of function and then think about question if it won't make paradoxes and contradictions with ZFC.

ZFC has greater consistency strength than PA.

If we take ZFC (or some other set theory) as our meta theory, we can easily see that the axiom of infinity (of ZFC) gives a set of natural numbers (using the von Neumann encoding), which, when equipped with the successor function, is a model of the natural numbers.

zfc doesn't have functions, so you are building something new on top of it.

Also, I am not sure successor function is enough for PA.

It simply does have functions. According to ZFC, a function is a set whose members are pairs, such that no two different pairs have the same first element.

I mean this quite seriously: have you considered reading any first course in set theory?

> According to ZFC, a function is a set whose members are pairs, such that no two different pairs have the same first element.

Can you cite where did you get this?

As I have said a few times now, you should read any first course in set theory. I’m quoting my third-year notes from Cambridge there, but essentially every intro to set theory will say the same. (I’m sure someone will find a single counterexample that does it somehow differently.)

Formally, a function f is a relation between sets A and B such that, for all x in A and u,v in B, f(x) = u and f(x) = v implies u = v.

It's just a definition. Authority is, as the parent suggests, any introduction to set theory.

> Formally, a function f is a relation

discussion was if zfc has functions at all, not sure why you put relation here.

The guy's remarkable response makes clear that he's a clueless troll.

I think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”?

They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.

Ok, but a random educated person will not perform well on vast majority of specialized tasks where professionals operate. A model like Astra probably will beat random educated person performance on majority of specialized tasks. It’s getting close to the level of professionals in many domains, and to genius level on some (e.g. math).

I’m just trying to understand the implications of the current frontier model capabilities.

Current models can do a variety of tasks that requires substantial expertise for people to do, yes.

But there are also many cognitive tasks that the typical educated person would do better at than these models.

Like, e.g. long-term managing what a vending machine gets stocked with and what prices the items should be sold for. Or, various things like that.

When there are essentially no more tasks like that, then we’ve reached AGI.

Interesting, you think a random educated person would beat Astra on Vending-Bench 2? Honestly I would not make that bet, I think it would be 50/50.

All I’ve been able to do is mentally tag parts of a shape as being at different “depths” (possibly with two parts at the same 3D location but tagged as having different “depths”). Which, yeah, I agree isn’t really visualizing a 4D shape. I think someone better at it than me might be able to use this to leverage one’s visual spatial intuition in a way that is a bit closer to what 4D visualization might be like if it were possible.

But I don’t think it is possible for us. At least, for strict senses of visualization. I suspect that the architecture of our brains doesn’t support it. This is rather speculative because I don’t know basically any neuroscience, but I wonder if the whole “the brain is largely a very wrinkled surface (though with several layers to this surface), and the retinas are also surfaces” may have something to do with this. A retina in a eye-4-ball would have a 3D boundary (I.e. hypersurface), and I imagine that the amount of information that it would take in if it had an at all similar angular resolution, would be too great for our visual cortex to be able to represent all of it.

Of course, our vision only really has the high resolution it seems to everywhere in the narrow region we’re directly looking at, but still.