Sadly we don’t even know what “knowing” is, considering human memory changes every time it is accessed. We might just need language and language only. Right now they’re testing if generating verbalized trains of thought helps (it might?). The question might change to: Does the sum total of human language have enough consistency to produce behavior we might call consciousness? Can we brute force the Chinese room with enough data?

Ah, this got a good writeup by news piece. I first learned about this from Medlife Crisis’s The Epidemic of Fake Disease. Statistics about anything as big as cancer diagnoses are beyond complex, and honestly it would take a gargantuan effort of science communication to get this out to the general public. It’s… sobering to know that mortality is not morbidity and that harsh side effects create the most important optimization problems of patients’ lives. I hope that if (or maybe when) I get confronted with a similar diagnosis, I can face the numbers and the odds with as much of a level head as possible.

Manufacturing is actually the name of the game with chip design. Even if a quantum computing design becomes feasible, the exotic nature of its construction will turn any discovery into a engineering nightmare.

As for the type of technology, here’s what a competitor looking for the first blue LED said about the Nobel Prize winners: “It’s like I say to people: they had been working on the steam engine for 100 years, but they never could make one that really worked, until James Watt showed up. It’s the guy who makes it really work who deserves the Nobel Prize. They certainly deserve it.”

My favorite part about the microchip production line is that it all depends on one company (ASML) in the Netherlands and their R&D. They make double digit quantities of EUV machine and that’s it: they dictate the entirety of “easy” technological speed advances in computing.

And then they ship to a micropseudonation being threatened by the most powerful Eastern country just thousands of kilometers away. That’s where the chips are actually produced.

And this entire process is predicated on quantum physicists banging together light waves that literally turn chip design into a probabilistically modeled engineering problem.

What fun!

Shoutouts to Asianometry for having the best videos on all sorts of the chip design process. He covers a ton of other stuff but his interests just about align with mine so I’m a huge fan.

Common Beehaw W for good natured communications

Can’t wait for Beehaw to have 7 or so golden age years before we drop this place. But it’s gonna be a great time in between.

When you get into Vim, you love it. There’s so many buttons for movement and editing that you never have to mash the arrow keys ever again. But that’s because you must customize Vim for how you like it. As you use Vim and accustom to the crazy binds, you will find situation where you think “I want to do this movement over and over and faster”. Then you learn about the dot (repeat) key, the “copy(y) within quotes”, the “jump to next function” button, the “jump to definition” button, etc… And if you don’t find a button for what you need? YOU MAKE YOUR OWN BIND. I have a button combo that does “take the current word under the cursor and grep it for every file with the same current filetype down the directory tree”. I use that button 50 times a day. Pure bliss.

It’s a text editor where you can program in your favorite movements.

I guess there has to be a lowest common denominator instance. Not at all a bad thing, it leaves the dedicated communities out of their inevitable implosion range which still having access.

Just got a big blue headline on old.reddit.com, trying to negotiate their way out of the modtool API debacle

The federated nature of instances unfortunately might nerf the SEO because they’re from different domains. Google wouldn’t value instance_1. com more because the clicks to related_instance_2. com are higher.