Don’t shoot the fruit wine
“Being a little bit smarter is where revolutions come from. Not time. Not hard work. Although hard work and time were usually necessary, others had worked far harder and longer without result. The essence of revolution is raw smartness” — Yudkowsky - Staring into the Singularity 1.2.5
“A civilization with high technology is unstable; it ends when the species destroys itself or improves on itself. If the current trends continue - if we don’t run up against some unexpected theoretical cap on intelligence, or turn the Earth into a radioactive wasteland, or bury the planet under a tidal wave of voracious self-reproducing nanodevices - the Singularity is inevitable.” — Yudkowsky - Staring into the Singularity 1.2.5
“Jawless fishes (e.g., lampreys and hagfish) and jawed vertebrates (pretty much everything else, including humans) independently invented different mechanisms of blood-oxygen transport to sustain aerobic metabolism.” — Biologists find that red-blooded vertebrates evolved twice, independently
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The things we design will end up designing us.
Fred Vaughan: Incompatibilities of theories concerning black holes and an expanding universe
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IMAGINE that the United Kingdom was an absolute monarchy known as Windsor Britain. Imagine that Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, had dozens of brothers, scores of sons and hundreds of cousins, and that the broader House of Windsor numbered thousands of lesser princes and princesses. Imagine further that all these royals pocketed fat state stipends, with many holding lifelong fiefs as government ministers, department heads, regimental commanders or provincial governors, with no parliament to hold them in check. Now imagine how sporting these princely chaps would be when the throne fell vacant, if the only written rule was a vague stipulation that the next in line should be the “best qualified” among all the Windsor princes.
This is roughly how things look in Saudi Arabia, a family enterprise run the old-fashioned way. Here the king is not only prime minister. He also appoints the members of parliament and designates a successor to the throne. Yet the actual workings of this system are not so simple. The size of the ruling al-Saud family (at least 5,000 hold princely rank), and the accumulated privileges of its leading princes are such that kings must take care to balance rival interests. They must also accommodate Wahhabist clerics who expect rewards for sanctioning absolute monarchy, technocrats who actually manage the country and even, sometimes, those of their subjects who grow restive, and demand a voice beyond presenting personal petitions at royal receptions.
” — The Saudi succession: When kings and princes grow old | The Economist“If there is zero substitutability between q and each of the private-market goods, it can happen that, while the individual would only be willing to pay a finite amount for an increase in q, there is no finite compensation that she would accept to forgo this increase.” —
W. Michael Hanneman, Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept: How Much Can They Differ? American Economic Review, vol. 81 no. 3 (1991)
N.B.: This is Hanneman, not Kahneman. This is not a behavioral result; it’s a straight optimizing agent result posed as a theorem with an ensuing proof. This regards the case where an agent can maximize his utility on a basket of goods X but can’t include q in that optimization problem.
The “one non-optimal good” theory (MBAishly called “willingness to pay/willingness to accept) is often used in environmental economics. But this: if q is liquidity, then we have Kahneman loss aversion without any psychobabble.
I'm a man... I'm ahead.. I'm the first mammal to wear pants... -
Consider this: Much of what makes a picture artistic could actually be programmed into a camera. Diagonal compositions, color contrasts, foreground/background? All of these are pretty simple things for a computer to vet.
Nadia from Andrew Kupresanin on Vimeo.
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In addition to the recycled content from al Qaeda’s core leadership, Inspire also contains quite a bit of new and interesting content from AQAP’s military and theological leaders. An interview with AQAP leader Nasir al-Wahayshi provided al-Wahayshi the opportunity to reinforce several points he has been making for months now regarding his call for jihadists to conduct simple attacks using readily available weapons. “My advice to my Muslim brothers in the West is to acquire weapons and learn methods of war. They are living in a place where they can cause great harm to the enemy and where they can support the Messenger of Allah.” Al-Wahayshi continued “…a man with his knife, a man with his gun, a man with his rifle, a man with his bomb, by learning how to design explosive devices, by burning down forests and buildings, or by running over them with your cars and trucks. The means of harming them are many so seek assistance from Allah and do not be weak and you will find a way.”
This call was echoed by Adam Gadahn in March 2010 when the American-born spokesman for al Qaeda prime advised jihadists to strike targets that were close to them with simple assaults and urged his audience to not “wait for tomorrow to do what can be done today, and don’t wait for others to do what you can do yourself.” These calls are part of a move toward a leaderless resistance model of jihadism that has accompanied the devolution of the jihadist threat from one based on al Qaeda the group to a broader threat based primarily on al Qaeda franchises and the wider jihadist movement. With this shift, more attacks such as the Times Square bombing attempt, the Fort Hood shooting and the June 1, 2009, Little Rock shootings can be anticipated.
In an effort to provide training in terrorist tradecraft to such grassroots and lone-wolf jihadists, Inspire contains a section called “Open Source Jihad,” which is the term that AQAP uses to refer to leaderless resistance. This section is intended to serve as “a resource manual for those who loathe tyrants.” The material is intended to allow “Muslims to train at home instead of risking a dangerous travel abroad,” and one part exclaims, “Look no further, the open source jihad is now at hand’s reach.” The section also contains a lengthy step-by-step guide to constructing simple pipe bombs with electronic timers, bearing the rhymed title “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
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“I would like to rectify your statement, and declare that this is not madness, but in actuality, Sparta.” — Friends, a dreadful error has occurred. : lounge