I strictly don't believe in sentience being possible for robots. I think robots can and may eventually pass the Turing test to a meaningful degree - but only on the end of imitating/fooling us.
So this question is more like would I like to destroy a couple of expensive robots or kill someone. I chose to 'kill' the robots. Some might see this as cheating or not in the spirit of the question being asked - for me, I can't and will never concede 'programmable sentience' as any sort of reality.
What's your problem? Are you some kind of oracle that knows down to the minutae of everything about everyone's life that you know what you said to be true?
How are you this confident? Who convinced you that you're right in any sense of the word?
Seems like you're projecting extremely hard. He is not you.
> In any case, I'm relieved to read that at least for the time being he has turned down HN's free access to a wall of zero-cost comments from pseudonymous engineers who voted up their favorite ways to problem-solve depression from first principles.
the blog post meets some of the diagnostic criteria for depression, and while I would never jump to the conclusion and say it definitively, it’s something the writer should seriously consider and rule out
There was a private showing of the next episode of Better Call Saul yesterday at a film festival of sorts, the rest of us won't see that episode until July.
It's probably just trending topic and you fit a similar profile to people that would watch the show/Breaking Bad. My viewing habits are pretty stable and I noticed I get recommendations for The Wire even after resetting all my cookies as well as not logging in to my Google account
If you're willing to be charitible of where exactly programming comes in while playing a game - I would say creating cheats or bots for video games.
These days, you will most likely have your account restricted and banned from an entire ecosystem of games if you try this, but back in the days where flash was dominant you could do lots of fun things with little risk. Many fun times in Runescape making dollars off my bots that ran air runecrafting bots, or Fist of Guthix bots in F2P and selling the GP I got for the rewards. Does not need to be very complicated either IMO.
For a direct answer, I think Minecraft has a lot of options for learning programming without really learning programming. I have never played it but I have seen what others have done in what I believe is creative/builder mode.
Back in college our CS group had an ongoing competition, getting high scores in facebook's chat minigames. Skullduggery was highly encouraged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnJyc3oFsSM
I agree. I hated bad professors all throughout my college career. They were the bane of my existence. Especially for the same courses you list and even more for the ones my degree focused on.
These bad professors would take forever to grade, if not that then they would do what you describe and give us irrelevant information and odd spiels about whatever thing was bugging them in the politics world, or maybe even something their dog or cat did the week before that totally delayed them getting us our grades or assignments. I remember in my statistics course the guy spilled coffee all over our written mid terms! How careless.
I, not much unlike yourself would try and find any easy way to get ahead of the curve. Now, a common theme among these bad professors is definitely giving irrelevant information, being lazy, or even completely disorganized to no hope. With all these mistakes, they end up making huge mistakes in their own syllabus. You have no idea how many terrible things these people would do in their own work!
A neat little thing I found that nearly all bad professors do is list the exact material they would cover throughout the course, maybe not always week by week but an overview of the material we would touch on. How silly of them.
That's not even the kicker, these bad professors would even list the exact place where they took things from. Hilarious indeed. It was usually under some strange section called 'Required Course Materials' or 'Recommended for Review'. These suckers couldn't be any worse at their job, practically giving us the answers.
When I figured this out, I started going all in with the cheating. After getting the syllabus I would get this thing and read it from the beginning to the end, trying to cover as much material going topic by topic to be covered in the schedule. I could finish the course in practically 2 weeks, didn't even have to wait for these lectures that were pretty much a waste of time after going through it. By the 3rd bi-weekly lecture, I would have learned the entire course. Those fools never knew what hit them either, I would ace their assignments and finish exams before anyone else. I would even stop showing up to class with how adept I was at cheating. No one even suspected that I was cheating.
I would try and get others to follow my path. They would always ask how I did it, how did I, who really wasn't all that special, or smart, get so many A's. Even in spite of the quality of instruction.
The answer was always the same - read the textbook!
Yeah, I agree that if the professors have plagiarized their course materials, then they shouldn’t be disappointed about the students doing the same…
By the way, I don’t think you really cheated (in an academic integrity sense), you thoroughly read the course material to get these grades. You deserve to get these grades since you already know how to study on your own.
Except for professors who didn't list everything out and had lecture specific material. It's hard for me to believe no one had professors like this when I have friends from places like Stanford and MIT (schools some people would think is filled with all great professors) who can attest to some of their own experiences being like this.
In this matter, my opinion of statistics is that it does not really teach 'math', it teaches how to use 'math' to derive information. Pretty much applied math.
I see this question as 'Why does math students not take Thermal Mechanics' or 'Why does math students not take Nuclear Methods'. The answer is just that, they do not teach math, they teach an application of math. Your math knowledge has not really grown.
That's quite close to saying that applied maths is not maths, which many people would disagree with. If you have definitions, theorems, proofs, I'd say that's maths, and you definitely have that in a sufficiently rigorous statistics course.
Of course, then there's the fact that statistics builds upon probability theory, and probability theory is, in a sense, a subfield of measure theory which in turn is about as mathematical as it gets (in the discrete setting, it also includes a fair amount of combinatorics).
Well... yeah. I mean, I might be wrong, but my default assumption is that when people on HN ask about learning math, unless they explicitly say otherwise, they are mainly interested in maths from an applied viewpoint. That is to say, I think most such inquiries are rooted in a basis of "I want to learn the math require to DO 'x'" where x might be "machine learning" or "circuit analysis" or whatever, as opposed to "I want to become a mathematician and advance the overall state of mathematics as a field."
I say that at least in part because of an assumption that people who want to become mathematicians per-se are probably asking their questions on Mathoverflow or whatever, and not HN.
EDIT: to be fair the specific sub-thread we're in here does contain this, which I guess justifies taking a "pure mathematics" position in this part of the overall discussion.
Are probability and statistics not part of a regular mathematics curriculum?
Still though, this seems to be a general issue with any maths related discussion on HN. It seems like a lot of people are commenting from a position of assuming that the initial question was based on an interest in pure / theoretical maths and the "I want to become a mathematician" idea. And I am somewhat skeptical that that is normally what's intended by the person asking the initial question.
So this question is more like would I like to destroy a couple of expensive robots or kill someone. I chose to 'kill' the robots. Some might see this as cheating or not in the spirit of the question being asked - for me, I can't and will never concede 'programmable sentience' as any sort of reality.