What a great, thought-provoking question! Thanks mromanuk!
I started reading the Wikipedia page about free-will to try to work out where I stand on this. I think I quite like the classical way of thinking about free will as simply: Being free from coercion in one's decision-making! I guess the source of such limits could be either internal or external or both though! So I don't know whether that helps much in answering your question.
The Wikipedia page says about 'compatibilism' (which holds that free will and determinism are compatible) that it is "the absence of various impediments" and that "a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires", so that still doesn't really help answer the question.
I accept quantum-mechanics enough to be slightly skeptical of strict-determinism, so I guess maybe I fall more into the 'metaphysical libertarianism' point of view, but I still feel like the non-determinism that QM introduces probably acts more like a limit to how 'free' free-will can possibly be, rather than being a kind of 'secret sauce' that makes it possible for us or some external factor to be able to meddle with what reality (or ourselves) get up to in a meaningful way.
I also think that the internal/external distinction breaks down when examined very closely. For me this leads to the idea that I am actually the same thing (same 'wavefront' or whatnot?) as what caused the existence of the universe that I am a part of. I am both myself and the environment at the same time, but with a limited ability to sense very far into the external universe and its workings, beyond input from senses like sight/hearing/etc (I guess realms of pure-thought should also be included too though! Do we 'sense' reason/philosophy/mathematics/algorithms when we think about them?).
I think one answer (or the avoidance of a clear answer) to your question is that people have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and we (as a collective/species) are still really not very close to being firmly decided about it at all!
> This is also an uncomfortable direction. All investors have been betting on the application layer. In the next stage of AI evolution, the application layer is likely to be the first to be automated and disrupted.
I'm not convinced, we tend to think in terms of problem-products(solutions), for example editing an image => photoshop, writing some document => word. I doubt that we are going to move to a "Any problem => model". That's what ChatGPT is experimenting with the "calendaring/notification". It breaks the concept that one brand solves one problem. The App store is a good example, there are millions of apps. I find it really hard that the "apps" can get inside the "model" and expect that the model will "generate an app tailored" for that problem at that moment, many new problems will emerge.
Thanks. I listened to the examples and the pieces sound pretty convincing (ignoring the synthetic character of the instruments). Is what I hear directly generated from the DNN output, or was there some "manual" selection and tweaking of the music? The approaches based on symbolic musical information which I have seen so far sounded quite unnaturaly in constrast with passages no human composer would create like this. But this system generates pieces with a structure, harmony and progression that in times can hardly be distinguished from a human composer (with some exceptions). What is the deciding ingredient? I will now read the paper as well.
Actually, it would be very interesting to use this approach to generate improvised piano music in the style of Keith Jarrett. I had already considered using an AI to translate his various live concerts into midi and then use that to train a DNN. With the approach shown here, this maybe could work.
I used wintersmith.io. At some point it was abandoned and eventually the node version needed was old and other stuff associated with it. It became a hassle.
If you make such risks up, then no one says that html will be readable in the same way in 20 years (which is already kind of true as you have a lot of old blogs with awful layout on mobile)
But there is an even easier one - nothing will happen to your html built files of 20 years, they'll remain... static.
The worst is you'll go to updating your lovely html by hand, but you would've saved yourself wasting 20 years doing that instead of using a better system.
I promise you, HTML is not a hassle... It's markup. You describe the page, and then... you're done. And if you don't use weird, niche tags, it'll work basically forever.
This is a patently false promise. Yes, it's markup, but a bad one un-ergonomic-suitable for direct human consumption. Even the author of the blog understands it and uses alternatives
> with md-block for markdown
> You describe the page, and then... you're done
Unless you want to re-describe something, of course. Maybe sort a column in a table...
The use of the name Falklands is problematic because the Islas Malvinas are a disputed territory between Argentina and the UK. The UN has recognized this dispute and has urged the UK to negotiate their return, something the UK has ignored so far. Using the name imposed by the occupying power contributes to erasing Argentina’s legitimate claim and disregards the international legal stance on the issue. The proper approach would be to refer to them as Islas Malvinas or at least acknowledge the dispute in any discussion about them.
The 2013 referendum is not a valid argument in sovereignty disputes. The UN has repeatedly recognized the Islas Malvinas as a disputed territory and has urged the UK to negotiate with Argentina (Resolution 2065 and subsequent resolutions).
Self-determination does not apply here because the current population is not indigenous but was implanted after the UK forcibly took the islands in 1833, displacing the original Argentine population. The UN considers this a decolonization issue, not a matter of self-determination.
The argument that the islanders “chose” to remain under UK control ignores that democracy cannot legitimize colonial occupation. A referendum by settlers cannot override international law, just as a vote by European colonists in Africa in the 19th century wouldn’t justify occupation. The UK has consistently refused to negotiate, violating UN resolutions and international norms.
> Argentina claims that the population of the islands was expelled in 1833;[11] however, both British and Argentine sources from the time, including the log of the ARA Sarandí, suggest that the colonists were encouraged to remain under Vernet's deputy, Matthew Brisbane.
So again, I repeat: this is all very well documented by this point. The other commenter also already pointed out the other issue in your text here so I'll leave it at this.
I used Feedly, tried several RSS clients, I was into RSS but content providers started to only give you a portion of the content, subverting the very idea of RSS (at least what I wanted), even some clients had (or have) the feature to download the content and present it to you with a clean RSS style. So I quit it, because it was a new tech arms race. Not sure how is all that now.
I’m AI-obsessed and have been since forever (mid-1990s). I’m longing for AGI, so I tend to consume every piece of content that looks like an advance or is related to AI business.
AI-related content is seasonal. This new LLM trend (which is now shifting towards “agentic AI”) will eventually fade and be replaced by another shiny new term. Basically, there’s a lot of noise, but every now and then, some gems pop up. Finding those articles is the fun part and the reason why I visit HN every day.
Because group estimation is superior to individual estimations:
The phenomenon is called wisdom of the crowds. When a group of people independently estimate something, individual errors tend to cancel each other out, leading to a surprisingly accurate collective result. This works because of:
Diversity of opinions: Different perspectives bring a range of estimates.
Independence: Errors aren't systematically biased as long as individuals estimate without external influence.
Error averaging: Overestimation and underestimations balance out when averaged.
Law of large numbers: More participants increase accuracy by minimizing random errors.
It was demonstrated by Francis Galton in 1906, where a crowd's average guess of a bull's weight was almost spot-on. (estimates must be independent and reasonably informed for this to work.)
