You wipe them clean after use. Most 3rd party "elite" straps come with a special cloth to wipe them which I think is similar to the one you use to wipe your glasses.
How come there are seemingly zero tests for what’s essentially critical infrastructure?
How do you make sure things keep working? How do you prevent regressions as team members change and tribal knowledge and intuition is lost? How do you ensure all future humans working on the project can make meaningful changes with confidence?
Short answer: you don't, you brute force testing with your user base and you get lucky until you don't, plus you don't care because you're too entrenched.
That's how 99% of these old timey tools work (coreutils, SSH, SSL, etc). They're getting better but you can definitely feel that they're managed by old hackers that predate CI/CD.
I have to admit I never got the “99% similar” and “octopi are so smart” thing.
May sound like an ignorant meme, but if they’re really so smart and similar, why can’t they build cities or create cultures or do anything better than just survive?
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
This is what scares me so much about AI researches, many assume that more "human like intelligence" is a good thing, it's been hyper destructive so far, even if unintentional, so I can't see it being much different into the future. Useful yes, not by default always "good".
The hope I have is that we actually do create something that is "actually" really intelligent in the we like to think of ourselves and not the way we actually are.
> This is what scares me so much about AI researches, many assume that more "human like intelligence" is a good thing, it's been hyper destructive so far, even if unintentional, so I can't see it being much different into the future. Useful yes, not by default always "good".
It is our imperative for self-preservation that drives destruction. Everything else is just human psychology corollaries of the same thing (aggression, deceit, greed). Human drive for destruction doesn't originate in human intelligence, intelligence just amplifies the ability to destroy.
Arguably this is true for all reproducing mammals (whose intelligence is not comparable to humans). If you trap most mammals in a cage and threaten them, they will destroy whatever comes at them to the best of their ability.
So probably more relevant would be to make AGI without a sense of self or at least without an imperative to self-preserve or reproduce, rather than just fearing the development of something that happens to matches human intelligence.
Are you mad? I say this to grab your attention more firmly!
Do you think unchecked locusts, would not eat the planet bare? Goats, with no predator, would do the same, destroying all vegetation.
Cats torture their prey for fun. Hippos attack with little provication. Even male beavers, during mating season, are deadly and attack without cause.
Everything on this planet expands endlessly, without predation. Apex predators only die off due to starvarion, see prey/predator population cycles for more info.
Humans are perhaps the most benevolent species, for we actually try to reduce our impact!
Heck, even vegetation cares not for anything but itself. Vegetation changed the entire atmosphere of the planet!
By violence, I don't just mean physical violence. Humanity's emotional violence is astounding. Also, a lot of those animals you mentioned do those things for survival. Humanity is discontented and will often reach for violence that is otherwise not necessary. Animals in the wild will often avoid conflict at all costs.
How do you square "humans try to reduce their impact" with the fact that, exactly like vegetation, we're changing the entire atmosphere of the planet? And getting plastic everywhere from Everest to Mariana Trench, to boot?
It might just be a threshold thing; that the brain just crossed a size threshold where it could actually make useful connections that led to where we are now.
Similar to how GPT finally crossed a size threshold where its responses are actually useful to us now rather than just random words. The models are just bigger.
It’s worth noting that a human living in caves and hunting 20k years ago would’ve been perfectly capable of being a modern-day software developer hanging out on the internet. So it’s not even the cities part that matters, it’s something more fundamental, something that must be impossible to achieve without that extra 1%.
I suddenly had this image of a CV by a hunter gatherer looking for dev job. “Dev looking for a job. Skills: Able to work in small tribes, likes to hunt Mammoths, Bears and small rodents for team mates. Basic arithmetic : can count to ten, more with help from others.”
Octopi die at around 3 years old (1 - 5 years) from a mutation that closes their digestive tract upon sexual maturity, genetic ailments that occur after reproduction do not get weeded out
A genetically modified octupi that lived far longer may well become something we would have to coexist and collaborate with. Right now we’re just taking advantage of children, who may be far more intelligent than our own children.
This seems a different topic. It doesn't seem very difficult to imagine why creating civilisations is evidence of intelligence. Even within our species, we'd call subsisting tribes 5000 years ago "primitive". This is just applying that same reasoning to other species.
I think it is an important distinction to make in every similar discussion - certain animals just have some behavior “hard-coded”. Humans realized the need and the how of building cities/homes.
Technology does not imply intelligence and vice versa. Animals that live in the ocean are highly constrained by their environment. Animals that lack opposable thumbs are constrained by biomechanics. Plenty of animal species have culture.
Good point. It's still not clear if our way of surviving as a species is more successful as the "old" selection method. For the individual this is also an arbitrary goal even if some buy it as-is.
> We didn't know that he doesn't have proper windows, we were shocked as well. It was our first time meeting him and he doesn't have any mobile connection. It's very difficult to reach his place, it took us 3 hours by car and 1 hour by snowmobile (which got broken while we were filming). Thank you for your concern, we will replace his windows soon.
Ease to use and ease to misuse usually come hand in hand.
If we had very clear and static requirements I’d see languages/tools with more safeguards, fool proofing, optimized design etc. But we’ll never have that for configuration languages, and when aiming for flexibility you have to trust people to not shoot their own feet.
All these evolutionary arguments (e.g. “head of penis is shaped as such to clean out semen of competitors”) all sound conveniently convincing, but I’m curious if there’s any data validating them?
It’s easy to shoehorn any number of plausible theories, but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one?
Clearly the arguments that sound less convincing have failed to survive and reproduce. The existence of evolutionary arguments is therefore proof of the correctness of the theory! ;)
Except penises come in quite a variety of shapes across species.
Distinguishing actual driving traits from those that just happened to ride along (i.e. men's nipples and other various vestiges, bright red colour of foxes where neither the foxes themselves, nor their predators or prey can see colour), is very hard.
> but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one
IMHO, the one that works is the one most likely to result in increased gene propagation even if the percentage is minuscule in the absence of orthogonal genes.
The argument is not that X evolved to do Y, but rather X resulted in increased gene propagation as it happened to do Y.
In the example above, the head of the penis is shaped as such because that shape enables semen displacement. In the same vein, males tend to lose an erection, and therefore the [flaccid] penis loses the displacement property, after excretion because that results in not displacing one's own semen.
And if I'm being truthful, I struggle with evolution a bit. It's a bit like life. I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Any specific mechanism is explained as having evolved, but if so, how did it _start_?
For example, there's an HN thread explaining why bees die after they sting and why it's acceptable from a colony perspective. What put bee's on _that_ specific evolutionary track? How did it _start_?
I think a lot of people are like myself, there's a level of blind faith put into evolution. We obviously have witnessed it happening so we know it does happen, but there are so many things we can't explain for sure that forces us to have blind faith it happened via _purely_ evolutionary forces. like ... what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot.
And so I continue to have blind faith that even if we don't have a concrete explanation for many of the things we see it happened via evolution, but I also understand the skepticism some people have for evolution being the sole explanation.
> I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Evolution doesn't explain how life started (or attempt to explain), just how it changes over time. How it started is obviously a really interesting question, but not one you can use evolution to understand. Evolution explains a specific thing, not everything.
> there's a level of blind faith put into evolution
I'd call it common sense, more than blind faith. You see a person dead on the floor with a bullet wound, and a handgun laying next to the body. Concluding that the victim was shot to death is common sense, not blind faith. In that sense, evolution is more like playing detective, all the evidence is pointing to it.
> 1. The assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence; belief in general.
> 2. Specifically Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment; earnest and trustful confidence: as, to have faith in the testimony of a witness; to have faith in a friend.
...
> 5. Intuitive belief.
We have a hypothesis that the penis _evolved_ due to it's ability to scoop out semen. A part of that hypothesis is that this is why longer penises evolved, to place semen in places that cannot be scooped out by other men.
But another explanation for larger penises is that women find them more attractive and pleasurable and therefore it increased your chance of mating.
Another would be that larger penises are statistically more likely to get a woman pregnant in general, with or without a bulbous head.
But here's one for you. The original hypothesis about the penis head came from an experiment in which they found that a single thrust could potentially pull out 90% of a competitors semen. We won't discuss the logistics (they didn't use real people), we'll have _blind faith_ that the experimenters ensured it was realistic.
Men ejaculate in spurts over a time period that is larger than what it takes to thrust a single time. This would imply the penis head also removes it's own sperm quite often.
---
The point here is that
1. We don't know, and
2. We can't know without actually documenting the process.
This sub-thread was brought about by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're offended by the phrase blind faith, use whatever phrase you like. But while you're doing that, please watch that youtube video. It will help you better understand why it's more useful to discuss the underlying idea than to discuss if we should be using word X or word Y.
> by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're talking about evolution in general, then it makes a large number of predictions about the way things are, that have borne out.
If you're talking about penises scooping out semen, the answer is we can't know, therefore we take it on faith—the answer is we don't know, and so it's one of several hypotheses—none of which are mutually exclusive. Nobody is (or should be, at least) taking it on faith, because nobody should be asserting it as definitely true.
I would be interested to see how you think this short video supports the claim you are making here, as it does not mention evolution, common sense or faith, and is ostensibly about how little knowledge one gains just by learning the name of a thing.
You don't understand how pointing out the names of things isn't the important property of a thing would be relevant in a discussion with someone who is arguing it should be called X instead of Y?
No, the claims made in the video you linked to do not show that, as you put it, "in this case, 'common sense' and 'blind faith' mean the same thing." Nor does your reply to mcphage.
correct, the video is pointing out the name you call something isn't important.
I choose to call it blind faith and the other poster prefers to call it common sense. If a 3rd person wanted to call it guacamole I'd be onboard.
The other poster insists on arguing about the name rather than discussing the interesting part, which is underlying idea. They want to do this based upon the whole "science vs religion" thing that was boring even back in the 90's when it was raging.
I have no interest in it and so I've stepped out of that conversation. Let someone else take up a stupid, useless, argument.
> The video is pointing out the name you call something isn't important.
Firstly, this is a misreading of the video. The absurdity of this position can be seen from extending your example through replacing every noun in your comments by "guacamole".
Secondly, "blind" is an adjective, and one that you use at every opportunity (except where you are looking up definitions - by the way, isn't looking up definitions an odd preoccupation for someone who doesn't see anything of importance in what you call something?) It is well-known that you cannot outright prove anything about the natural world by induction, but to lump everything that is not proven into the category of specifically blind faith ignores the epistemic value of evidence and just leads to what you call a stupid, useless, argument.
> what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot
A simple explanation would be that the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
There's just too many possibilities to so confidently claim it's kicking the can down the road.
Simplicity would be more likely to imply creation than complexity.
Simplicity implies understanding and intent.
No one would design the absolute spaghetti code mess that underlies our existence.
Look at the computers we build. Neat little rows and friendly little abstractions.
Life isn't. It's billions of years of good enough hacks layered one atop the other, and sometimes transitioned sideways from other forks of the code base.
Near half our DNA is just viral cruft that got mixed up and passed along for untold generations.
>Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin
Suppose living matter came to earth on an asteroid. That still doesn't explain how living things emerge from non-living matter.
> the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
That looks like argument from complexity. And it seems that complexity through planning would require an even more complex creator, not a simpler one.
> There's just too many possibilities
I don't think it makes a difference either way. If we can figure out one way of making life from non-living matter, we've cracked the code, we don't need to know how exactly it happened.
