oliver

do you use a washing machine

Everyone should have the chance to have a laptop job they work from home at while robots do the really hard stuff

i too am in this warzone

i refuse to take "read a book" from anyone whose field still doesn't have anything like the arxiv

Person with an advanced degree in a field whose value to humanity is only realized if people are broadly educated in it: its not my job to educate you

i am periodically very amused to see you rerepost this one

many of yooumfs

i'm not sure what your point is? the principle is that you are always able to construct a hypothetical machine to match any accuracy metric, i don't expect that the only way for something to be accurate is to literally recreate it

Imao ok say no more im poasting it claudepilled lesbian yearner olivooms is basically my exact target audience

that's fine at this level of abstraction, the thing i'm concerned about is that you could acquire the necessary information in principle given the appropriate resources, and then produce a simulation whose scope and error is governed purely by physical limitations of the hardware

as for computability, i mean it in the most conventional sense of "an abstract computer given arbitrary time and memory could simulate this with an arbitrary degree of accuracy." i assume that physics is a system of rules, and so it must be a formal system (and hence amenable to computation)

claiming that we know what's necessary for a phenomenon we've observed only once in our own species is an incredibly strong claim! we barely have a working definition for it, let alone a real understanding of what's necessary

so to be very clear, your view is the physical world is non-computable? i.e., not even an arbitrarily powerful computer with infinite memory could simulate it with arbitrary accuracy?

i'm not quibbling about tractability here, it genuinely doesn't matter to me. my point is that, from the perspective of the formal definition of computability, there's no conceivable way that any biological process is not computable

so,
1. this thread was about a mathematical argument
2. biology is sufficient but may not be necessary
3. my point is that it definitely *is* computable
4. you're making extraordinarily strong claims about reality without justifying them

this has nothing to do with biology? i'm making a very specific argument about computability, and in this setting a "system" is just some arbitrary process simulated by some model (with the trivial case being that an object obviously behaves exactly like itself)

i am saying "a system is a representation of itself." i am not saying "all representations of a system are the system." does this really seem so outlandish to you

is it not just "yes" and "no"?

glory to azure

see also the general problem of government budgets where people do not understand that millions of USD are a rounding error

"the economy is very large and the super-rich do not make up a significant fraction of it" is both true and very hard to grasp for a lot of people

explodes your database with my mind

tom-scott-frantically-scribbling-on-paper-in-an-airport-cafe.webp

Claude Desktop app unresponsive Subscribe Monitoring - Root cause: Users with scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork or Claude Code who are in a timezone that observed daylight saving time last night were affected by an infinite loop. When the app tried to locate tasks scheduled during the "skipped" hour, it couldn't resolve them and got stuck. Fix: Update to version 1.1.5749 via https://claude.com/download. If you're unable to update right away, temporarily switching to a timezone that doesn't observe daylight saving time will also resolve the issue.

minor point but LLMs aren't (to my mind) modelling human language, they're just a weird piece of software that works in a useful way. i don't think their failures are evidence that modelling human language is computationally intractable

the softer claim, that these processes are computationally intractable, is easier to defend. i still think it's probably wrong, but it's not something i would take issue with on principle

the analogy here is that humans are basically very specialised hardware for simulating humans. we have physical evidence that these processes are computable because if they weren't, we could not exist as we are

i'm sticking on this point because it's directly in contrast to what we already know: all the processes that produce a human are computable, so it should be possible to model it computationally. the only way this cannot be true is if there exist non-computable processes here

maybe? but there are much stronger claims here than just that narrow example