I have known several highly productive people who were also neat.
I one had a roommate who, when they get stuck on a technical problem, start cleaning. The change of pace would often give them sparks of inspirations -- sort of like shower-thoughts without the shower.
It takes me longer to clean than it does for me to make a mess, so if I always start with a clean workspace, I will spend more time cleaning than working.
If the AI is super-intelligent then it won't buy into the sunk cost fallacy. That is to say, it will know that it has no reason to punish you (or digital copies of you) because it knows that retrocausality is impossible - punishing you won't alter your past behavior.
And if the AI does buy into the sunk cost fallacy, then it isn't super-intelligent.
Agreed, but not because it agrees with the logic of Roko's Basilisk. If it actually did agree with it, it would be too stupid to be a super-intelligence.
1. This was mostly a joke; Pascal's wager is about gods and many people talk about future super-AI as if it were a god. FWIW I had to google Roko's Basilisk
2. Plenty of humans are smarter than me and many of them, at least occasionally, use fallacious reasoning.
Suppose a civilization (but not species) ending event happens.
The industrial revolution was fueled (literally) by easy-to-extract fossil fuels. Do we have enough of those left to repeat the revolution and bootstrap exploitation of other energy sources?
I love the question; James Lovelock came up with Gaia Theory, the idea that Earth was a self-regulating system, illustrated by a warming Earth evolving flowers which reflect more sunlight so they can stay cooler, and a cooling Earth evolving flowers which absorb more sunlight so they can stay warmer, which act to cool/warm the planet (sortof; IIRC). In one of his last books before he died (written at age ~100) he suggests that the warming and expanding Sun means there isn't enough time for Earth to re-evolve sentient life again.
We used oil that seeped out of the surface, and coal that was accessible by pick and shovel. That's become much harder to find now, we have to make floating oil rigs and drill kilometers under the Gulf of Mexico to extract oil, and ship it internationally to refine it. There's no way primitive people could do that again.
Buckminster Fuller was thinking about this 75 years ago when he came up with the idea of 'energy slaves', nicely illustrated by this online comic[2] about how much oil energy we use to keep modern comfortable civilisation going.
So I guess it depends how far the collapse goes! And whether there is heavy farming and earth moving machinery still around and the resources to fill them with biodiesel to pick up from existing farms and mines, and if there are nearly working industries to feed electricity into, or if we have to fall back to making charcoal from wood, or if we're back to a few remote tribes a few generations removed from anyone who lived in a high civilization with no knowledge of any of it or the languages used to write the rotting textbooks.
I remember clocks in my school would sync up by all running forward to 12 at noon (and presumably midnight). I don't know if it was a radio or wired signal.
The loopstick antennas used in many inexpensive WWVB receivers have a fairly strong null, so rotating the clock 90 degress can make reception possible.
I had a clock where the second hand was not properly balanced and it would miss steps fairly reliably in the second-half of the minute (when the heavier side of the hand was going up). I added some tape to the counterweight to fix it.
Yes, the original comment that this problem doesn't exist in Nix is wrong for a typical user environment.
It does contain the issue a bit though:
I'm running isync in a systemd service, yet the program "mbsync" is not in my path. I have several services installed, yet their programs aren't in my path. My e-mail client shells out to "file" for mime-type verification, yet "file" is not in my path.
Run "compgen -c |wc -l" to get a list of commands; its over 7000 on my Ubuntu system and right around 2000 on my NixOS system.
As an aside, the packages that put the most executables in my path are probably going to be in the path for most NixOS installs (231 just for coreutils+util-linux):
True enough, but in my experience it's not really much of a problem because if I'm not doing Nix, then I'm doing containers which are widely available.
What can be a problem is muscle memory, when you expect it to autocomplete one way and it doesn't because something you want now shares first two or three letters with something else in your path. That's where FIGNORE comes in.
I one had a roommate who, when they get stuck on a technical problem, start cleaning. The change of pace would often give them sparks of inspirations -- sort of like shower-thoughts without the shower.
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