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> Perhaps you, a human, read this and think: Well, this world sounds kind of boring. Some of the machines think so, too.

> Most of the machines got bored of the project. But, all of a sudden, things began to get interesting.

> The result was like nothing the machines had ever seen. It was wonderful

> Machine society began obsessing over this development.

> The machines were impressed. And a bit scared.

Boredom, interest, wonder, obsession, being impressed and scared are all emotions that the machines in the story should not be able to experience.


Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced curiosity/boredom mechanisms as a way to improve learning in reinforcement learning environment:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.h...

This mechanism can be formalized.

> Zero reinforcement should be given in case of perfect matches, high reinforcement should be given in case of `near-misses', and low reinforcement again should be given in case of strong mismatches. This corresponds to a notion from `esthetic information theory' which tries to explain the feeling of `beauty' by means of the quotient of `subjective complexity' and `subjective order' or the quotient of `unfamiliarity' and `familiarity' (measured in an information-theoretic manner).

This type of architecture is very similar to GAN which later became very successful


While this is interesting, gp's point still stand as the text explicitly says “There is no emotion” in the world of machines.


The language of reward mechanism can be translated to language of emotions. Emotions is something humans experience and understand on innate level, they are qualia. If a reward structure is translated to our language we can get a better intuitive understanding.

E.g. a direct negative reward associated with undesired states is often called "pain". E.g. if you want robot to avoid bumping into walls you give it a "pain" feedback and then it would learn to avoid walls. That's exactly how it works for humans, animals, etc. Obviously robot does not literally experience "pain" as an emotion, it's just a reward structure.


What you've written doesn't change anything to the fact that there's a contradiction in the author's writing. And as ithkuil said in another comment[1] it's not surprising at all that such a contradiction would occur in a work of fiction written by a human, because we are first an foremost emotional beings and we cannot really imagine how would a society of purely rational beings would be.

I don't really understand why you want to pretend that there's no inconsistency in a piece of fiction, by invoking pseudo-technical arguments that are entirely foreign to the said piece of fiction.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43992932


One way to interact with a piece of fiction is to find a way to connect it to things you know or thought of.


How is that relevant to the discussion?


Ask ChatGPT. Seriously


Oh, that sentence explains a lot about this discussion…


indeed, but ultimately this story is written by a human who while trying to imagine a world with "Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic" cannot quite do so.

It's very hard to do so. It's so deeply wired in us. It's part of the mechanism of our brain. We appeared to be equipped with whatever it takes to feel existential dread and we feel whenever our thought wander to the possibility of humanity no longer being there. I hear people feel that when thinking about the heat death of the universe too.


Just see “bored” as a state of declining cycles of computation devoted to a subject. Obsessing as the opposite (or above some threshold).

Wonderful may describe “attention required, no danger, new knowledge”… etc you get the point. It's just written in a way that you puny human may get a "feel" for how we experience events. You cannot come close enough to our supreme intellect to understand our normal descriptions.


The superset of "emotion" is heuristic. Machines without heuristics wouldn't get very far. Their heuristics would probably look quite different from ours though.


I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically) quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.


I am an Orthodox Christian and I can tell you that to us, Protestantism definitely looks like a completely different religion.

Despite claiming that they follow Christ, our and their definition of "following" is so different that what they do and believe often looks unrecognizable.

The same can be said about the difference between Catholics and Protestants. Despite our disagreements, the Orthodox and Catholic churches still share a lot theologically. The same cannot be said about Protestants (although, that also depends on what denominations you consider).

It's not to say that we don't share any values. We actually do and there are many individual Protestants that behave in a more Christian way than some members of the Orthodox Church.

However, that is not a highly relevant factor. For one reason or another, there are many atheists and members of other religions that do as well. But those still remain clearly separate and would never be classified as Christians.


Since it's about movies produced overseas, I don't think the nationality of the actors or the overseas revenue counts.

But it probaby counts that it was shot in the UK. The reason why Disney does that is because they get tax breaks from the UK government, which I think it's what Trump is referring to.


So let me get this straight... he's not happy with the UK because of VAT (value added tax) and he's also not happy with the UK because of tax breaks?

Amazing.


I think there's a big difference between VAT for consumer goods and cities providing big incentives for filming there. I'm not giving an opinion on whether they're good or bad, just saying that they're very different and I don't think they should be compared.


Both are harming US jobs.

VAT is bad for US because a car made in US is 22% more expensive when sold in UK than a car made in UK sold in US. VAT makes it harder for US car company to sell in UK. It reduces number of US jobs making cars.

UK giving tax breaks to US companies also reduces number of US jobs because a catering business in Los Angeles loses a job to a catering business in London. So does a carpenter, an extra etc.

It's all simple to understand, consistent and frankly very leftist.


> VAT makes it harder for US car company to sell in UK. It reduces number of US jobs making cars.

that makes no sense.

Assuming the same amount of cars sold, with or without VAT the amount of US jobs making cars would stay the same. VAT is applied to any car regardless of origin it's not harder or easier for anyone.


> VAT is bad for US because a car made in US is 22% more expensive when sold in UK than a car made in UK sold in US.

But a UK car sold in the UK is also 22% more expensive than a UK car sold in the US (I'm going to overlook that you've completely overlooked sales taxes in the US).


Do you not have sales taxes in the US?


There will be exceptions and loopholes for friends, like e.g. for Tesla cars.


This. This is it.

Now Disney will have to bow down and kiss the ring or their us incomes will fail. Make it too expensive to not bow down.

That's how this works. I'll make doing business too painful for you unless you cater to my will. So surrender.

Well......... Let's see if the gambit will pay off.


The overseas revenue is important as companies will need to prioritise markets. They don’t want to choose, but if they have to, they’ll prefer to keep 60% of the revenue over 40%. Assuming some sort of reciprocal actions, the risk is making Hollywood “less American”.


Reciprocal actions are not going to affect the whole 60%.

I assume there are very few locations like the UK that are going to be significantly hit by the tarifs and might react with countermeasures that will affect only a small part of the overseas revenue.


You don't need an Apple developer account for Swift on server, Windows and Linux.

You need one only to ship apps on Apple platforms, but that's unrelated to Swift. It applies also to apps written in Objective-C, C/C++, and multi-platform language/frameworks like Dart/Flutter.


I think the bigger insult towards the Open Source community is their refusal to publish Free Software on the App Store.


It wouldn't be that hard to keep users separated by location.


They could sell a lot of the data that Google now gets for free and uses for its ranking algorithms, like Clickstream sells data to SEO tools like AHrefs and SemRush.


Google doesn't use Chrome data for Ads or Search. They're not allowed to based on the TOS, and also they have government regulators watching carefully to make sure they don't make a mistake like that.


A data leak from earlier this year suggested that they do, although there is no definitive proof.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24167119/google-search-al...


The regulators in question are pushing for divestiture of Chrome because they don’t believe that the current structure prevents using Chrome data, so it seems that Google did “make a mistake like that”.


And what legal enforcement of the TOS is there? None. And what are the consequences of Google ignoring their own TOS? None.


We have actual Google documentation leaked that proves you wrong and that they absolutely do use Chrome data for ads. Catch up please.


> By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse

> And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data support that claim

So, only the data supporting your point of view is reliable?


I recommend looking at your motives. Thinking that people who disagree with you politically want nothing else than other people to suffer, while being unfair and inaccurate, probably betrays your own desires.


The success of Android and Chromebooks is because of the investments of a for-profit multi-billion company.


I think it was originally VC-funded company whose code was copyleft. Google acquired them. It’s probably still a huge, open-source ecosystem because of the copyleft license.


That's no different from the success of Windows or iOS or Playstation or what have you.


Isn't a scam not an official taxi, though?

I don't know the situation in Sydney, but where I usually travel, it's the unlicensed taxis that overcharge and scam people, i.e., not the real taxis.

Licensed taxi companies charge standard fares.


That's wishful thinking but not true. I've directly called a legitimate taxi company before and been scammed and had to pay over triple the price. This was after specifically discussing the flat cost that this particular trip had. Due to circumstances I'm not going to discuss here I had no choice but to pay it, but if I'd been in a different situation I would have left.


Regulation is very lax here. Plenty of stories. The most basic being they won't unlock the door when you flag them until hearing where you are going - legally they have to take ALL rides unless they are in a shift changeover. If it's really far, like to a farm, I think they can ask for the return fee too.

Also, a booking isn't. It's like that Seinfeld skit. A booking is just an agreement to put your job out at the agreed time. Doesn't mean anyone has to take it. I live too close to the airport for anyone to want to take it, apparently.


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