I was thinking about this the other day actually and I believe consciousness serves a higher purpose. If you think about it without any consciousness in the universe, nothing would ever be observed. Without consciousness the universe would just be an empty library, full of history and knowledge but with nobody there to read the books (assuming we are the only conscious life form in the universe). And that's fine I guess, the universe obviously could care less if we read its biography, but at the same time I think about how lucky it is that there is a biography to read at all. We could have been conscious beings in a universe that is truly chaotic and could never be made sense of but here we are in this nice one. That is able to be quantified and one that can be appreciated. One filled with unimaginable beauty and mystery to appreciate. Even if we have no tangible purpose, we still have the ability to observe and in a limited sense manipulate the universe around us and I think that is a highly overlooked facet of what makes being a human not completely unbearable. To me the meaning of life is to just simply to be. Butterfly affect applies here, just simply existing can have an unknowable cascade of effects that ultimately shape the story of the universe. My version is a little different: Entropy will always win. Until then, just exist and enjoy.
Perhaps. Personally, I don't find these notions comforting. It could be that our consciousness serves a higher purpose of some sort, or it could be it is but sweet delicious nectar for hungry entities, and we are but fodder.
Entropy IS always increasing. Water is always gonna flow downhill. Its not possible to go from maximally ordered to even more ordered, except in some kind of highly localized phenomena. But it is possible that it can return to that maximally ordered state after it reaches a maximally unordered state. This is the idea Roger Penrose has for the big bang is that it is the state of the universe immediately succeeding the heat death of the universe, at a certain point maximally unordered and maximally ordered can look the same, at least mathematically.
I'm not really talking about things that violate energy conservation or statistical mechanics. I'm talking about how the uniformity of the state during the big bang lead to something clumpier. Structure formation. And I still find it suspect to apply the concept of thermodynamical entropy, something defined for isolated systems at thermal equilibrium, primarily, to even make sense at universe-scale.
Structure is not entropy though unless I am missing what you are saying. The arrangement of macro level objects like a supercluster has less to do with entropy and more to do with dark matter/energy or what ever that stuff is. Also I dont follow the reasoning that this concept of entropy is incorrectly being applied to the universe... energy is energy I have never heard that the thermodynamics only applies to isolated systems in equilibrium.
Also the didn't the human team have full control over what characters were used? Doesn't say much that the bots weren't able to strategize late game when they weren't allowed to pick their optimal lineup. The bots should have got to pick not the other way around.
They reversed the characters used for the 2nd game. The pros considered the matchup to be fair (no draft advantage to either side).
It's argued that drafting is one of the major components of competitive play and more often than not, draft advantage wins games, but that wasn't a factor in this match.
It's not about stealing jobs it's about jobs offering less compensation and benefits than what they would normally because they can exploit the inherent risks of immigrating to lock people into less substantial employment contracts.
You'd be surprised how much overhead a compiler adds even for something like C. Also you can do things in pure assembly that you just can't do in C (w/o inlining assembly haha).
Exactly just think about the current platform this comment is hosted on. There's no reason hacker news couldn't function as a decentralized platform. In fact it pretty much does considering the only things that are really hosted/centralized are hyperlinks, comments on those hyperlinks and a little metadata. The core of the product is already distributed among the users who themselves curate the content. The real issue is how fast you get to see the content, and for a video service that should offer 4K video I think centralized services are the only solution that are performant, right now, that doesn't mean decentralized services couldn't be just as performant if not more so. But for all intents and purposes it should be easier to build an audience on a decentralized service, specifically a niche audience that is more likely to engage and support your content. There also isn't a reason why centralized services couldn't step in and build infrastructure to support certain aspects of an otherwise decentralized network, after all that is the internet in and of itself haha!
If "Texas" is a downside for Austin, then surely Portland has the same problem? Isn't the rest of the state strongly conservative?
Honestly I doubt it will be a city on the tier of Austin/Portland/Seattle, when San Francisco was still the obvious place to go for people who wanted to do weird things it was much cheaper relatively. The same goes for NYC back when it was a musical/artistic hotspot - living space was much much more affordable than any of these cities.
>If "Texas" is a downside for Austin, then surely Portland has the same problem? Isn't the rest of the state strongly conservative?
It definitely does, but to a lesser extent. Oregon is a reliably blue state because the population is extremely sparse outside of Portland, whereas Austin is just a bubble amid a sea of red. Oregon is also a lot less of the "southern redneck confederate" type, and more of the "libertarian don't tread on me" conservative, which is far more tolerable.
But its not really a social network...BBSs were/are great too! Plus BBs let you actually manage content versus just chat and link. IRC is great and always will be but a social network it is not...and I doubt we are gonna see any real revival.
Irc created more new social connections than many networks that came after. Same goes for bbs. We need to find the next thing that truly connects people.
BBSs were more of the than not local, with some federation in that the operator or someone he trusted would exchange data between the local BBS and some distant BBS.
Similarly IRC used to house a high number of very local channels back when i first came online (and one tried to pick a server on the network that was in one's own nation or a neighboring one to avoid finding oneself on the wrong end of a net split).
Social networks offers much the same via various means (groups on facebook, sub-reddits on reddit, etc).
Honestly IMO, what killed IRC was IM and SMS. This because now the schoolyard cliques could once more ostracize.
Locality, interesting. I'd agree on BBS'. My experience of IRC, thought on efnet was expanding past my local calling area.
IM definitely took the bite out of IRC because it was far better at creating beginners that never made it to IRC, and a lot of IRC users got pulled to IM. ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN created a new type of connection.
The best private conversations start by branching away from a public space. It's that juxtaposition that makes each half all the more special (think noisy club/bar vs outside). I think the biggest failing of IM is that it's easy to end up with a declining circle of people whom you communicate with. Without a public space to replenish ideas from, privacy becomes a curse. IRC allows both.
Nor does alcohol mix well with heavy machinery, but just because someone may drink alcohol at some point in the future doesn't mean they will before they operate deadly machinery. The same would apply to marijuana. A stable considerate employee wouldn't use either substance while performing their duties, so maybe we should be screening for something like mental stability, aptitude for identifying/avoiding high-risk behavior etc. instead of trying to run a catch-all for potential drug users.
