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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • Haven’t you identified this casino as an element of the universe, and observed how it works? I can’t predict exactly where the ball will fall, but i don’t think roulette is supernatural. I can understand the non-deterministic process and chacterise the probability density. And test and observe over many trials to confirm the stochastic model is right.

    Uncertainty, randomness, even entaglement and action at a distance can be observed right? with some degree of preision? When you start to pin them down with experiments and describe the probability distribution experimentally, repeatedly, testably then hey presto; I’d call that a “natural” obsrervable random or non-deterministic process.

    Maybe it’s natural with some more uncertainty than usual , but as you said about Heisenberg everything is at least a bit uncertain, so it’s really just a matter of how big is the variance of the probability distribution of your explanation or prediction.

    I know you’re just trolling by trying to use “supernatural” as a term for, unknown / uncertain / not fully explained / non deterministic. For me supernatural might be be predicting that the roulete wheel will come up 6 black next time. A way to determine the exact oucome of a process we believe to be non-deterministic.

    Of course that supernatural thing (like magnetism was back in the day) will become mundane if and when science can pin it down experimentally. Develop a model with a lower variance estimator.

    I’d argue entanglement has beein going through a process from supernatural and spooky when it was only theoretical. To natural now that it’s been proven, but theres still a lot of uncertainty. so you might call it peri-natural?

    I see the whole process of scientific explanation being moving our understanding of phenomena out of the mystical magical and supernatural realm, into the mundane natural world once we understand more about them and have some well understood (even if weak and incomplete) predictive power.


  • The “god” part becomes an unnecessarily complex explanation. I prefer simpler explanations when they fit the data just as well as the complex ones. It also reduces te risk when trying to broaden out to other lines of enquiry.

    As johsny said It makes the god explanation redundant for the large topic of species of life. There’s no need to waste time or energy “disproving” god. The whole concept of god is simply useless to understanding - and so is a waste of time or mental energy.

    But the so called explanations referncing god are typically such bullshit anyway nothing testable, no evidence, just “god did some shit”, “isn’t god cool/powerful”. So they never were actually useful to scientific reasoning. However much they may pretend otherwise religions are so much more aligned with laws and social structures and norms of behaviour than they are about advancing science.




  • I think it is in the drake equation effectively, it factors into the length of time that the civilization might send and receive detectable signals - It doesn’t say why the Civilisation might collapse, but the planet becoming uninhabitable is surely one reason. On wikipedia for Drake Equation the Carl Sagan specification of L is in terms of the “fraction of planetary lifetime”.

    I think a missing factor might be how directional transmission and receiving is, if we can’t broadcast to and listen to the whole sky equally then we might have a 1/r-cubed type issue with the chances of both listening and transmitting with enough strength/energy at the same time.



  • Perpetual motion machines are one of the mothers of all snake oil. Maybe AI can turn base metals into gold too. Do these AIs even really have a demonstrable understanding of thermodynamics yet? It needs to prove itself with a usable output for a clear observabe application on a small scale scale before anyone should start chucking vast amounts of energy at it in hope of what it can “maybe” do. I’d much rather chuck all that energy into trials of tokamaks or something like that.


  • Ah yeah, just choose a different energy souce. Simples.

    Have you seen the growth in % of renewable (incl, nuc biofuel and waste) electricity generation over the past 30 years. (36% i in 1990 , dropped to about 33% in late 2000s up to 38% recently) this is global, IEA figures.

    There have been two years since 1990 when renewable electricity output has grown faster than total electricity demand. 2008/9 recession and 2020 covid. The only way renewables will come close to meeting current electricity consumption is actually to start reducing those demands.

    If we start transerffing gas( domestic heating), and petrol( low-capacity road transportation) onto the electricitry grid then the scale and speed of renewables needs to ramp up inconcievably quickly - it has grown fast over the past decade, but it hasn’t been cheap nor has it been fast enough to keep up with current demands.

    TBH I don’t know where AI lines up next to EVs in scale of potential extra demand, probably lower but still an added demand (unless it can substitute for other stuff and improve efficiency somehow).

    Electricity source is not really a choice, it is resource and tech constrained many sources are needed; the cheapest fuels will continue to be in the mix used so long as demand keeps increasing so fast.

    Maybe, If you ran all AI in peooles houses in cold countries in winter, it’d substitute for heating - that’d be one way it could reduce its impact. Or maybe it can get its act together and spark widespread, frequent, deep, long lasting recessions in economic activity.


  • i think hi res is for professional work. If you’re going to process, modify, mix, distort the audio in a studio, you probably want the higher bit depth or rate to start with, in case you amplify or distort something and end up with an unintended artefact that is human audible. But the output sound can be down rated back to human levels before final broadcast.

    O couse if a marketing person finds out there is a such a thing as “professional quality”. . . See also “military spec”, “aerospace grade”