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250 books
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443 voters
Viv’s project was machine learning stuff like the Death Star was laser pointer stuff. She had come within a hair’s breadth of a real self-optimizer: a smart program that could make itself smarter, without limit.
“A friend isn't someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.”
―
―
“It’s no magic bullet and cannot solve every problem. In further experiments in the maze domain, we generated hundreds of random mazes of different difficulties and applied both novelty search and objective-based search to solving them. The trend that resulted from the data was that as mazes grow increasingly complicated, both novelty search and objective-based search can fail to solve them. However, objective-based search’s abilities taper off much faster [55].”
― Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective
― Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective
“Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.”
― Accelerando
― Accelerando
“Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!”
― Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
― Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
“But—let me tell you my cat joke. It's very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she's got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room—has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak—and it's gone. And there's the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing it's face."
"The cat got the steak," Barney said.
"Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. "Weigh the cat," someone says. They've had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and a guest says, "okay, that's it. There's the steak." They're satisfied that they know what happened, now; they've got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, "But where's the cat?”
― The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
"The cat got the steak," Barney said.
"Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. "Weigh the cat," someone says. They've had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and a guest says, "okay, that's it. There's the steak." They're satisfied that they know what happened, now; they've got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, "But where's the cat?”
― The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ic’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ic’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
75 books
|
13 friends
4,415 books
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349 friends
19 books
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24 friends
4 books
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21 friends
2,822 books
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120 friends
824 books
|
9 friends
94 books
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78 friends
56 books
|
27 friends
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