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If you learned that a piece of the brain where meaningful computation takes place was stateless, would that cause you to question whether the human mind was "highly autonomous"?


Good question.

I don't know enough about neuroscience to really answer your question in depth.

My opinion, uninformed as it is, is basically around the intuitive reasoning that something cannot be "highly autonomous" if it has to be kicked every second ;) Autonomous is defined as not needing to be controlled externally. And coupling that part with something as simple as cron job doesn't solve that in any meaningful way or make it "autonomous".

A batch file coupled with a cron job that triggers it once a day is not an "autonomous system" to my mind. It's a scheduled system, and there's a significant difference between those things.


It seems to me that you are trying to define "autonomy" as a structural property rather than a behavioral one, and then adopting arbitrary rules as to what structures do not count as autonomous whether or not they produce the same behavior as structures which do.

I guess that's fine, autonomy has lots of definitions (some in overlapping domains) and I guess one more doesn't hurt, but I'm pretty sure the intended use in the discussion here is the standard mechanical one where it is a behavioral trait defined by the capacity of a system to decide on action without the involvement of another system or operator, and therefore it is something that could be achieved by a system composed of a processing and action component called repeatedly by a looping component.


yeah, if we're just arguing semantics then I'm happy to let it go ;)


I think I'd say that the batch file is not itself autonomous but the system as a whole is autonomous (if limited) but I'm not prepared to argue that's the correct definition.


You can avoid specifying agency in the active with some sort of placeholder. Hopefully, maybe, that placeholder is going to be more noticable than the omission of agency in the passive... but it seems more useful to simply ask directly whether agency is clear.

"Missiles were shot at Gaza" is passive and avoids specifying agency. "Someone shot missiles at Gaza" is active and avoids specifying agency. "Missiles were fired at Gaza by Israel" is passive and specifies agency. Sometimes you don't even need a placeholder: "Missiles hit Gaza" is active and avoids agency.


Importantly, specifying reasoning can have communicative value while falling very far short of formal verification. Personally, I also try to include a cross reference to the things that could allow "this" to happen were they to change.


Wildly, the Polish word "nagle" (pronounced differently) means "suddenly" or "all at once", which is just astonishingly apropos for what I'm almost certain is pure coincidence.


Strangely, the Polish word seems to encode a superposition of both settings: with NODELAY on, TCP sends messages suddenly, whereas with NODELAY off it sends tiny messages all at once, in one TCP packet.


Yeah, it's named after the person who wrote the RFC - John Nagle. Wild coincidence! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc896


hes on hn as "Animats"


Funner trivia is why he's named "Animats".


I've been on HN a long time and this comment was the one to finally make me realize that "animats" is "stamina" spelled backward.


See, I didn't even realize that --- wasn't what I was referring to! :)


Nominative determinism strikes again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism


> so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains

I think I agree you've excluded them from the definition, but I don't see why that has an impact on likelihood.


> IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription,

Sometimes they do! But not in general, yes.


I think there are both of those.


My understanding is that you are correct that "rizz" comes from "charisma", and when used as an adjective it's pretty well used the same (although there may be shades of difference I'm simply missing), but notably "rizz" also gets used as a verb in a way that "charisma" does not.


In this case, the measure itself is temporary. That's in the text of what we voted on. For it to not be temporary, we'll need to vote on it again.

Also, it only affects Federal congressional districts, not State Senate or State Assembly districts, so there's less feedback: the US Congress has little say over how CA draws its maps.

The effects on normalization are another question that you're right to be concerned about, but I can argue that either way. It's clear who started this mid-cycle redistricting, and it's obviously not actually a response to Joe Biden doing the last census wrong. Credible threat of retaliation may reduce the tendency to break further norms, when compared to the available alternative of not pushing back.


> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?

Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?

My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.


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