There is a little bug icon in the toolbar of your open notebook in both user interfaces. The bug only appears if you have a kernel that supports debugging (e.g., ipykernel). So if you see the little bug on the right-hand side of the toolbar for your notebook, when you enable it, you should start seeing the variables in your memory state and you should have the ability to click in the gutter to add breakpoints.
A self-contained solar powered cargo-container-sized box that can create calories with minimal top-ups of material might make some marginal areas habitable.
This is the technology that's absolutely needed for off-Earth agriculture.
We take so many things for granted, like air and sunlight. I think the Biosphere 2 project was the only one that tried to figure out just what we need to support life in a closed system. It was horribly expensive and it looks to be horribly inefficient - 8 people to make the food and oxygen, and 3.14 acres of land. What we do currently for the space station is to ship them 1000 pounds of stuff every month per person.
The answer to this is related to the answer of: "would you prefer to be in the lower class of Norwegian society or the lower class of nearby Belarussian society?"
At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy.
> At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy.
That attitude with the associated American power was a complete catastrophe for:
A catastrophe for America (Americans) or for the countries listed and their people? Only one of those is relevant.[0]
My greater point here is that global politics is an inherently amoral game. By extension a morality-based strategy is inherently sub-optimal.
[0]addendum: To be clear there are definitely arguments to be made that some or all of them weren't good for Americans (e.g. loss of global goodwill may have resulted in less favorable trade agreements).
> War is not an extension of "diplomacy by other means".
FWIW: War is defined by Clausewitz as the continuation of politics by other means, not of diplomacy. (It's probably the most famous theory of warfare, by the preeminent theorist.)
Clausewitz wasn't normalizing war, but explaining it: it's politics using violent means. If you don't understand the fundemental political nature of warfare then you will make major mistakes and many more will die and suffer. Those mistakes still happen: You can see that the US in Afghanistan lacked a clear vision and strategy for a political outcome. In those countries you see the results of defeating an enemy militarily and not politically. Russia, even if they 'win' militarily, will have a very big political problem in Ukraine.
The idea that war is a crime at the international scale is underpinned by the threat of war, just as the idea that murder is a crime at the personal scale is underpinned by the threat of murder. We fully intentionally put a lot of steps in between because it turns out that dying sucks a lot,[citation needed] but the fact that they stand between radical disruption of quality, er, quantity of life is what gives those steps weight.
That is to say, war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
> That is to say, war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
I'm not sure I understand what you're arguing here. Let me spell out my alternative interpretations and tell me which (if any) is what you meant:
a- War is the primary principle or tool of diplomacy. It is by the threat of war that diplomacy without violence can work.
b- Like a-, but with the implication this is the right way, and there's no other non-violent means for humans to resolve their disagreements and organize themselves at the world level. It will always be "my way, or a club to the head".
c- Like a-, but with the implication this is a historical artifact and reflects a sad state of affairs, and that true diplomacy will find a way to work without resorting to the threat of violence. Or at least, that this is a goal worth striving for, even if humans are imperfect.
The distinction matters, because a- and b- make it easy to jump to the conclusion "in this case" violence is warranted ("I hate war, but this is a just war!") and that "boot to neck" diplomacy is sometimes needed and unavoidable. Whereas option c- will always consider resorting to violence a kind of failure and not something to celebrate or chest-thump about.
> war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
Clausewitz, the leading scholar of war in modern history, called it 'the continuation of politics by other means', so it's not so easily discredited.
> the idea that murder is a crime at the personal scale is underpinned by the threat of murder
It may be partly underpinned by that threat, but my choice not to murder is not because of some threat, but because I very strongly don't want to murder people. That is the case for almost all humans, except the sociopaths. I don't follow HN's guidelines because I'm afraid of being banned, but because I want to treat people well and have a high-functioning community. People want to live peacefully, safely, see others prosper, etc.; conflict happens because we feel threatened.
The idea that people are fundamentally sociopaths seems like a popular assumption, and like many logical extremes, I think that is because of its logical clarity. It's a simple, easy theory to work from. But that's not how humans are.
In the international arena, most relationships are not underpinned by threat of violence. For example, the relationships between most European countries are not that way - that's one reason Russia's attack is so shocking. France and Germany are not fundamentally deterred from fighting because of the threat of violence - why the heck would they shoot each other? They want to trade, see each other prosper and live freely, and make money. Though certainly, lacking an effective international government, it is more anarchic and violent than life in democracies.
Given how easily corruption rots things.... I'd say definitively yes.
I remember, I took part in a modeling competition trying to create a sustainability index for countries. During my analysis phase I realized that almost everything measurably bad you can think of correlated astoundingly well with the corruption index for that country. Even what seemed like very distant externalities.
I read that as a teenager, thought it sounded nice, went to grad school and did molecular dynamics simulations (like folding at home) for a decade, then went to google and built the world's largest simulation system (basically, the largest group of nodes running folding at home). Eventually we shut the system down because it was an inefficient way to predict protein structure and sample folding processes (although I got 3-4 excellent papers from it).
The idea is great, it was a wonderful narrative to run my life for a while, but eventually, the more I learned, the more impractical using full atomistic simulations seem for solving any problem. It seems more likely we can train far more efficient networks that encapsulate all the salient rules of folding in a much smaller space, and use far less CPU time to produce useful results.
Yeah, I think the idea of Laplace's Demon is mostly just useful to make a philosophical argument about whether or not the universe is deterministic, and it's implication on free will.
I dunno, I wonder what Laplace would have made of the argument over the meaning of wavefunction collapse. It took me a very long time to come to terms with the idea of a non-deterministic universe.
That's peculiar. Most people probably struggle more with the idea of a deterministic universe, as it'd leave no room for free will, which would make everything kind of meaningless.
I'm also more in the camp of "quantum effects making the universe non-determinstic." It's a nicer way to live.
I've evolved over the years from "determinism implies no free will" to roughly being a compatibilist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism, see also Daniel Dennett). I don't particularly spend much time thinking that (for example) a nondeterministic universe is required for free will. I do think from an objective sense the universe is "meaningless", but that as humans with agency we can make our own meaning.
However, most importantly, we simply have no experimental data around any of this for me to decide. Instead I enjoy my subjective life with apparent free will, regardless of how the machinery of the actual implementation works.
It’s interesting that many things are deterministic to human-relevant time/length scales. If the small stuff is non-deterministic, it’s interesting that large ensembles of them are quite deterministic.
Going further back to the 1600's, Descartes' idea of an evil demon deceiving one's mind with a perfect, fake reality made me think often of simulations in my undergrad philosophy classes
OP proposed that advertising is psychologically manipulating people into believing their lives are incomplete and asked whether that is a harm. You conflated this manipulation with built-in desires; it is not that.
By analogy, it is as though OP argued that deliberately withholding food from prisoners to cause them distress from hunger is a harm and you are countering that OP may as well describe hunger itself as harmful.
> Most people don’t subscribe to the Buddhist point of view, though.
Buddhism does not consider desires an inherently harmful. Being captured by desires and constantly craving can be, but that's not the same as the mere existence of desires that can arise.
Does categorizing something as harmful depend on the agent? Shouldn’t the harm exist quite apart from whether or not someone deliberately inflicted it, and regardless of their motivations?
Perhaps you’re reading more into the original comment than I am, but what I took exception with was the notion that the type of emotions aroused by most ads are harmful. I don’t think it’s comparable with withholding food, in either the level of control or the magnitude.
> The main defense against this situation is that it does not work to improve citizens lives. It only benefits a small part of society and it will make the rest suffer.
This pattern is attenuated when there's a reliable external source of energy. Hungary is not a closed system that will decay into entropy. It has regular funding from the EU which allows the disequilibrium to continue.
A basic income that truly covers the basic needs of modern life (food, shelter, electricity, running water, heat, healthcare, broadband, education, etc.) would give the lowest paid workers bargaining power.
A basic income that doesn't cover those things might instead just make it easier to pay workers even less.
Think of what some restaurants do when their employees get tips: they pay less than the legal minimum wage because they expect tips to "top off" worker earnings until they meet minimum wage requirements, so they explicitly pass that tip from customers into the business's revenue stream, skipping the intended tip recipient altogether. If we don't protect recipients of UBI, their employers can do the same thing.
