> probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users
Wrong. AMD/Xilinx doesn't sell devices directly to customers, they sell them to distributors in huge quantities. Those distributors then sell them to "small-batch users", and they're not involved with AMD/Xilinx free-tier software at all.
> they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers
Your elided quote removes the five words where I declared my views as speculation openly and in plain language. The complete sentence that you misquoted opens with that:
> I would hazard a guess
I’m perfectly content to be wrong at HN; it’s a forum where we all have opinions and people rarely restrict themselves to exclusively their own expert subjects, or else we’d all never learn anything! So I will be considering the arguments made here by others before engaging with this topic in the future.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417 from a few days ago apparently makes some of my points much more clearly, or at least with less hostile replies. I wish I’d found it sooner, but I didn’t realize this entire post was a dupe in time to go back through its comments in detail. Would have saved me commenting at all! Ah well.
No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow.
[1] Or "qualia", to be precise.
[2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based devices.
There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness.
So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
Its exactly the same, the universe is functionally a computing device, it is based on data and causality. Its complex but our brains do not work deeper than the neuron and so can be modeled in other computing devices like it is modeled in the computing device that is the universe.
Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening? Writing data on a storage medium? What about a roomba vacuuming a floor?
> Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening?
Yeah, of course.
What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's not precise enough but because it's something else entirely.
Can descriptions of brains do consciousness? I don't know why we'd expect that they could. You can describe a fire in all the detail you like, and burn nothing.
Can electronic brains be conscious? I dunno. If I had to guess? Sky's-the-limit ignore-all-physical-and-temporal-constraints? Probably. Within the bounds of what humans will ever achieve? Maybe. I doubt they'd look as little-removed from tabulation machines as ours are, though. Like I definitely don't think you get there solving math problems. That would be surprisingly metaphysical.
A fire is something that happens externally and has observable actions. An internal state is not. Your thoughts may take a physical form but that form cannot be demonstrated. Unless you can show me telekinesis then you have only intuition. Why are you so certain that these intuitions are true?
Possibly metaphysical naturalism is wrong and supernatural things exist! And maybe thoughts (and/or the experience of consciousness) are among those supernatural things. That could be it. In which case sure, maybe solving math problems can create consciousness (why not?).
Do I think supernatural things like thoughts not being represented in physical reality exist? I defer to Russell's Teapot on this one and lean toward "no". If they do, then attempting to reason about anything gets pretty iffy anyway. Who knows what might exist or be true, in that case!
There is nothing that says that if thoughts are not made in brains they must be supernatural. You are making conclusions not based on evidence or argument.
I think you're conflating qualia with free will. These are very different concepts, and the experience of qualia has nothing at all to do with "violating causality".
> So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise, or even what exactly they are, your claim has no base to stand on.
>As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise
Qualia or the feeling of consciousness arises from our evolved instinct and ability to personify other humans; turned inward. There is a great amount of evidence to support this from neurological to psychological research.
But even if we didn't know how this came about in the brain, deduction demands it must come about through causal means, which itself is computable and so could be represented in other mediums.
Bigger brain does not automatically mean more intelligence, but we have reasons to suspect that homo neanderthalensis may have been more intelligent than contemporary homo sapiens other than bigger brains.
You can't draw conclusions on individuals, but at a species level bigger brain, especially compared to body size, strongly correlates with intelligence
And yet another "AI doesn't work" comment without any meaningful information. What were your exact prompts? What was the output?
This is like a user of conventional software complaining that "it crashes", without a single bit of detail, like what they did before the crash, if there was any error message, whether the program froze or completely disappeared, etc.
This is quite hostile. Yes, criticism is valid without an accompanying essay detailing every aspect of the associated environment, because these tools are still quite flawed.
> We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling).
To my understanding, you couldn't do this, no. The US is a net oil exporter, but many of its refineries are tuned for processing oil with a chemical composition that isn't found in the US, or not found in sufficient quantity. So the US has to both import and export oil, it can't just replace imports with exports.
> but many of its refineries are tuned for processing oil with a chemical composition that isn't found in the US, or not found in sufficient quantity
How difficult would it be to retune those refineries to process domestic oil instead? In a world where a heavy-handed extreme like “banning oil exports” is on the table, surely doubling down on the heavy-handedness wouldn't be out of the question.
> ironically because he thought it would avoid making him look weak and incompetent
Trump is what a weak man imagines a strong man to be like. Just look at his official portrait [1], trying to look tough and dangerous. Compare that to Dwight D. Eisenhower's portrait [2], a man who commanded entire armies in the largest war in human history.
Oil is a globally priced commodity. This means that downstream consumers of oil in the US will be just as affected by rising prices as European consumers. US producers of oil will benefit, though.
Europe didn't slack off militarily during the Cold War. Germany, for example, poured massive amounts of money and resources into the Bundeswehr to be able to fend of the Soviets. The US relied as much on the European members of NATO as the Europeans did on the US.
After the Cold War, both the US and Europe scaled back their military spending and enjoyed the peace dividend. It was only after 2001 that the US increased its budget again – but to fight insurrectionist wars (which EU members aren't particularly interested in), not in a peer conflict. They're not prepared for a pro-longed war against a near-peer power.
So although I agree that Europe should be rearming heavily, and should have started in 2022 at the very latest, it's not like the US did really much better. They're really good at curb-stomping much weaker opponents, like Venezuela or Iran, but they haven't seriously prepared for a war against China.
> They're really good at curb-stomping much weaker opponents, like [..] Iran
That remains to be seen, though. Really winning that war requires either lots of boots on the ground and a long occupation (where the outcome might still be like in Afghanistan) or using nukes, which could escalate quite badly for us all. There is a reason no other POTUS has attacked Iran before.
Of course Trump can at every point in time just declare victory and leave the mess to all others for cleaning up. That is the most likely outcome, IMHO.
> But for startups, side-hustles, VC-pitches and the inner-workings of companies and so on (HN crowd) coding was never the problem.
I'd say you're 180° wrong. Getting to an MVP fast is the most immediate problem when you've started a startup. Iterating on ideas fast is the most immediate problem once you've released your MVP. You need an MVP to get users, and you need to to iterate to find product-market fit. Perfectly crafted code is a luxury problem you can't afford in the early stages.
This isn't in defense of perfectly crafted code. It's about NO CODE. Do not write (ai-moar) code! It's not the code that is the problem.
I understand the need for MVP to bring an idea into reality. It's the feedback that's valuable not the code. This is not about the code. So why is the argument "write more code"?
In any case, I have yet to create a product on my own that has done well financially. So what the hell do I know. If you have, then I should probably listen to you. But I have worked on teams for successful companies and in my career, the best advice I can give to an engineer is that your code matters, do a good job and care about what you make; also it's not about the code.
It isn't, that's what you injected. The argument was "write [the same amount of] code faster". And that is undoubtedly a good thing, because execution speed can make or break your startup.
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Baseless speculation
> probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users
Wrong. AMD/Xilinx doesn't sell devices directly to customers, they sell them to distributors in huge quantities. Those distributors then sell them to "small-batch users", and they're not involved with AMD/Xilinx free-tier software at all.
> they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers
More baseless speculation
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