Merkur 23C, btw, in case anyone is looking for a safety razor that’s both inexpensive and very good. Unchanged for literally a century now, no fancy materials (“aerospace-grade aluminium”) but good ole chromed zinc and brass. On the blade side, Russians being out of the picture, BIC is probably the right choice unlike other western brands they didn’t slouch on quality. Feather is always an option but many consider them too sharp. Also, more expensive. BICs should be somewhere around 15ct a piece. Don’t buy anything of that stuff from Wilkinson or such their offerings in that area seem to only exist to make safety razors look bad.

because Zuckerberg did Jujitsu

LMFAO that coordination failure of a leek I have to see that.

I can’t believe this exists. Watch carefully how Lex Fridman (yes that one) goes to great lengths to not kill Zuckerberg in training.

As to martial arts in general and assholery, I’ll just leave this here.

Higher refresh rates for movies are meh at best, VRR OTOH is a godsend as 24Hz just won’t fit into 60Hz. Gaming, too, is much nicer when you have VRR, figures that delayed frames are quite a bit less noticeable than dropped frames.

Depends on whether you grow crops specifically to turn into fuel or ferment waste that would otherwise ferment in the open.

The main point on the European level revolved around whether construction of gas plants should get access to some green fund or the other, to which the answer is yes because they’ll always carry some on-demand load, and seasonal storage is bound to include syngas because we’ll need that stuff anyway as chemical feedstock.

US/Canadian border from roughly Vancouver to Winnipeg. Berlin is further north than Saskatoon, Karlsruhe is on the 49th parallel. The lot of mainland Europe is north of Albuquerque. In fact much of Tunesia is north of Albuquerque. Miami is on about the same parallel as Bahrain, Orlando on the same as New Delhi.

They introduced some kind of caps (don’t remember the details) on negative pricing quite early on, from what I understand it would have been very lucrative in the last decade or two to get into grid-scale battery storage without those caps.

One thing I remember is Flensburg building, pretty much on a whim, a water storage tank with immersion heater, an investment that amortised within a month or two as they were literally getting paid to fuel their district heating.

There’s got to be some rules as to what you can do with electricity you by at negative prices, e.g. not just put an immersion heater in the ocean, maybe some prioritisation as to who gets the energy first just as there is on the production side (fossils have to shut down and pay if they don’t do that fast enough while renewables get to produce energy), but overall I don’t see why there should be a limit on negative prices.

The first goal isnt event maglev but magnetic propulsion.

The TSB does the same, on plain steel rails. Levitating on them, using them as what’sitcalled reaction component in linear magnetic propulsion, only the power transfer is direct contact. TSB rails may look a bit fancy but they’re two electrified steel beams in concrete casing. Your Poles may be working on an improvement to linear motors but it’s not a new concept. Thinking of it they should look into breaking applications: Mechanical breaking causes massive wear so fast trains are using induction brakes but those don’t work to bring the train to a complete standstill, but if the brake is a linear motor it could do that. Selling magnetic brake tech to Siemens or Alstom would probably set the lot of them up for life.

The company developed TSB because they were part of the Transrapid consortium, responsible for the track, and judged that ultimately track cost was why the whole thing failed to materialise, so they sat down and said “what’s the cheapest track we can build” and then designed the rest of the tech around that. Cost differs depending on lots of details but overall they’re actually cheaper than standard rail, doubly so if you take lower maintenance costs into account.

I very much doubt they’re doing contactless power transfer with nothing but the existing rails and overhead wire. Alsomention of “hypertube” sets of massive alarm bells.

Back to the context though: If the brain can access it, why would AGI be unable to?

I mean if the point is that we know that we know nothing then I’ll agree.

first order logic validity problem

Validity is RE (semidecidable), Satisfiability is undecidable.

How do we figure out that your fancy new law is actually the oracle you claim it is? It could be lying to us, to establish the thing as an oracle we’d have to be able to either inspect it or unit-test it over the whole infinite range.

You know what? I’m going to plant a nuke under your ass: Turing machines can’t exist, either. Any finite machine can be expressed as a DFA. We’re nothing but a bunch of complicated regexen.

This whole time we were talking about potentiality, not reality; in terms that are convenient theory, not physics. I see no reason to extend potentiality to uncountable infinities when we can’t even exploit countable infinity.

Side note, and this might actually change my mind on things regarding “Is R all that we’ll ever need”: If people manage to get an asymptotic speedup out of quantum computers. The question is whether the parallelism inherent in operations on qbits is eaten up by noise, more or less the more states you load onto the qbits, the more fuzzy the results get, because the universe has a maximum amount of computational oomph it spends on a particle or per unit volume or whatever the right measure is. Of course, before we’d need to move past R we’d first have to load an actually infinite number of states into a qbit and I don’t really see that happening. A gazillion? Doubtful, but thinkable. An infinite number in finite time? Not while we have fat fingers typing away on macroscopic keyboards.

You would need to invent a complexity class larger than R, one that contains more than countably infinite programs. Those, too, can be diagonalised, there would still be incomputable functions. Our whole argument would repeat with that complexity class instead of R. Rinse and repeat. By induction, nothing changes, Q.E.D.

I know diagonalization proofs, they dont prove what you say they prove.

Not proofs, plural, not the category. This specific one. The details involve a method to enumerate all programs which is the hard part. IIRC the lecturer doesn’t actually get into that, though. Read the original papers if you want nobody found issue with them in nearly 100 years.

Cite any computer science source stating that the existence of hypercomputers are logically impossible.

Church-Turing is a fundamental result of CS, arguably its founding one, and I will not suffer any more denial of it. It’s like asking a physicist to provide a citation for the non-existence of telekinesis: You fucking move something with your mind, then we’ll talk. In the meantime, I’m going to judge you to be nuts.

Feel free to have a look at the criticism section of Wikipedia’s hypercomputation article, though. Feel free to read everything about it but don’t pester me with that nonsense. Would you even have known about it if I didn’t mention off-hand that it was bunk, serves me right I guess.

The incompleteness theorem says that a consistent axiomatic formal system satisfying some conditions cannot be complete, so the universe as a formal system (supposed consistent, complete, expressive enough, …) cannot be axiomatized.

It can also be axiomisable but inconsistent. In principle, that is, but as said you’d annoy a lot of physicists.

What do you mean external?

As in the previously mentioned summation of the results of theoretical hypercomputation: “If uncomputable inputs are permitted, then uncomputable outputs can be produced”. Those oracles would be the input.

The possibility of using physical phenomena as oracles for solving classically uncomputable problems in the real world is an open question.

If they exist, then they can be used. We do that all the time in the sense that we’re pretending they exist, it’s useful to e.g. prove that an algorithm is optimal: We compare an implementable algorithm it with one that can e.g. see the future, can magically make all the right choices, etc. But they don’t exist.

If you think this is logically as impossible as a four sided triangle you should give sources for this claim

I already pointed you to an easy-going explanation of the proof by diagonalization. I’m not going to sit here and walk you through your homework. In fact I have given up explaining it to you because you’re not putting in the work, hence why I resorted to an analogy, the four-sided triangle.

Some undiscovered physical phenomenon might make this possible… who knows.

Are all thinkable phenomena possible? Can there be four-sided triangles?

The four sided triangle is logically impossible, but a hypercomputer is logically possible.

That is an assertion without substantiation, and for what it’s worth you’re contradicting the lot of Computer Science. A hypercomputer is a more involved, not as intuitive, four-sided triangle.

If you think that it’s logically possible, go back to that proof I pointed you to. I will not do so again.

how does the laws of the universe being not axiomatizable

…I never said they are not.

relate to the brain not using uncomputable functions?

That is unspecific: Do you mean it is using external oracles? It cannot use use them because they cannot exist because they’re four-sided triangles. If you mean that it is considering uncomputable functions, then it can do so symbolically, but it cannot evaluate them, not in finite time that is: The brain can consider the notion of four-sided triangles, but it cannot calculate the lengths of those sides given, say, an area and an angle or such. What would that even mean.

To the point that you say things like the universe already is a formal system to which we can apply the incompleteness theorem.

And that is contentious, why? If the laws of the universe are formalisable, then the universe is isomorphic to that formalisation and as such also a formal system. We’re not talking being and immanence, here, we’re talking transcendent properties.

When I asked this, you only mentioned being able to express natural numbers. But can the formal system express them in the specific sense that we need here to use incompleteness?

How do you express them in ways that do not trigger incompleteness? Hint: You can’t. It’s a sufficient condition, there’s equivalent ones, if I’m not mistaken an infinite number of them, but that doesn’t matter because they’re all equivalent.

These are all giant holes you skipped

These are all things you would understand if I didn’t have to remind you of basic computability and complexity theory literally every time you reply. As said: Stop the philosophising. The maths are way more watertight than you think. We’re in “God can’t make a triangle with four sides” territory, here, just that computability is a wee bit less intuitive than triangles.

If you want to attack my line of reasoning you could go for solipsism, you could come up with something theological (“god chooses to hide certain aspects of the universe from machines” or whatever). I’m aware of the limits. I didn’t come up with this stuff yesterday and my position isn’t out of the ordinary, either.

…production train in revenue service over the period of usual track maintenance. It’s not the rails I’m worried about but the overhead lines, have a look at the TGV record run there’s a lot of arcing that can’t be good for them. On the pantograph side the contacts are carbon, notoriously brittle, and generally speaking over 300km/h things become dicey just because of heat buildup. Automated retraction systems can prevent the worst, meaning the pantograph getting tangled in the lines at speed, but, well: Production revenue service. Can’t have those fail-safes kick in or you’ll mess up the timetable.

European high speed trains actually got slower vmax over the years for the simple reason that the rest of the systems is reaching practical limits and it doesn’t make sense to have trains that can drive speeds that the track will never reasonably support. If you want to go faster you want to go contactless which means building a whole new, incompatible, network. And the only maglev system with affordable tracks, as in bucks per kilometre (TSB), has a design limit of ~200km/h: It uses bog-standard third-rail like technology for electrification, everything else would be expensive. But for its intended use-case as an S-Bahn 200km/h are plenty and you get nice bonuses such as 10% gradients and inexpensive viaducts (because no point-loads they can be built way lighter).

China, in the end, isn’t that large. You can do high-speed sleeper trains, 12-14h or such, from one end of the country to another with existing stock technology, and so btw could the US.

Dictatorship doesn’t imply that there’s only a single ruler.

That said the situation, as in the power of the Politburo, isn’t as extreme as it was in the USSR or in Vietnam before 1988. But they still have ways to go before they’re at Cuban levels of “wait we’ll have to take a closer look they might actually have come up with a form of democracy constitutionally different from the usual ones”. Cuba is still authoritarian but that seems to be more cultural inertia than tankie ideology. Singapore might actually be a good comparison, not economically but politically.

Technically correct, which is the most tone-deaf kind of correct.