Kawoomba

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Link One of us is no more. > Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11. > > The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.” He deserves a eulogy more eloquent than what I am capable of writing. Here's Cory Doctorow's, one of his long time friends. It's a sad world in which you are being arrested and grand jury'd for downloading scientific journals and papers with the intent to share them.

120Jan 12, 2013

Kawoomba

Message

5179

1450

14y

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Jan 12, 2013120

Implications of an infinite versus a finite universe

Hi gang, for the last several months, I've intermittently been wondering about a curious fact I learned. You see, I was under the impression that the universe (as opposed to just the currently observable universe or our Hubble volume) must be finite in its spa[t|c]ial dimensions. I figured that starting...

Dec 21, 20124

Musk, Mars and x-risk

Article on space.com > Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. Relevant Sagan quote: > (...) we've put all our...

Nov 23, 201214

[LINK] TEDx "When creative machines overtake man"

Video here, illustrated transcript here. Contains a good sketch of Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity. One TEDx passage in particular stuck with me, quoted with context: > In a few decades, such [creative] machines will have more computational power than human brains. > > > This will have...

Nov 6, 20125

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

The "intuitive" (fast) interaction heuristic is predisposed towards selflessness, while the "calculated" (slow) decision making process favors greedier behavior: review of game studies. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22996558 Sidenote: Strange to have a Nature paper conflate a faster-payoff / 'egoistic' approach with being 'rational', and to contrast intuition with calculation, of all things. As...

Oct 4, 201211

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

(Title is tongue-in-cheek, "preservation" would've been more appropriate but less catchy) With [news like that](http://news.discovery.com/history/preserved-brain-bog-england-110406.html), how hard can it be when you actually do want to preserve a brain: > A human skull dated to about 2,684 years ago with an "exceptionally preserved" human brain still inside of it was...

Aug 17, 20129

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Kawoomba

Kawoomba

Kawoomba

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Kawoomba

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Implications of an infinite versus a finite universe

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] TEDx "When creative machines overtake man"

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Implications of an infinite versus a finite universe

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] TEDx "When creative machines overtake man"

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying