be it chocolate, coffee, wine, or [heroin]
ensure that those chemicals are available safely and taxed appropriately
While I agree that prohibition has proven time and again to be a terrible thing, I'd also argue that some drugs are so dangerous in small doses that sale should never be sanctioned. Still, I would not argue in favor of strict punishments for sale nor use, especially. Issues of sale should come with punishments similar to improper business practices--tax evasion, fraud, etc--based on the scope and scale of the transactions.
As you point out, people often seek certain substances because at some level they feel it will make things better. The improvement they seek may be proportional to the strength of the substance, meaning those seeking out street drugs are probably also in the most dire straits. From that perspective, punishment seems quite cruel--kicking a person when they're already down.
Some people do drugs occasionally just for the fun of it, not expecting any improvement.
My stance is that I would like to see most drugs legal to consume, it is stupid and evil to put people in prison because they put something in their mouth (oversimplifying but it is what it is). As for the selling part of things, I would like for state to sell the drugs with 100% purity, at high prices and with some kind of programs to go along with that that handle addicted users (they would be addicted in any case, this way you can at least track them, and do something humane and not put them in prison). But if that would be the case, that you can buy drugs legally, I would enforce even stricter punishments for illegal sellers.
Depending on the way drugs are sold, penalties could, and probably should go as high as involuntary manslaughter.
Dealers often misrepresent what they sell, cutting with toxic chemicals, lying about purity or even selling an entire different product. With drugs as potent as opiates, it could mean death. In fact, I think this is the leading cause of death by drug use.
These practices should be much more penalized than just selling the drug, even if both are illegal. Just like armed robbery is more severely punished than shoplifting.
I see a need for a government to facilitate access to clean good quality drugs, taxing them, and providing the support mechanisms to enable people to come off those drugs.
Just to emphasize, Portugal didn't legalize any drugs. It decriminalized drug use and possession.
Which mean you are not going to be judged and sent to prison, but you can still get fined, especially if you refuse the treatments they suggest.
Drug trafficking, defined as possession of more than the average dose for 10 days is still a crime.
> The thing is you can make it illegal to sell without being illegal to consume.
If they make it illegal to sell, then the state must sell it. Otherwise it just doesn't work. Why should people acting legally need to buy from criminals?
If you look at Portugal, who has had the most success in reducing drugs, they decriminalized drugs. Which meant they kept them illegal, but if caught it was equivalent of parking ticket fine, but also if person hit a threshold of too many fines, there was drug addiction therapy required. Decriminalization removes the excessive fines, time in jail, and removes the criminal record black mark.
Atlanta GA has decriminalized marijuana this year. If caught it's a $60 fee only. Previously it was $1000, up to 6 months in jail, and a criminal record.
This decriminalization should be applied to all drugs. This has been proven to work, everywhere it has been tried.
The article notes "that this is only a thought experiment."
And I think it should stay that way. It's very interesting to think about, yet SQLite offers nothing but problems for developers and content creators. While maybe a bit clunky, a zip file manages to be a close best choice. When considering that a document may be hundreds of megabytes with thousands of assets OR a single page of text, zip offers enough simplicity and robustness, while being highly accessible.
While perhaps not immediately pertinent to the problem, the emergence of sexual reproduction is credited as a major factor in the explosion of variation in multicellular organisms. Part of the advantage, ironically, is that sexual reproduction is a rather large burden compared to evolutionary strategies that came before. The fact that sexual reproduction is so challenging perhaps ensures that less is left to chance by filtering out individuals that cannot meet the burden and rewarding those that tend to be better at achieving reproduction itself. Likely there is some relation between improved reproductive success and some novel traits that helped to achieve it. I don't have the knowledge to weigh in on AI analogs, but I could imagine roughly a strategy that involves co-related burdens and goals to improve the chances of choosing the right individuals.
I think, the main effect of sexual reproduction is that, much like GANs and competitive self-play, it creates species-internal competition: Both sexes need to impress, which makes cheating an obvious strategy (makeup, steroids, Shakespeare quotes, LISP etc., but many such examples can be found in the animal world), and hence both sexes also need to be able to detect cheating. Some species are rather asymmetric in that regard. For example, in humans it is mainly women who attract (they masquerade as fruits [make up is likely a cross-cultural phenomenon; and, well, breasts] tapping into male food gathering circuitry); men compete in hierarchies trying to impress and women select men from the top of the hierarchy. Complex dynamics emerging from this likely lead to the immense growth of the human cortex.
Sexual reproduction basically outsources some of the selection effort to the cognitive apparatus of the species itself, thereby introducing a massive amount of additional selection signals (mainly by the much increased necessity to model other minds, namely minds of the opposite sex). Many of these signals promote traits that are useful for survival (mainly intelligence and health).
I was thinking the same thing. I think it would be interesting to explore this area more and try to model it computationally.
Your point about physical features made me think of how physical attractiveness plays into human development as well.
Research has shown that beauty in humans is defined as physical symmetry. So "novelty" in our case might be defined as someone who is really ugly - the elephant man.
So in this case, beauty wouldn't really fit into the robot walking example as it's neither fitness (moving the foot forward) or novelty. More a different type of fitness that increases the odds of reproduction.
My guess would be that symmetry is a simple heuristic measure of physical fitness. Visual attraction is basically a strong regularizer that restricts the search space to phenotypes with particular traits. Asymmetry means that the joints wear out more quickly and muscles might not coordinate optimally leading to less strength and a reduced ability to hunt and to fight predators. AFAIK it is also a quite robust predictor of all kinds of diseases because it often means that the growth signalling is out of tune throughout the system. Visual selection basically performs environmental selection more immediately and more effectively: an asymmetric person might still survive, but its offspring has a lower overall chance to survive. The teaching signals of that are much weaker.
I quite like async/await except that it's annoyingly easy to produce a deadlock, and given a snippet, it's not obvious that such a deadlock should occur.
Ironically it is essentially the event loop which causes the deadlock in C#.
Depending on what framework/runtime you're in .NET will schedule the await continuation on something called a "SynchronizationContext" which has ~3 different forms but it's basically an event loop/message loop which queues up each continuation on the original thread.
The problem occurs when you use .Wait() or .Result instead of 'await'. This causes the function to spin waiting for the Task to finish, which of course it never will if it has a continuation trying to dispatch into that same event loop.
This problem doesn't really happen at all under some circumstances, such as if the async chain starts on a background thread, or in .net core where they've removed the SynchronizationContext, hence no event loop, hence no problems.
Do you have an example? I’ve never seen a deadlock in Js. I’m trying to think of how it’s even possible? Async/await is just super around promises anyway.
Oops, should've specified C# specifically, in which deadlock has become notorious. I don't think there's anything wrong with async/await per se. It looks to me like the linearity of js engine event loops wouldn't produce the same problem.
Still, as the article points out, efforts to sanitize reporting will fail. But I think that's OK. I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed, than one uninterested and uninformed.
The appearance that quantum effects might be attributed to 'hacks' probably has more to do with the hackish nature of the Copenhagen interpretation. For instance, there is no stated physical explanation for the collapse of a wavefunction--it is only an extremely convenient way of explaining many experiments. A crude analogy--you can describe the flipping of coins with simple probability, but this is a non-physical yet very convenient explanation.
Nothing changes at the time of "wave function collapse". When you measure one particle of an entangled pair, nothing actually happens to the other one. But you don't need to listen to me, check this out:
The wave function collapse and "spooky action at distance" for entangled particles are somewhat different concepts. The collapse idea arises as a part of Copenhagen interpretation, which states that particle always exists in a superposition state (aka wave function of probabilities). So when audience asks, "well why is it that my measurement device showing particle exists/doesn't exist in one place"? The interpretation then says, "That, my dear fried, is because the wave function collapsed to a single state just when you did the measurement". People have been trying to explain and figure out what/why/when this collapse occurs to make sense of Copenhagen interpretation.
That's true, but such proposed extensions or alternate interpretations are then filling in the gaps that would lead people down the path of the simulated universe in the first place.
Bohm's interpretation is just many worlds with a "world particle" tacked on. That particle doesn't affect anything and it's only purpose is to get rid of those pesky other worlds.
Not only is it superfluous structure it makes the theory non-local, which is hard to reconcile with relativity.
If you have no a priori reason to reject a multiverse Bohm's theory is quite uninteresting.
It's the most obvious counter-interpretation. I think it's become remarkably successful, but also suffers in its embrace of causality. While the Copenhagen interpretation can skirt the issue completely, Bohm's must wrangle with the implications of both relativity and non-locality and no one has been completely successful as such. Also, if it were the leading view, I don't think discussions of a simulated universe would be as popular.
> While the Copenhagen interpretation can skirt the issue completely, Bohm's must wrangle with the implications of both relativity and non-locality and no one has been completely successful as such.
Some might consider that a feature. John Bell of Bell's theorem thought QM's non-locality was the most important unresolved issue, so placing it front and center where it couldn't be ignored was a great idea. Interpretations like Copenhagen simply let you paper over the problems which will inevitably just arise elsewhere.
Finally, I think there's been some promising work in deriving covariant Bohmian mechanics. For instance, a preferred foliation of spacetime can be derived from the wave function itself [1], which means a preferred reference frame is actually a part of every interpretation of QM. This is the kind of result that probably would have never been found without research into Bohmian mechanics.
> Also, if it were the leading view, I don't think discussions of a simulated universe would be as popular.
I don't see why. Simulated reality is a purely logical argument [2].
You're right that simulation arguments generally don't rely on QM interpretations. I mention it as potentially detracting from simulation because a common argument includes the need for computational shortcuts. QM as it is popularized now simply fits the shortcut narrative better than it would under the Bohmian approach.
Yes. Many worlds is the single obvious solution. It seems some people don't understand many worlds though. Or maybe there is some other definition I am not aware. I want to describe my understanding here for people's benefit.
The idea is that when you make an observation nothing special happens at all. For one, there is no wave function collapse. This is more an idea about how the observer experiences making a measurement. The salient feature is that the observer is not external to the system. He is a part of the system. His belief that the result was heads or tails is coincident in the wave function with the coin being heads or tails. In other words, the user becomes entangled with the system.
A toy wave function would look like this (I am leaving off normalization since I can't write a square root of 2):
Coin flip result, no observer:
|heads> + |tails>
Coin flip with observer, "Tom":
|heads>|Tom: it was heads> + |tails>|Tom: it was tails>
There is no collapse here. However, to Tom it appears as if the world did collapse. For the "version" of him that thinks the coin flip came up heads, his entire world is consistent with the measurement coming up heads.
I assumed most people who really understand quantum mechanics believe this (but I may be wrong). And that among them, there is no effort to say "There is no collapse" because indeed the effective result of the measurement is a collapse. I also use the language "wave function collapse" to describe what happens. This not because it is an objective reality of the universe but because it is the way we observe the universe.
That was my understanding too. It's disappointing that it keeps getting explained along the lines of "every time there's a decision point at the quantum level, the universe splits in two", when it doesn't say anything of the sort (at least, not if I've understood it correctly).
To be sure, JavaScript can sometimes be fairly terrible as the scope of projects grow. The advantage here is how easily rich (or even absurd) UI elements can be implemented across all platforms by using web technologies. It also makes it comparatively easy to create a platform that is highly customizable and pluggable.
I'd guess the typical overhead of material and contracting could be drastically different between the two markets. Also, it seems the complexity and size are far less in the Indian project. 9m modules on 4700 acres in California vs 2.5m modules on 1270 acres in Tamil Nadu.
In many ways, the idea of IRC chat has grown significantly beyond the conventional client. From the ubiquity of chat for productivity in applications like HipChat to the hugely successful Twitch.tv platform, IRC has proven to be a viable backbone in these scenarios. It's quite nice then to see a concerted standardization effort. Hopefully, many of the proprietary features we might recognize today will be widespread and freely available in the future.
I see a lot of beauty in the js ecosystem, but only insomuch as related technologies come together to produce platform-independent, user-facing components. Similarly, I find C# or Java and their related technologies to be more beautiful on the server. Of course, one downside to this opinion is the requirement for skill in multiple ecosystems--and perhaps your employer had sought to consolidate these skills with js across the board.
As you point out, people often seek certain substances because at some level they feel it will make things better. The improvement they seek may be proportional to the strength of the substance, meaning those seeking out street drugs are probably also in the most dire straits. From that perspective, punishment seems quite cruel--kicking a person when they're already down.