The anthropic principle is ridiculous. Suppose that, against all odds, you survive the worst plane crash in history. Then you ask NTSB what caused the crash and why you survived. They answer:
"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."
Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.
Fine tuning for the earth might be able to be explained away most easily, like you said. Fine tuning for the universe, though...
Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable.
When you said:
> there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life
You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like:
> You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing.
Sure, but I think that's a form of arguing about semantics.
Let's say I argue that our universe is fine-tuned because the constants of the universe were decided by dice roll and that there are a trillion other universes with no chance of life.
What about the "substrate" within which these trillion universes formed? Wasn't it fine-tuned enough to give rise to at least one universe (ours) with life, just as our universe was fine-tuned enough to give rise to our planet?
Now I could argue that actually there are a trillion such "universe substrates" and ours is the one that's fine-tuned. However, it's clear that eventually, everything must converge to a single base layer of existence that just so happens to be "fine-tuned" enough for everything above it to produce at least one instance of life. But this is trivial.
This is a such common logical fallacy that we should have name for it.
> No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty.
"No matter how low", really? Are you suggesting that your multiplication result is infinite? Otherwise, no matter how big the result is—even if it's Graham's number or TREE(3)—but as long as it's finite, there are odds so low that bring the outcome extremely unlikely.
The thing is we don't know even a ballpark estimate of the odds, but you were saying like we have a lower bound of the odds. The universe is unfathomably huge, true, but we also don't know if abiogenesis is less unfathomably unlikely.
You're asking as if the other candidate is a no-brainer choice. If the other candidate were Kennedy, then sure—but they were not. In this case, many would be undecided and would vote not the best candidate, but the least bad one.
Try a different approach than engaging in war/apartheid. The practice of the IDF "mowing the grass" by harming civilians has been long established and commented on. Certain Israeli politicians also empowered Hamas, in order to divide and discredit the Palestinians, so that they would not be in a suitable position to negotiate an end to the conflict. Practices like that do not produce peace. I suggest Israel do its best to look at its role in this conflict (and not just Hamas's) and then act in good faith to bring about peace, so that there are no more terrorist attacks like Oct. 7.
Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive—not even the most pacifist country would do that.
And let's not pretend that no diplomatic solutions have been proposed, all of which were rejected. They will only accept it if they own every inch of the land and Israel is obliterated (their own word).
> Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive
The actions that led up to Oct. 7 long predate it. The seeds of this have been sown every year that the IDF "mowed the grass" and every time they tried to disrupt the PLO from negotiating a peace. Remember, an Israeli prime minister was assassinated for seeking and negotiating peace- not by the Palestinians but by a radical Israeli, whose politics are aligned with the current prime minister. This current prime minister has used his long time in office to disrupt and prevent any peace from occurring.
The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7. The sheer ferocity, scale and cruelty of 3,000 terrorists storming across the border to gleefully slaughter and capture civilians young and old, is somehow reduced to "oh well, they had it coming"... "oh well, the seeds were sown"?
In my view, that is a very dark and troubling position. I will never in my lifetime form the view that Oct 7 was anything other than crossing all lines. It was end-game stuff. Standing alone in measures of evil, it therefore needs dealing with on those terms. Civilised humanity should be uniting against that senseless barbarism including renewed focus on the deeper causes and future remedies for fanatical violent groups.
This may be why many of are divided: Those who believe Oct7 crossed all lines; and those who believe Oct7 was horrific but within "resistance" seed-sowing territory. We all want peace, but it amazes me the latter has any traction at all.
> The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7
If you don't recognize causes, then you will be baffled by effects. It has been clear to observers of the Middle East that the status quo that Netanyahu has created was violent and untenable. It gave the appearance of peace only because most people remained ignorant of the underlying brutality of the situation. If you think Oct. 7 was frightening, what do you think about the generations of children that have been killed and maimed by IDF soldiers and settlers? The terrorist invasion of Oct. 7 was terrible and unacceptable, but that does not make what Israel did before or after ok. The fact that you cannot recognize that Israel has also crossed all lines, means that you are incapable of being a part of the solution.
Israel has done many terrible things, no more than any other country who has engaged in war, nothing like crossing all lines, but pain was inflicted on innocent people, for sure. So what? October 7th isn't an inevitable or just counteraction. Jews have been mascaraed repeatedly for hundreds of years, including by Palestinians and other Arabs. Can you give an example where Jews retaliated by mass raping, butchering and burning alive their oppressors?
What you referring to are war crimes. Sadly this is part of most/all wars. Not justifying or trying to reduce the evilness of the actions, but this is something very different from October 7th or any other pogrom.
One are relatively small scale horrible events within an active full scale war, the other are sadistic attacks aimed at civilians, by crowd that is made of at least half civilians, outside of active war. One is a massacre, the other is a prolonged violence torture and mass raping.
I don't think Israelis are saints, and Israel could and should have acted better in many cases, both for moral reasons and for its own good. I believe a two states solution is the only just and sustainable option, and Israel's share in avoiding it is a terrible mistake. But October 7th wasn't action of people who see the two states solution as a desired state or a viable compromise.
> Not justifying or trying to reduce the evilness of the actions, but this is something very different from October 7th or any other pogrom.
Trying to treat the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 as unprecedented and unique is not only deeply ignorant but incredibly dangerous. It allows you to suspend all normal considerations of decency, which we have seen in the words of Israelis leaders (calling all Palestinians "human animals" and terrorists) and the actions of the IDF (war crimes, murdering civilians, throwing people off buildings, torturing, etc).
Please stop with your apologies for genocide and war crimes. Even Israeli scholars and Holocaust survivors recognize that what Israel is doing now is deeply wrong. Stop
I wish that October 7th was unprecedented. It is not the first pogrom Jews suffered. I'm not aware of a case in the history where Jews behaved like that. If it did occur,it is unexcusable, just like October 7th.
Let's put it in clear terms. I'm an Israeli, humanist and supports a two states solution.
You, on the other side, are terror justifying and, I guess, antisemite.
People usually use the word 'evil' to say something is not just bad, but to imply that there is a spiritual or supernatural significance to it. I understand that thinking in those terms can make it easier to deal with suffering, but you cannot know those things. I am not saying you should not keep searching for meaning (nor find strength in the belief in a kind and loving god if you do), but you should also remember that you cannot know god, nor know the mind of god, and believing that you do is fooling yourself- especially when it comes to discounting others pain in comparison to your own
Yes, cosmological principle is probably the most fundamental assumption in astronomy.
Most people don't realize that science—and even everything in life—has to start from some axioms/assumptions, just like math. I first realized this fact when I was reading the Relativity book written by Einstein himself, who challenges the assumptions in classical physics.
As time goes, some of the assumptions could be proved to be unnecessary or even wrong. There must be still some assumptions left, though—because without them, we can't talk about science, or anything, really.
I hope it gets added, it adds so much safety to the language. Mind you, Go is not a very safe language in general, its type system is pretty loose compared to e.g. Java or Typescript. I don't believe it wants to be though.
It's very clear that the reason these kinds of proposals haven't been accepted has nothing to do with the core team not believing they're important enough, but instead because of the impact that they have on the rest of the language.
Immutability is a fundamental property of a language, it's not something that can be bolted on post-facto in a version update. Go as a language doesn't provide immutability.
It's tough to retrofit new restrictions to old code.
C/c++ code still doesn't have "const" everywhere it could. You have to make the default immutable - write "var" or "mut", not "const" - or it doesn't get used everywhere it should. But that breaks old code.
Immutable by default is only really possible now that we have gobs of memory though. I'm not even sure it's likely to stay popular: the demands of data processing at scale mean we're all likely to be routinely handling gigantic datasets which we don't want to copy all over the place.
The real problem is just visibility: am I editing a copy of the original? Who else can edit the original? Who's going to?
I'd argue those two questions are what we actually want to know the answer to, and immutability criteria are just an awkward compromise solution.
Immutable by default doesn't mean you have to write your program as a giant copy-aon-write or log-structured architecture. You can still commit all your shared global program state behind a mutex/rwlock crimes when that makes sense. But you can contain write access to that data to the places where it's needed.
And at the function-local level move elision should turn copy-and-modify to in-place modification if the original is no longer used.
"Immutable by default is only really possible now that we have gobs of memory though"
I don't think so, actually. It's just changing the default. A choice to have types like Java's String which are always immutable might drive up memory usage, but just realising that the defaults are wrong and altering the language doesn't impact this at all, instead it makes your programs more explicit about what's actually happening.
LLVM will transform your mutable program into immutable one anyway because otherwise it's much harder if not impossible to write a lot of optimizations or validations.
You can collapse a lot of the additional copies at compile time even for C
That's not really the same thing though - that's a choice of representation for optimization purposes. LLVM won't turn a pointer access into a value copy - it can't, because that would change program behavior.
The distinction here is that in a lot of cases, you really do want to edit data in one location and there's no good reason for it to be copied except that it makes the program easier to reason about (exceptions apply for when things like cache locality considerations come into play).
I seem to recall that in many cases it is in fact permitted for C compiler (probably C++ as well) to turn pointer access into value copy so long as the rather flexible semantics are still kept.
The main saving grace is that usually you're only dealing with register copies...
Agree. When people hear the adage "don't roll your own crypto", they often think it refers to crypto primitives only. In reality, it's also hard to design a secure crypto protocol, even if the underlying crypto primitives are secure.
> The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial.
This is too naive. While it may be the case for single player games that use online connection only as a DRM mechanism (Hitman 3, Gran Turismo 7), for some games it's not trivial at all.
For example, The Division 2 servers do not only act as a "coordinator" between players like CS:GO servers, but also run logics for NPCs and environments. The server and the client are too tightly coupled.
I'd rather see some sort of provision where if the company disables the product they sold us, they're required to subsequently license the source code to us for personal use.
First off, hobbyists have an amazing track record reverse engineering many online games and creating third party servers and mods for them, so not only does this solve the problem but the amount of creativity that would be unlocked would be incredible.
Second, you better believe many many publishers will flip the fuck out if they're staring this possibility in the face, and as a result they will work way harder to support their games in the future.
It's irrelevant whether the costs are trivial. Once developers and publishers release the server binaries or API-spec, fans can invest as much time and money as they want to replicate it. They don't need to reverse-engineer it.
What happens if the game developer has licensed 3rd party tools and libraries which the server software depends on and they don’t have the right to include these?
Those shouldn't be included, of course. If the server has them too tied up to be decoupled, then I guess someone needs to unscramble the spaghetti before serving it
Right, but how hard would it be to make the server self-hostable? I feel like as long as the server address wasn't hardcoded into the game, it wouldn't be too hard
That depends entirely on the infrastructure necessary for hosting the multiplayer servers. Such as, does it require a database server for persistent storage of player information? It might be built for a k8s based environment. Split into many smaller services that all interact using a service mesh or message queue.
You cant just take these things, press a button, and voila, a small bundled server platform anyone can run at home. The modern day software development experience is a massive and complex beast.
They explicitly mention server hosting as an acceptable thing. They are not saying every consumer has to be able to run the infrastructure, but the community has to be able to. A few services on a k8s cluster would absolutely suffice for this.
I think it aims mainly at games that use an online connection as a DRM mechanism, such as Hitman 3 and Gran Turismo 7. Both games are single player games that shouldn't necessitate online connection in the first place.
"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."
Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.