This speech seems rather ... hateful. Shall we fine you? Officers! This man is screaming hateful speech in the public arena!

Or maybe you disagree with that being hate speech? In an uncivilized society, if I have the power then it doesn't really matter. You still get fined or worse.

> You can question everything, just not your own values on speech

No, you can still question that in a free society if you so choose. But you may not necessarily be able to in an unfree one.

> You've turned freedom of speech into dogmatic faith.

This is entirely disingenuous. Supporting a philosophical position is not without reason, as you well know, and is not automatically dogmatic.

> It's all just platitudes about authoritarianism and slippery slopes and ironically enough unoriginal, replicated talking points.

Perhaps, you can better explain your dogmatic devotion to your belief that freedom of speech is not an important tenant of modern civility and sophistication?

Which is a nice way of saying that this is the beginnings of a new authoritarian and totalitarian age.

It should be very worrying to everyone to see speech be legally punished in the West.

Slippery slopes do exist and this is one.

The parent comment wrote:

> which is demonstrably false

which demonstrably proves my comment perfectly valid and correct.

Try again later.

Quote:

> The exact influence of Ultra on the course of the war is debated

So, you provided a link that proves your own comment incorrect ...

I love how idiots on HN are justifying blatant ad hominem attacks in their commentary as being perfectly valid.

WTF is HN becoming? Are people really getting this stupid?

So, would you like to try again? Are you intellectually capable of providing a proper retort?

You need to get out more.

It's a writing style. Like it or hate it.

Nonetheless, criticisms of writing style are far too cheap and shallow for HN. Be better.

Has anyone every genuinely done any research to check if an increase in theses resulting symptoms from decreasing T levels across men over the past few decades is highly-correlated to our seeming decline in productivity and generally stagnating GDP growth?

Can it be affecting the contributions of 50% of the population? Can it be affecting scientific, industrial, cultural, community, and familial contributions from men across society more than we realize?

And what would we actually do if we did realize this?

Not really. It's just too complicated of a "debate" (it's actually a non-debate) or discussion to dive into the differentiating factors that will assume different priorities for different people. Tradeoffs are everywhere and in everything and so is nuance.

Personally, I am growing tired of chasing Windows releases every few years so I will re-prioritize almost entirely around Linux's strengths.

But, you cannot have Wall Street consolidated market winners if you do that! How dare you!

I saw this first hand growing up. The school system had a couple of programming courses a few years before I got into the high school, and then it got all new computers and magically reduced computer education to only a set of Microsoft Office courses offered.

Who needs programming? The school knew we would all only need Word and Excel at any "office job" we could possibly ever get ...

I find it interesting that the project seems to have hard-coded emergence with the concept of "tokens".

So, I am much less intrigued by the simulation examples when most of what we are seeing is just a procedurally-generated video game with pre-defined game rules. Much of it is not truly emergent.

Again, it's a "oh, that's cool" kind of factor, but a far cry from contributing to anything in the way of "artificial life" research.

[0] https://alien-project.org/documentation/Basicnotion.html

As with everything on the internet (it sadly seems), there is a necessity for nuanced position. Perhaps, economic and cultural factors are playing a self-reinforcing and thus compounding effect on our society?

There are also the non-cultural and non-economic factors such as declining testosterone levels. This could have profound emergent economic and cultural implications that we have not even begun to calculate.

But, this is a very unaddressed point. Why focus on "simulation" when mathematical formalisms & theories could be potentially even more useful? Especially when most "simulations" are running on some arbitrary set of hard-coded assumptions?

> What you see as a criticism of this line of research

To clarify, I was in no way criticizing ALife research. Quite the opposite. I am actually trying to help ensure it does not get stuck in a rut.

Thanks for the link!

> Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model.

While I would like to believe you on that, one link does not seem sufficient to support the word "plenty" when the ratio of ALife projects built around CAs to not is extremely high.

There is zero evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, so why would some random person on HN be able to have the answer to this question even if we are in a simulation or even if we simply assume that we are?

And preferably an answer that goes beyond just saying that Von Neumann used Cellular Automata in his ALife research.

Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of life then I would also be interested in learning of these.

All in all, I find these procedurally generated art pieces to be rather underwhelming in any serious attempt or study of what artifical life is/can be.

> digital organisms and evolution

This is a claim without definition of what a non-biological organism even is. Could we just claim that any CA, any program is "living" while it is running?

I would love to see some formality before claims are made in this area.

EDIT: After watching the "Planet Gaia" video [0], I feel even more like the excitement about this is no different than the excitement for a video game and not for actual scientific progress. Cool code and cool visuals. Very little in the way of understanding life better.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9R6zrdl6jM

Related: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...