The regular Suica app is separate and is not English-friendly (this may be worth it for you only if you’re staying long term, ok with the language barrier, and want a card that doesn’t expire).

Learn from my mistake:

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* $21.25 shipping

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* $31.94 import fees (billed directly by UPS)

Total cost: $76.17

I recently completed an entry on Leibniz's Theodicy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Leibniz predates AI, but I could not help making the connections while I wrote.

Leibniz published in 1710 to answer a hard problem: God created intelligent, agential beings in His own image, and these creatures caused enormous harm. Who is responsible, and could God have done better?

Now, we're building systems modeled on our own intelligence, granting them agency, and then asking: who is responsible when they cause harm? Their creators and designers? The systems themselves? The conditions that made failure inevitable?

Three ideas from Leibniz map directly to AI governance:

1. The author-of-sin problem → the accountability gap. Leibniz asked: if God creates "all the opportunities for sin" and even "provokes the will of the agent," how is God not responsible? We ask the same of companies deploying AI. If you design the system, train it, and release it, how much distance can you claim from its failures?

2. The best-possible-world defense → the tradeoff argument. Leibniz argued that some evils are inseparable from the goods they enable. "A dissonance in the right place gives relief to harmony." And we have recently heard, from AI companies, that some harms may be the price of a system that, on balance, does enormous good.

3. Deficient causation → emergent failure. Leibniz argued, with subtlety, that sin arises not from what God puts into creatures, but from their inherent finitude. Our connatural limitations become "deficient causes" of harm. And for AI: there can never be enough data, compute, and training to guarantee virtue.

Leibniz himself refused easy answers. The creator's good intentions are not enough. Human freedom does not excuse the author of our nature and circumstances. And evil itself is real enough to demand an explanation: you can't take credit for two bowings of the violin without taking responsibility for the dissonance. Most importantly, Leibniz insisted that philosophical answers provide real comfort to the afflicted.

Three centuries later and the engineers have theological problems now.

Link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/

I'm not sure it's worth the upkeep to have comments. Seems that mostly spammers comment, and rarely real people. I just wanted a low-maintenance commenting system and Commento seemed to work decently at the time. I'm now noticing it's showing some CORS error, so I guess comments have been broken on my site for some time, doh...

(this isn't a promotion, these are free to use photos)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44436719

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

From Zhuangzi, Warring States period in China (born around 369 BC):

    But to wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same - this is called "three in the morning".  What do I mean by "three in the morning"?  When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, "You get three in the morning and four at night".  This made all the monkeys furious.  "Well, then", he said, "you get four in the morning and three at night".  The monkeys all were delighted.  There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger.  Let them, if they want to.  So the sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in Heaven the Equalizer.  This is called walking two roads.

I interpret this to mean first that what the monkeys care about is petty and trivial (like the petty distractions we all encounter daily), and more importantly at the end of the day there's no real change in the situation one way or another (the sum either way is seven acorns). The monkeys, caring about these trivial things, are happy they won the argument and got their way, even though it amounts to no significant difference at the end of the day.

So let it be.

For more depth I highly recommend Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. I took a course that used this book as its text and it was really life changing and made me hopeful that there are some more practical philosophies out there for us.

I don’t know of any other places showing film in the area, but I do know the Carolina Theatre in Durham shows loads of classics.

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Company mission: Reducing methane emissions is the single fastest way to slow the rate of global warming today. In order to reduce emissions we first have to know where they're being emitted and who is responsible. The most effective way to do this on a global scale is from space, which is why we're launching a satellite to find when, where, and how much methane is being emitted. We are building tools to put in the hands of folks who will best be able to make the data actionable.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945413

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

NPM trends tells an interesting story as well: https://npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue

He also had some sort of decoration made out of moose scat decoration hanging from the rearview mirror and was also trying to convince us passengers of the many uses of moose scats - skin remedies, even ingestion. But that's another story!