It's a term of art. The audience for this paper would understand, rather like many denizens of HN know what TDD is.

The paper doesn't even use it consistently. At first it uses "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID", and then in the results section it uses the same phrase to mean "all causes including COVID". The whole purpose of terms of art is to increase the specificity of language, but they're not doing that here. Their usage of the term is confusing.

Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.

Where do you see them using "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID" in the beginning? I skimmed over all uses of the term before the "Results" chapter, none of them seem to exclude COVID deaths?

According to your view, the text you have written has nothing to do with consciousness.

The NES DPCM runs at up to 33kHz, so it actually has double the bitrate of the 2-bit 8kHz encoding used in the article. If you run it at 16kHz to match the bitrate, it will sound much worse.

The post doesn't blame individual Americans. There is no irony.

The stick is the player character's head. Pull back their head and they look up.

You seem to misunderstand the proposal. The proposal is that after they have done everything that is already legally required (advertise an open position for some amount of time etc), then they must amend the posting to include that the position is filled by an internal/external/H-1B hire. There is still a period of time when the position is advertised as open.

I use to work for a company that got around this by posting the job ad physically outside our offices doors. We were 5 stories in a WeWork space. Probably illegal but I doubt the company cared.

Which is still "broken" since the position was never really open in the first place - it's still a ghost listing, as the position was always going to an internal hire or H1b or whatever.

Yes, but requiring the post-fill disclosure will at least make data available to work the problem further.

The point was not to solve it, but to expose it.

Because I have plenty of opportunities that don't involve dancing for a micromanaging sociopath.

It's possible you could at least mitigate the problem by checking that what you've proven isn't trivial. If you slightly change a mathematical statement, it frequently becomes either trivially true or trivially false. So if you accidentally proved the wrong thing, there's a good chance that your proof can be shortened to a point that it becomes obviously wrong. For example, if you accidentally put "there exists" instead of "for all" in Fermat's last theorem, the proof is 1^3 + 1^3 != 1^3. That is obviously too short to prove FLT - it would have fit in Fermat's margin.

> As humans can be reduced to physics, and physics can be expressed as a computer program

This is an assumption that many physicists disagree with. Roger Penrose, for example.

That's true, but we should acknowledge that this question is generally regarded as unsettled.

If you accept the conclusion that AGI (as defined in the paper, that is, "solving [...] problems at a level of quality that is at least equivalent to the respective human capabilities") is impossible but human intelligence is possible, then you must accept that the question is settled in favor of Penrose. That's obviously beyond the realm of mathematics.

In other words, the paper can only mathematically prove that AGI is impossible under some assumptions about physics that have nothing to do with mathematics.

Where am I assuming that we have perfect knowledge of physics?

To make it plain, I'll break the argument in two parts:

(a) if AGI is impossible but humans are intelligent, then it must be the case that human behavior can't be explained algorithmically (that last part is Penrose's position).

(b) the statement that human behavior can't be explained algorithmically is about physics, not mathematics.

I hope it's clear that neither (a) or (b) require perfect knowledge of physics, but just in case:

(a) is true by reductio ad absurdum: if human behavior can be explained algorithmically, then an algorithm must be able to simulate it, and so AGI is possible.

(b) is true because humans exist in nature, and physics (not mathematics) is the science that deals with nature.

So where is the assumption that we have perfect knowledge of physics?

You didn't. I confused something but looking at the comment chain now I can't figure out what. I'd say we're actually in perfect agreement.

Penrose’s views on consciousness is largely considered quackery by other physicists.

Nobody should care what ANY physicists say about consciousness.

I mean seriously, what? I don't go asking my car mechanic about which solvents are best for extracting a polar molecule, or asking my software developer about psychology.

Yet somehow quantum woo is constantly evoked to explain consciousness.

"Many" is doing a lot of work here.

"Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't think it's a bad name for the concept.

Are you sure? That’s almost the opposite of what I heard, which was that “gender” being used to refer to -inity arose as a euphemism to avoid using the word “sex”, because the word “sex” came to be more associated with specifically “sex-acts” (and that prior to it being used as a euphemism in this way, it essentially meant something like kind/type/sort), and only after “gender” began being used as a euphemism in this way, did people begin using it to distinguish between “gender roles” and “sexes”.