That “company” is the key part of the scam here. Your father will be asked to invest money in it for various reasons. Whether they’ll go for the “it’s a great deal” or “help me Obi Wan” angle is dependent on the mark.

I don’t even know why they bother pretending they have laws anymore. No one on the outside buys their bullshit and their loyal zombie hordes will bend over for any reason. It’s just a silly larp now.

Intentionality is the key difference. You can eventually tell a Chinese room’s nature by giving it new variables that it hasn’t encountered before. New problems lead to algorithmic breakdown.

That said, there’s deeper conversations you can have about what consciousness truly is, of course. My personal view is that it requires a level of complexity that we are still very far away from architecturally, and a level of scalability that we may not even be able to support ecologically. This thought experiment is mainly to show you what the inner workings of a computerized process can look like, and works to provide a demystified perspective.

A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.

The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.

This is an often misquoted fact. The study that compared coal and nuclear was only studying air pollutants, and obviously the steam stacks from nuclear reactors don’t have as much radionuclide pollutants as coal. However, the study did not look at other sources like wastewater - which is where most radionuclide pollution from nuclear reactors comes from (along with other sources like spent fuel, casings, and moderator rods).

Well I would argue beta decay is an aging-like property inherent in atoms. Granted, the half-lives are pretty long, but a limit still technically exists in that respect.

Hey this happened in Spec Ops the Line

No worries. Wasn’t trying to lecture you, just thought your comment was a good segue. I appreciated your fact as well.

Yes and that’s exactly why I use this place. I don’t want another Reddit. I want a space where a different viewpoint can be fostered.

Too bad using religious text to settle geopolitical issues is never a good idea. The fact of the matter is that the state exists. Erasure of a state shouldn’t be on the table and that goes for any country out there no matter how heinous or insignificant. Both Israel and Palestine need to come to an agreement wherein both parties can coexist in the present, otherwise their leadership is failing. I like that speech the Kenyan Ambassador Martin Kimani made to the UN back in 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine. Sometimes it’s best to let go of historical gripes and to look at how you can work together with the “now”, otherwise you will end up fighting for all eternity.

Out of touch execs still chasing metrics instead of focusing on quality. Their desperation betrays the awareness that an end is near.

People need to demand more out of their municipal leaders. Public transport and pedestrian infrastructure needs to be higher priority. Social spaces like plazas, markets, and parks should be protected and expanded. Other public infrastructure like schools and hospitals and mom and pop stores should be supported to allow jobs to flourish outside of cities and reduce the need for people to drive if they can’t live in higher density zones. Cars make people miserable, both inside them and outside them. They destroy the environment with their noise, pollution, accidents, and concrete carpeting. They make people lazy and unhealthy. It shouldn’t be our number 1 priority for travel solutions.