It can be very hard to disentangle the cause and effect of ‘not wanted so it doesn’t count as a failure to not get it,’ vs ‘can’t do it, so won’t say I want it,’ vs ‘might want to do it but everyone and everything is getting fucked so hard these days and I don’t want to watch my kid get fucked, so not going to bother having one.’

Now I wonder what it would be like to go inside of a mirrored sphere wearing a glow in the dark jumpsuit…

You can look at a pair of meshed gears and understand it just as readily as you can understand a single transformation by running the math on paper with a pencil, but I don’t think anyone will ever be able to comprehend the fullness of any useful-scale model for the same reason they would never comprehend a clockwork with the same number of gears as an LLM has transformers or indices. It’s a non-intuitable space with too much complexity which cannot be simplified without oversimplifying.

One activity occurs in a hazily understood chemical system with near completely unobservable states in interplay with activities and systems which have effects on the main system that are barely recognized, much less fully understood. The other is a constructed, completely defined system with near total observability of states affected by probabilities based on inputs defined by human written, completely known tokenization systems.

Will they next speculate about the similarity of ‘preferences’ between a robot from Japan and the nearest non-terrestrial intelligent species?

*auto-complete

Call me a cynic, but I suspect it would be entirely possible for representatives of the US government to say something is bad without paying a penny to do anything about it.

I both agree and disagree. It would be good for America to take some level of responsibility for what happened, but I am also of the set that says Iraq is a cross-cultural region that should probably be redistributed according to local understandings of the territory rather than the economic desires of early-middle-of-the-last-century English and French people, because Iraq’s governments have had trouble trying to establish enough legitimacy to override longer standing cultural ties. Either way, America should probably cough up something, at the very least an acknowledgment of fault, and stop interfering in what should be local matters.

As much as it might suck for some victims, once your victimizer is dead, that’s it. We can’t all be held responsible for the crimes of everyone in our genetic lineages, let alone our national histories, or we would all be lined up for capital punishment for the uncountable rapes and murders our predecessors committed in near total impunity.

Ah, but have you considered that pierogi are delicious?

That brain shaped hole in his head. Someone at the guardian graphics department is having some fun.

Mmm, pierogi regatta…

‘And look where that got us.’

It’s hard to get buy-in from most people when your solution looks like the problem you’re trying to solve. It creates uncertainty. Add in the media’s approach to science, and you get fear. It’s hard enough getting science funding when people aren’t afraid of it. Toss on the modern anti-intellectual movement and now you’ve got a controversy, a system of doubt. And controversy is good for business. Controversy gets clicks, which sells ads, so the controversy will never be allowed to die. You can’t let there be a final answer to an argument that gets you paid for as long as it continues, now can you?

He takes over 10 minutes to get to the start of making a point, so that’s not great, but there have been people with ideas for terraforming earth before. It’s one of those things people are very frightened of because that’s kind of a thing in sci-fi. It might work, but people are still mostly looking at climate change as something that is in the future. It won’t get funding until it’s too late.

Briefly misread that as ‘Germanophobe’ and the the thought of there being nations that specifically eat a dessert because they hate Germans is delightfully absurd.

Thanks for pointing this out. Blocking it now.

What should they do? Responses sit either in the non-violent space, which is only effective when the people in power have a sense of shame for ‘failing to represent their constituency,’ or the violent space, which is self-destructive and, if you’re facing the gigantic american system, suicidal, and feeds into rhetoric about how the government needs to crack down on violent extremists, helping to legitimate further authoritarianism.

Two guys in overly complicated clothing fighting over who’s the daddy? What is this, Thursday night at the BDSM club?

Splinter sect? Are we about to get some great schism in our historical shitshow soup?

Lawsuits.

Useful for those whose noses were affected long term by COVID.