This seems interesting. What’s the context here?

I take your anti-corporate point. However, I believe pro-doping would totally work if it was a gladiatorial bloodbath decathalon within the olympics itself. And if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers. Jousting, Barenuckle boxing, Pride rules MMA, Hell in a Cell, no rules water polo, shit like that.

Grow up.

Before this is all over, MS will be charging users to extract their snapshots from a proprietary cloud-only one drive account. The recovery process will take about 3 hours, and involve scrolling through ai-authored help articles that don’t lay out clearly and methodically how to access the old snapshots. The comments on the help articles will begin with “Hello sir, can you confirm that you have followed the steps at this link?”. The link, before delivering you to an irrelevant solution, will shunt you to a landing page that forces you to log into your microsoft account before you can see the answer.

How? What country is going to jump at the chance to take in a 70 year old immigrant?

“We don’t understand. Why aren’t people simply searching for Taylor Swift”

‘Killed her 14 month old dog for misbehaving’ is the clicky headline. But the subtext is, this person might be the republican running mate, and her story is presented as a parable about how killing is ‘a job that needs to be done’. It’s not crazy to put those pieces together and be anxious about the direction they point in.

I can see where you’re coming from. You’re right that her story is divisive. I think that’s the objective. It’s an engineered, populist, fascist move to present the story in the way that she does. No one in the public eye writes that kind of thing in a book and expects it to fly under the radar.

You’re also right that there’s a strong rural/urban ideological division. Best way to fix that I think is to talk to each other more, IRL, and try to honestly understand the perspectives of others, especially if they’re different from our own. My 2¢.

Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit’s licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That’s really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. “Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee.”

Think it’s more of an allusion to lurking habits, active times, metadata, stuff not related to public posts. I’d imagine the average user has plenty of stuff they’ve browsed through that they wouldn’t want their family / co-workers, etc. to know.

Would also need to get a burner phone number w/ answering machine to take calls from 240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses and cash-strapped public schools for any & all tech support questions until the end of time, because if there was an issue with system stability in any way whatsoever, or if the router went down or the printer stopped working, they’d assume it was the fault of ‘the guy who changed everything’.

Linux is great & everything, but this sounds like a recipe for utter disaster, not a way to make an easy buck.

Wouldn’t checkering itself, even in the abstract, need to reference two discernible colours or shades, and so, wavelengths of light, and so, some extension along a z axis, and position in time? Is it possible even for an abstract checkered pattern to be defined in any less than 3 dimensions + time?

Interesting. I’m curious to know more about what you think of training datasets. Seems like they could be described as a stored representation of reality that maybe checks the boxes you laid out. It’s a very different structure of representation than what we have as animals, but I’m not sure it can be brushed off as trivial. The way an AI interacts with a training dataset is mechanistic, but as you describe, human worldviews can be described in mechanistic terms as well (I do X because I believe Y).

You haven’t said it, so I might be wrong, but are you pointing to freewill and imagination as somehow tied to intelligence in some necessary way?

Thanks! I’m not clear on what you mean by a worldview simulation as a scratch pad for reasoning. What would be an example of that process at work?

For sure, defining intelligence is non trivial. What clear the bar of intelligence, and what doesn’t, is not obvious to me. So that’s why I’m engaging here, it sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into an answer. But I’m not sure I understand your terms.

By a doctor, I very much want to be seen strictly as the biological organism that they have spent their life studying. The fact that there are very few doctors, and every person born on this earth will be a patient, means that a standard for unvarnished and concise language is morally praiseworthy in terms of its service of the greater good.

I guess my feeling is, there’s no good reason to get offended by the standard of language that the medical system operates in. There is an ocean of ill people who need help, and we’re not all special, in that sense.

A doctor who is led into a cognitive trap by seeing “diabetic” on a chart, is a bad doctor. I’m not sure small refinements of language are the remedy for that doctor’s deficits.

Not being combative or even disagreeing with you - purely out of curiosity, what do you think are the necessary and sufficient conditions of intelligence?

I’m glad to hear this and hopefully it fulfills my fantasy of having sex with Clippy.

Kurosawa is a good counterpoint for sure. Haven’t seen Guns Akimbo, Psycho Goreman, or Black Magic M-66. I’ll keep my eye out for those. Thanks!

Nostalgia for what, though? It was a ‘duo go into a tower and kill everyone’ movie that happened to be called Dredd. I liked it for what it was and I didn’t go in with any nostalgia. I feel your anxiety, but, I wonder if action movies by their nature can’t really be deep meditations on the human condition. What story can be told at the muzzle of a gun or the end of a fist that hasn’t already been told?

I kind of feel like action movies are at their best when they operate in a space that is far away from the frontal cortex, invite us to a more libidinal place. Even ‘thinker’ action movies like The Matrix, kind of strike me as philosophically shallow harangues interspersed with cool fights.

I donno, maybe I’m wrong, or not steeped enough in the genre, or just have normie preferences. Out of curiosity, what action movies have a good story & are worth checking out, in your opinion?

Mmm. I grew up in a different time too. Makes me ponder how the software circumstances of that time built in us a very different idea of what an iteration actually is, when it comes to writing. The fact that we couldn’t go back and atomically dissect the history of a piece. That a draft, and an edit, were something heavier. Maybe we’d have to think a bit more slowly and carefully before irreversibly casting a previous version into the ether.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a “gen z bad” post. Just reflecting on how things are different these days, and maybe it leads to a different kind of work.

I don’t begrudge anyone for believing that Covid-19 came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. History shows that governments will make every effort to avoid standing up and telling their citizens a difficult truth. The lab leak theory is a fruit of rampant dishonesty in government. It’s directly the fault of the government that conspiracy theories like this exist, and it’s hypocritical for governments to bemoan those theories and the people who believe them.