TheVat

Had to Google this. Wow. $500-1000 fine for first offense and then it doubles again. Seems to fit your falls heavier on the poor scenario. Admit that I laughed when I got to the trafficking penalties. Gum trafficking, what a concept.

Ankle-worn cell jammer: brilliant! I rank that up there with EMP cannon for use on loud car subwoofers.

Very helpful @Genady, thanks. Intrinsic and extrinsic are clarified for me now.

The dogputer mental image (a K9 processor?) was amusing but not quite what I had in mind. I was speculating on an artificial system which included forms based on organic structures, not one using actual biological material. IOW, a strong departure from the classical digital Von Neumann architecture that has dominated IT for...almost its entire history. What you are referencing, with its potential for a locked-in consciousness, does indeed seem spooky and an ethical red flag.

Me too. Though social shame doesn't work with teenagers in some societies, often triggering more of an undesirable behavior as an enjoyable bit of rebellion. I used to live near a high school, so have unfortunately accumulated a fair amount of anthropological data on this. Fairly stiff enforcement would be required for that demographic, because moral lectures (How would you feel if I started depositing my trash in YOUR yard, hm?) would be ineffective. A friend of my parents, many years ago, had a rather unusual solution to someone tossing litter from their passing car into his yard. He took down the plates and, being a journalist, was somehow able to obtain their home address. He then mailed the litter (including some spoiled food) to them with a letter explaining that he was kindly returning to them what was theirs. A satisfying story, but an unusual bit of luck to see the perpetrators in the act.

So, if I'm following any of this, curvature is defined in a way that is intrinsic to the manifold and not dependent upon its embedding in higher-dimensional spaces. Like, if I'm a flat bug on the shore of a calm lagoon I can measure a curvature of the "flat" water as flat bug-ships drop over the horizon, without any reference to an earth interior or global topology?

Yes, and it builds on the CRA, a philosophical argument that is a priori. The crux of such arguments is that human brains are largely analog/analog-to-digital and react directly to the world which they are a part of, as opposed to machines (yes, can be circuits or valved water pipes or air hoses or anything) which are digital devices which follow instructions for computation - AKA algorithms - and interact with the world via compiled digital inputs, i.e. they manipulate numeric strings. For the original CRA supporter, computers having minds is rather like a virtual weather simulation that starts gushing water from its processors. Ain't gonna happen. So it comes down to, generally: can a digital simulation in any way become that which it simulates, and second: is genuine understanding (with the conscious awareness that implies) something that could happen if digital systems somehow morphed into fully embodied entities that actually interact with an exterior world? This latter is the focus of the Robot Argument (RA), which philosophers like Dennett and Jerry Fodor, among others have endorsed versions of. The RA involves something usually called externalist semantics. This goes with Searle that syntax and internal connections in isolation from the world are insufficient for semantics, while suggesting a hope that more embodied forms with causal connections to the world can provide content to the internal symbols. So Dennett et al (iirc Hans Moravec is also a fan of RA, no surprise, right?) are open to the notion that a symbol manipulator could, in principle, "graduate" to actual semantics and really attach meanings to the symbols it is manipulating. Full disclosure: I worked briefly with a very narrow form of AI back in the day, developed a couple of expert systems back in the late 80s, and leaned towards the CRA. While I still question functionalism, I have become more open to externalist semantics and the RA in terms of some future entity that might interact both analogically and digitally with the world, a blend of organic and machine forms, a creature that operates both with symbols AND has a non-symbolic system that succeeds by being embedded in a particular environment. Pretty pie in the sky, right?

Thanks @Luc Turpin I will have a look.

On second blush, there is the problem of unintended consequences. Human affairs are complex and chaotic. Time war would seem prone to backfires - kill Hitler and.... woops.... a more clever and ruthless person filled that historical space, formed an even stronger government that more wisely didn't drive out all the smart Jewish physicists or fight on too many fronts, developed a nuclear-tipped longer range V2 before anyone else, and so on. Also, if the time travelers are to remain unchanged, then their original timeline must still exist, right? Otherwise they would wink out of existence as soon as the change was effected.

I would speculate that many doctors steer clear of dietary recommendations because there is such a welter of ambiguous data, so many foods that have both positive and negative aspects. Potatoes, for example, are fairly high glycemic which is mildly linked to prostate swelling and cancer incidence, but they also have nutritional elements supportive of prostate health. Tomatoes, similar thing, are rich in lycopene which is associated with reduced PSA levels and lower cancer incidence, but are also acidic which can be a bladder irritant. Almost every food is a mixed blessing, with different effects traveling different biochemical pathways. Cranberries are diuretic, not great for a full night's sleep, but also inhibit bacterial attachment to bladder wall and further infection. They can also aid better draining during the day and so, if not consumed after say 2 pm, actually ease bladder issues in the wee hours (NPI). (that was my experience ) I agree agri business will often make inflated, bordering on ridiculous, claims about foods based on cherry picking from the research findings. Same as it ever was. It's unfortunate that many overlook habits which do gain some control over health issues, viz. sustained physical activity, noise reduction, and less sitting (western chairs, esp.) are examples. Americans seem particularly fond of panacea thinking - kale smoothies changed my life! Either that, or absolute restrictions - I never pollute my body with dairy! (gluten!)(corn!)(anything from an animal!) etc. A shift to more holistic medicine with more face time between doctors and clients could bring some balance, but I'm not sure if that's going to happen with health being so dominated by mass marketing forces. Sorry, am veering way offtopic. .

Yes, and it's a good question as to which of those pose problems. I have approached this empirically (corresponding with Dr. Freely on a daily basis), and for me peppers seem to be the primary offender, while tomatoes are okay in moderation. I think Solanum members like potatoes are less a problem as you are just eating the starchy rhizome, mostly just carbs. The worst foods, from what I've gleaned from literature, are ones like egg yolks or red meat which are high in arachidonic acid, which elevates inflammatory markers. So much variation in personal chemistry that it seems like an experimental approach is good with some of these. My dad insisted chocolate was a menace to the prostate, but I don't seem to have a problem with moderate intake. And some inflammatory response can happen as a sort of "perfect storm" of several inflammatory foods in concert - e.g. a lasagna loaded with red meat, ricotta cheese, tomatoes, spices, and peppers. Spread all those triggers through multiple meals and dishes and maybe one would have no problems.

A dozen eggs a day would pose some problems for men in middle age or later - eggs are one of the foods, like cheese, meat, strong spices, and Nightshade family plants like bell peppers, that are to be minimized in a prostate-friendly diet. Choline content is high in eggs, and the primary protein, casein, is also implicated in BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia). There's a fascinating monograph on this topic by the British physician I.P. Freely.

One might hypothesize (though not perhaps falsifiable in accord with Popper) that the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog was a surviving Precambrian rabbit. You can also deal with time travelers surviving by positing alternate timelines. When you've stepped on a Jurassic moth or whatever, you start a different timeline but your own remains and can be returned to. This would make time wars pointless however.

I was just making a dreadful pun, on Niels Bohr, who developed that early rendition of the atom. No need to apologize.

The old image of the atom as particles in an orbit around the nucleus is now seen as rather Bohr-ing.

https://archive.is/2024.01.03-125833/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/fetal-maternal-cells-microchimerism/676996/ Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had at some point wandered out of the womb. They’d ended up in his mother’s thyroid—and, almost certainly, a bunch of other organs too—and taken on the identities and functions of the female cells that surrounded them so they could work in synchrony. Bianchi, now the director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was astonished: “Her thyroid had been entirely remodeled by her son’s cells,” she said. The woman’s case wasn’t a one-off. Just about every time an embryo implants and begins to grow, it dispatches bits of itself into the body housing it. The depositions begin at least as early as four or five weeks into gestation. And they settle into just about every sliver of our anatomy where scientists have checked—the heart, the lungs, the breast, the colon, the kidney, the liver, the brain. From there, the cells might linger, grow, and divide for decades, or even, as many scientists suspect, for a lifetime, assimilating into the person that conceived them. They can almost be thought of as evolution’s original organ transplant, J. Lee Nelson, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, told me. Microchimerism may be the most common way in which genetically identical cells mature and develop inside two bodies at once. (article goes on to describe some implications of microchimerism, for the immune system, organ transplants from close relatives, etc.)

These seem to be the Right's favorite conceptually empty attack phrases. I have no idea what they really mean, nor do most people who use them. It's impressive that politicians can get a quarter of the GOP to rank fighting these chimeras at the top of their concerns. I'll bet if you actually defined the real meanings of woke and liberalism and presented them (minus those hot button words, or following them with "agenda") to your polled sample, you would get a much smaller group that wanted to "fight" them. For example, here is the actual definition of woke from Merriam Webster: "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" Yeah, my God, let's fight this looming threat of people attentive to important facts and issues, especially where racial bias in concerned! This could destroy the basic fabric of American life and drain our precious bodily fluids!

The LLM is still essentially what it was, a stochastic parrot which makes ranked lists of word probabilities and word pairing probabilities. There is zero modeling of an actual world. The only thing its doing is modeling next-word probabilities, its only "world" is statistical frequencies of strings within blocks of text. It is so very very far from AGI that all the hype around it is just ludicrous. They understand nothing. I would recommend anything by Emily Bender, who coined the phrase stochastic parrot, on this topic. The fundamental algorithms of LLM machines has not changed in the past year. If it has, @iNow could post some citation on that. Yep. Self attention is a basic aspect of all machine learning, especially natural language processing, and pattern recognition as in computers doing visual discrimination of objects.

Arise, oxysomes of the world! You have nothing to lose but your electron transport chains!

Thanks. On Q* I am not excited yet. It relies on a Markov decision process, so it's still a stochastic algorithm and builds no meaningful model of the world. That model I see as essential to AGI. But maybe Q (why do I see John DeLancie's mug whenever I refer to it) will do better at limited domain expertise than I expect. I always have doubts about reinforcement learning, maybe due to its roots in Behaviorism. It's all very lab rat-ty. 🙂

I expect you're getting some pushback on that. For one thing, intelligence is a vague blanket term for a vast array of cognitive skills. For another, some species have evolved in ways driven by other forces than intelligence. While a crow drops pebbles in a bottle to raise the water level so it can drink, a mesquite bush completely absent intelligence puts down a deeper taproot. An ancient hominin species, H. Floresiensis, decreased its cephalization ratio on a group of islands where protein sources were scarce and a large brain couldn't be supported on the food supply - it's likely this decreased their intelligence and yet it was adaptive in that set of environmental stresses. Sharks are dimwitted and yet have thrived for hundreds of millions of years with a minimal repertoire of instinctive behaviors and no sign of augmenting their cognition. Humans happen to be a weak, clawless, and neotenic species that found the developing of atypical cognitive skills like complex language and toolmaking to be adaptive as it spread through a huge range of ecosystems and climates. We, as a species, are outliers in regard to the adaptive uses of cognitive skills. And a global catastrophe which greatly diminished our protein supply could send us back to being pinheads like H. Floresiensis, cheerful morons digging up tubers in a planetwide shift to insular dwarfism.

Searles point has always been that formal programs, as a set of coded instructions, can only embody the syntactic elements of expertise or knowledge, without the semantics (understanding of meaning). Put differently, computers enact only unconscious processes, be they symbol-based or stochastic (the current emphasis in deep machine learning). While I take the points here regarding the usage of unconscious - it hearkens back to Jungian woo, or to the unhelpful wobbly table vagueness that @iNow mentioned - it can refer in a literal way to operations like those involuntary ones in the autonomic nervous system and up to the brainstem. Such operations aren't preconscious because they never rise into the spotlight of conscious attention or deliberation. I have been AFK a lot the past two weeks so will try to catch up a bit more on the threads before saying more.

The GOP biggest weapon is web-borne propaganda which grossly misrepresents his performance as president, the obstructions of Congress, and the globally driven nature of problems like inflation, war, and surges of refugees. Yup. Having US public schools dial back their social studies requirements has been lethal to our politics.

Eye color genetics turns out to be complex.... https://www.news-medical.net/health/Genetics-of-Eye-Color.aspx