Suffering? Really?

The problem fundamentally is that the LLM doesn't "know" anything. It strings words together in a way that is statistically similar to the way a human would do it, according to training data.

But they don't know what the words mean. They don't know what the sentences mean. They don't know the difference between true and false, right and wrong, real and fake.

They are fluid bullshit machines.

Oh look, you linked to a wikipedia page showing wild swings in the top tax rate, but also totally flat revenue, and you can't figure out what that means.

which certainly supports the "the rich are trying to turn us all into peasants" narrative of the person I'm replying to (although I strongly doubt their intentional narrative).

In terms of the slashdot comment system, I'm the person you are replying to. But you aren't responding to what I wrote, but instead to a hallucination. The nice thing about Slashdot is that what I actually wrote will always be there unchanged. You are free at any time to go look at my actual words, and meditate on why you substituted your own prejudices instead.

If I had to guess, I'd say you probably went to a government-run school and to the extent they taught you anything, they taught you envy, jealousy and class warfare. They certainly didn't teach you to consider how and why the government might be killing the middle class.

I can barely imagine what kind of education you must have had if you consider tax cuts to be a form of "shoveling money at" someone.

There are two ways to get really rich. One way involves creating something that many people want so badly that they are willing to give you their money to get it. The other way is by using government for plunder. It looks like your proposal is to empower the second group, under the theory that they will plunder the first group and not plunder you. Historically speaking, this has never worked. It is always easier to plunder you than it is to plunder the rich.

The goal is to reduce you to serfdom, peasants bought and sold by the rich. Cheap energy means everything else is cheap too, which gives you independence, so that has to go.

Some of the watermelons agree with this plan, others are in denial.

It does apply, in the sense that there has never been any suggestion that he would, should or could be charged with publishing secret documents. Nor, really, any suggestion that he should have offered the documents up for review to some censorship body before publishing them.

The US charges involve conspiracy to steal secret documents, and accessory to stealing secret documents. If he had sat back and waited for the documents to come to him, and then published them, as the New York Times did, he'd probably still be a free man today.

You can argue that the law is wrong, or that there should be a whistleblower exception, or whatever else. Personally, I think that Trump should have pardoned him. But the law is pretty clear, and the facts, as alleged in the indictment and assuming that they stand up under the scrutiny of a trial, seem to apply.

This reminds me of the sentencing of the "January 6 insurrection" guilty pleas. As I (a non-lawyer) understand it...

Regardless of whether you consider it an insurrection or a protest march petitioning the government for redress of grievances...

In the wake of the events, the fed busted a bunch of the participants and left them rotting in prison for months (over a year), with no end in sight. In many cases this left families with no breadwinner, enormous legal costs, and expectations of losing all their property as part of some eventual conviction.

Then the prosecutors offered some of the defendants a plea deal; Plead guilty to a misdemeanor or short-sentence felony and we'll drop any other charges.

Rule of thumb: a misdemeanor generally is a crime with a max sentence of no more than a year in prison, a felony more than a year - which is why you see "year and a day" max sentences on some crimes. An accused person already in prison for over the max sentence would expect that accepting the deal would result in immediate release with "credit for time served" (and others near the max might expect release much sooner). So some of them went for it.

Came the sentencing some judges applied a two-year sentence enhancements for "substantial interference with the 'administration of justice.'" OOPS! No release for you.

I'd expect them to pull the same sort of thing on Assange if he were foolish enough to plead guilty to anything, no matter how minor.

(By the way: This particular form of the practice, as used on the Jan6 participants, was just recently struck down. But the decision was based on Congress' certification of the presidential election not qualifying as "administration of justice.'" So this wouldn't apply to whatever enhancement trick they might pull on Julian.

I don't know what you heard, but baby cells can only stay baby cells, they can't become mommy cells,

Sez who?

There's been evidence for some time that post-pregnancy mothers often have clones of stem cells derived from the previous foetus. Sure such a clone would likely start out with its epigenitc programming set for whatever function it had in the baby's development (unless, say, some error in its differentiation is what led to it migrating to the woman's body to set up shop). But once established on the mother's side of the placental barrier, and especially after the birth, the stem cell clone can be expected to continue to run its program under direction of the growth factors in the mother's blood.

That amounts to a transplant of younger stem cells which could be expected to produce differentiated cells for tissue growth and replacemtnt,, with the aging clock set farther back and with some genes from the father to provide "hybrid vigor", filling in for defective genes in the mother's genome or adding variant versions of molecular pathways.

If you haven't read Rainbows End in the last few years, you need to re-read it now. That book is fucking wild after COVID.

This strikes me as a bit of a shakedown, settle with out patent claims or we'll screw up your IPO by creating a new potential liability.

Back in the early days of the personal computer explosion there was a patent for the "XOR cursor" which I hear was used as a trolling operation. Story goes that every time a new hi-tek company was in that sensitive period just as they're about to go public, they'd get a notice that they were believed to be violating that (even if whatever they were doing didn't even involve a display with a cursor, XOR or otherwise) and an offer to license the patent for something substantial but far lower than the cost and risks of fighting it. ($10,000?) So the companies generally paid up rather than derail their IPO.

It was jokingly referred to as a tax on incorporation. There are rumors of discussions of buying a hit on the trolls. Apparently this netted over $50,000,000 before the patent expired. (Also there was apparently prior art discovered - AFTER the expiration.)

I know that when I'm looking for wise guidance on America's industrial and labor policies, the first name that comes to mind is the guy who has never held a real job in his life.

If I recall, the consensus around the forums was that Hal Finney was not Satoshi.

You don't mention a name, so I'm assuming a little bit, but I can't recall anyone else who was prominent in the community (and at least minimally plausible) dying in the early days.

You could also start with:
  - two molecules that (moderately) accurately copied each other (though getting them both at the same time makes the time scale to the big event much longer.)
  - A molecule that makes NEARLY always inacurate (but occasionally acurate and complete) copies of itself. (This also drastically pulls in the time to a two-molecule solution.)
  - A molecule that makes inaccurate copies but with string of typical errors that occasionally loops back to an accurate and complete (mod a few errors in unimportant places) copy of a previous version.

These could eventually mutate into a version that can perform a one-step copy-itself loop.

=====

I've always been partial to an RNA-only origin. RNA can do it all (self-copy, enzymes, energy transport batteries in at least two sizes with self-pluggin-in connectors: ATP/ADP and UTP/UDP, expression regulation, directed genetic code editing, etc.). It's also still doing a lot of that in current lifeforms, especially in key parts (such as many of the components of the DNA duplication, DNA repair, DNA-to-MRNA copy, gene expression regulation, MRNA exon-eliminating editing, and MRNA directed protein synthesis machinery)

And of course the people of Japan are identical to the people of Florida in every way, with absolutely no difference in rates of obesity or other factors that make covid more serious, so it is perfectly normal and valid to just compare them per capita like this.

Tarzan is the one classic Disney movie that is safe from race-swapping. Can you imagine Disney casting a black person and making him act like a monkey?

I wonder if that works for these images. If you asked for Tarzan dressed like a Nazi, would you get an image of a white guy?