I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

I'd be curious what the breakdown is between 'addicts', in the compulsively-does-thing-despite-knowing-it-is-contrary-to-their-interests sense, and sad but locally reasonable behavior from people with tepid options.

'Addict' is a comparatively easy call to make when people are getting fired because they no-showed to play WoW; or spending all their time scrolling tiktok despite having a school or college worth of peers to socialize with; but if you are retired, less physically able to get out and about than you used to be, and at the age where your friends and peers are starting to die off, it seems like a much more open question whether having an engaging if ultimately rather hollow hobby is an 'addiction' or just a kind of depressing local maximum.

It's obviously not some ideal of perfected human flourishing; but if you are doing it because you don't really have things to do, rather than at the expense of things you have to do, that's not really classic addict behavior; just a mediocre hobby.

Could you help me understand the 'irony' here? Is saying impolite things about a dead guy the moral equivalent to being perhaps the most pivotal figure behind a war with an estimated half-million dead and a causus belli that was transparent bullshit; not to mention the elevation of extrajudicial torture to official policy? I'm not sure I follow.

And, if you'd like to expand on the 'political leanings' thing; I'd be more than happy to call anyone whose politics involve thinking that Cheney did a great job a monster as well; especially when it's so hard to argue that any of Cheney's ugliest aspects even paid off. Flirting with more expansive theories of the ends justifying the means can be a dangerous business; but, bare minimum, you can attempt to rank means by degree of atrocity and ends by degree of effectiveness; and on that score Cheney's work was honestly pretty shit.

Remember the 'Pax Americana' that the neocons assured us could be bombed into the fractious elements of the middle east? Lol. Bin Laden? Dude was chilling in an upmarket suburb in Pakistan while we were pissing away blood and treasure on hitting a mixture of hapless civilians and 'insurgents' who had the temerity to suggest that our puppet government was not the legitimate local administration in one peripherally involved country and one uninvolved one.

So, go ahead, please, explain your other level of irony. Tell us whose political loyalties are to this grade of not-even-effective violence. What'll it be?

Luckily, reliable sources assure me that he will be greeted as a liberator in hell; so things should go fine.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

It's possible that we'll see more given the generally geriatric trend among people who actually have money in the developed world; but a lot of 'smart' stuff is almost weirdly aggressive about squandering assistive potential.

It seems like it would be an area with a fair amount of promise; if only because not being able to do it yourself does answer a lot of the "why would I need a probably-unreliable and ad-riddled computer to do that for me when I could do it myself?"; but then you see them give the product to a UI designer whose contamination OCD is triggered by readable levels of contrast who replaces all the scrollbars with invisible grey hints; or a product manager with no real sense of UI at all who just churns things randomly or decides that blind copying of UI elements from phone-sized touchscreens to high resolution PCs with mice or large but lowish resolution TVs with remote controls is totally sensible.

Even users of average or better cognitive flexibility tend to be somewhat unhappy about that; and people who are not any the better for age tend to cope with the change less well, especially if compounded by visual or fine motor issues.

What seems even more concerning is that this is how he acts when he knows he's on camera and speaking to a relatively poor railroading candidate.

Because of their enthusiasm for working at or beyond the limits of their actual authority; you normally expect even dumb cops to have a decent instinct for the informal sociology of what they can get away with and against who. Columbine Valley, CO, household median income of ~$130k, over 50% over-40, most of the young under-18s presumably attached to households, 95% white, population a bit over 1200, is not quite at "my police department can do things for me my private security can't" levels; but it's pretty far toward 'customer service' on the "are police customer service workers or occupation forces?" continuum; and it's at least an inner suburb of the ff-course-they'll-fucking-lawyer-up-dumbass metro area.

If this is the sort of attitude that this guy brings to this situation it's hard to imagine him reacting well to encounters with the public in general. Hopefully he's more of a mall cop losing his mind for want of the stimulation promised in police academy; not the sort with a suspiciously stained large flashlight and a favorite rural ditch.

I don't think that the relationship is that straightforward.

You can, absolutely, build bureaucracies to resist accountability and avoid transparency; where nothing is every anyone's fault in particular, and all the records are classified, and the department in charge of checking its own work invariably concludes that procedure was followed. It takes some doing because the amount of formalized process required to keep a large org from just disintegrating means that you can't help but leave a paper trail, meeting minutes, policy documents, etc. that all need to be sanitized or kept out of reach of discovery and meddling reporters; but is certainly doable, especially if you can apply steady pressure over a prolonged period of time.

The high-cohesion/small-size case, though, tends to degrade into the 'if the mayor, the sheriff, and the DA get along they can basically do whatever; if the sheriff is prickly enough they might not even need the DA' awfully quickly and easily. Crumbles more quickly if there's a falling out internally or something Bad happens that has FBI agents sniffing around, since there's no entrenched apparatus designed to create the impression that organizational norms are being upheld; but, if that doesn't happen, it can be very opaque since it's small enough that no formal management and only very limited recordkeeping are required; and accountability is effectively nonexistent.

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.

Alright. Let me take the gloves off and be serious, since your other new response was a shitpost beyond reckoning.

Trivialism will not help you: the generation of consciousness is undecidable because we do not have a concrete definition of it.

The intended meaning of my comment was that the subjective experience of consciousness, like the Internal Revenue Service, is probably an emergent phenomenon built upon an immensely complex framework. "Missing the forest for the trees" comes to mind—if you're looking at the fundamental interactions that enable the atoms of the trees to exist, you'll never figure out that the trees were planted to spell out a message when viewed from orbit.

This gene, HAR1, is a non-coding RNA that we have known for decades is the smoking gun for human intelligence. It is key to the development of our language skills and absent from chimpanzees. If the authors of the paper were serious about studying the emergence of subjective consciousness, they would throw all their energy into deciphering how this gene influences brain development, then walk backward up the taxonomic tree, repeating the same diff-and-analyze operation until they reached nematodes, which have only a handful of neurons and are so simple that the average person can memorize all of the possible interactions and behaviors of those cells.

There is no room for a God of the Gaps when it comes to nematodes. They can be emulated by a Turing machine with perfect fidelity. They have no subjective experiences beyond those experienced by the billions of macrophages inside of you or a simple paramecium.

Interestingly all of these things thrash around wildly when they receive a fatal injury, ostensibly for the same reason we do—the pain is overwhelming and movement is an efficient way to introduce a competing signal that dilutes the misery. To the layperson seeing this through a microscope for the first time may be a bit horrifying as it seems rather relatable. But it isn't part of consciousness—resisting it is. It's just instinct, the result of a web of signalling molecules and proteins trying to minimize feedback loops caused by negative stimuli.

With all that said—the Simulationist argument is almost always made in bad faith, or as a result of someone acting in bad faith trying to plant seeds in the minds of others. It has long been a thought-terminating cliche wielded by nihilists and eschatologists to justify apathy and other actions that devalue life on this planet. Deciding whether the universe was constructed or not does not matter, because there are no tangible consequences of simply possessing a yes/no answer to that question. Belief will not tell us how to find bugs to exploit, nor will it give us proof we could ever escape from it. To do either, we would need actual direct evidence of artificiality that rules out all alternatives, and even that may not yield any utility.

However, advocates of nihilism do have something to gain from disseminating Simulationism—they get to push narratives about how it is fine to abandon social responsibility. In milder cases of internet-poisoned solipsism, they think it's fine to screw up (because nothing is "real"); more severely, Millerite cultists believe that a completely antisocial value system (donate all your money to the church and wait for the Rapture) is the optimal approach to life. Most dangerous are the oligarchs pushing this narrative: if you do not care about the universe, then you probably don't care about politics and won't stand in their way when they shred public institutions. This is basically what happened in post-Soviet Russia, though they didn't have to work nearly so hard to achieve it.

Because of these manipulative ideologies, anyone who promulgates or advocates a belief in Simulationism needs to be dealt with harshly and cynically to discourage them from openly proselytizing to the public. Unfortunately the battle is, in the main, very much lost for now, but so long as we know how to recognize the enemy we stand a chance of outliving them.

It's all neurons, baby. All neurons.