We have been hearing about overpopulation and especially the term "overshoot" since the Club of Rome report in 1970, which presumably follows on from earlier. Governments and industrialists were worried about rising population. Now either this is a real, actual problem, Or it's not. I don't really see how you can go from a population of say 500 million on through industrialization to a population of over 8 billion, heading for possibly 9 or 10 billion, and not know whether this is okay or not. Either overpopulation, i.e. there being 20 times more people on the planet than the planet can support is a real thing or it's not.

By all means, all these other initiatives and projects and memes around being green and being caring for the environment and reducing the amount of plastic bags you use, and increasing recycling, and cutting a bit here, and maybe flying a bit less, and maybe changing your car from a petrol one to an electric one, etc. Maybe all of that is all very well.

But if the population is 20 times what it should be, and has already been 20 times what it should be, for decades, then we're well, well past the limits of growth. We're well, well past the overshoot.

Either that's real or it's not. Either the overpopulation thing is real or it's not. It's that simple.

No worries, we'll just argue endlessly about whether whoever or whatever answered, passed the Turning Test.

Just to add to your points...

I think there is a level of religion which is all built around a structure of forcing people to blindly follow rules. The more people you can get to blindly follow the rules, the larger the group, the larger the identity, the more power the religion has. So ultimately their aim is to force as many people as possible to follow their rules. Blindly follow the same set of rules, therefore making their religion look more powerful.

Of course, that's only one level of thinking or religion, and there are actually much more modern levels where your whole religious orientation is much more rational and humanistic, and you think about things in a more ... philosophical way. For example, I was watching a talk by a Dzogchen head, and frankly he eats meat and really has no issue with whether you eat meat or not, and it's really just your own choice, and it actually has almost nothing to do with the spiritual teaching, in that particular field.

Often what's labelled "extreme right" or "extreme left" is actually all just blind rule following, blind beliefs, irrational beliefs and edicts, and groups trying to gain power by forcing their silly rules on others, and often the sillier the rules the better--because most sensible things are already common, so the "we are so special" groups, the ones trying to make their own special identity, they need irrational blind rules, like wearing silly hats, or eating in a malnourished way, or self flagellation, etc.

And all that blind irrationality and group power building, is maybe how the world worked before the modern era, and that's what these fights are really about, the pre-modern way of life versus the modern way of life.

And I think the word hallucination is a marketing term to make it all sound better than it is. It's actually a hallucination not in the mind of the AI, because it doesn't have one, but in the mind of the person reading, who imagines that the AI has a rational mind and is sentient.

Indeed!

The other question, is there a revolving door between Boeing and the FAA? Like how there is in other "heavily regulated" industries.

I deeply respect your culture, and I'm stealing your land.

There's a deep flaw in that reasoning ("just ban the assholes") and it's that we are all shaped by our culture and that predetermines what thoughts we form, and that happens before we even realise it. I can say that having temporarily lived in countries where the social values and beliefs are completely at odds with other values, and yet ordinary educated intelligent people hold those archaic nasty beliefs as obviously true.

And it's a huge realisation when people start to think outside their culture. As a comedy sketch put it, "wait, are we the baddies?"

Plus, modern life floods us constantly with advertising, influencers, politics, and authority figures, plus peer pressure. It's actually very hard to establish the truth on any given important issue. And the more certain people are of their fact, usually the less they actually understand. The more you know the less you know and all that.

As the old joke goes about medical school, half of what we teach you will soon be wrong, but we don't know which half.

So, free speech is about facilitating exchange and thus more quickly arriving at corrections and allowing views to evolve. Yes that includes allowing bad ideas to spread, but that's a thinking exercise, literally, for everyone.

There's a country where they banned or wanted to ban the Six Million Dollar Man because a child jumped out a window in imitation. It we can't develop critical thinking skills, as a species, then we have worse problems.

In any case, lots of advertising and influencing and authority figures and often just the plain issue that we just don't really know, and so no, if you're traditionally minded and want to believe your country and its authorities are trusted in all things, fine, but the modern world pays a toll for limits on speech.

Ingeniously, they obfuscated it in binary.
The actual password is 15

Indeed.

00000000

It's worrying if the courts simply assume the machine match is correct and it's taken as evidence. Like how speed camera readings are assumed correct. What happens if the machine says 95% likely it is you in the frame, and you have no alibi?

I don't think it's a country thing. It's a corporate and fascist movement versus democracy thing, and it's happening in all western countries, to varying degrees. Consider Italy's Green Pass, justified on the grounds of health, but respected experts in public health would not agree.

Make it extra pointy.

I'm realising I know so little about how the world works. The commotion around LLMs is revealing, as to how much the "reality" I believed, was actually being influenced, scripted, advertised, curated, and propagandised, by lots of organisations, all in sustained efforts to manipulate public opinion. The LLM is just another alternative medium which has an audience, and so all the more effort to control it, but with each new medium it becomes all the more difficult to control and so the effort to do so becomes more blatant and clumsy, thus revealing. Remind me again, is it a conspiracy theory to claim the some people like Marmite, or a conspiracy theory that some don't?

I'm just curious, where and how do data centres protect against bit rot or similar issues?