I too wish to rage at how bad an argument the chinese room is.

Searle's Chinese Room is a 3-card monty con. There's a room with a man consulting a book. Slips with Chinese characters comes in, he consults the book following it's instructions, writes out the lines of the characters, and passes the slips out, which is a legitimate conversation in Chinese. He argues the room on the whole understands Chinese, but the man in the room does not. And so AI is fake or some bullshit. This is a crock. The book is magic and obviously conscious and sentient. Such a book would have more pages than there atoms in the universe. That's the trick Searle pulls. In the original paper he's even dodgy about if it's a book or a filing cabinet. The man, the room? Who gives a fuck? You've got a magic book that can talk to you!

INSTEAD, let us imagine the same thought-experiment, except this time instead of a magical book, there's a box with a small child from Guangdong inside. This is the Mandarin Room. Now, nothing here is any different than Searle's bullshit concerning the room and the man. 100% identical on their end. The child tells the man what strokes to make on the paper. ooooo aaaaaah Does the man know mandarin or not? Let's debate this for 40 years! But it's all bullshit because the source of intelligence and the location of where the knowledge about mandarin language resides is obvious and definite. And talking about the room as a whole is a pointless waste of philosophical drivel.

Searl damaged the AI industry with this second only to that Perceptetron book that supposedly proved neural nets could accomplish much. We could have had TensorFlow in the 70's!

.....WHAT deterministic behavior? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle DICTATES that the physical components that everything is built upon is NON-deterministic.

Bruh, the fatalists that believed "it is written" still considered themself conscious beings. Do you get that? Non-deterministic consciousness. You've married consciousness to non-determinism for some crazy reason that makes no sense.

You are pretending it's some sort of magic soup that gets poured into the mix. There's no consciousness organ hiding in your brain. It's not a consciousness cell sneaking around and poking at synapses. It is a PROPERTY or a TRAIT that exists somehow in the 86 billion neurons in your head. OR you can just come out and say that you're not REALLY talking about consciousness and what you really want to say is "souls" but without sounding like you're an alchemist out of the dark ages.

Using a proper password hashing algorithm mostly addresses this concern... and standard cryptographic hashes like MD-5, SHA-1, SHA-256, etc. are not appropriate. They're designed to be as time and space-efficient as possible while still achieving their security goals. Password hashing functions (more precisely, password-based key derivation functions) are designed specifically to be time and space-hungry, efficient enough that you can execute them in half-second or so for user authentication, but slow enough that brute forcing even moderately-good passwords is intractible.

The best widely-available algorithm is Argon2id. The modern algorithms don't focus so much on requiring lots of CPU cycles because GPUs. Instead, they focus on requiring significant amounts of RAM, in ways that provably cannot be reduced. The most-recommended Argon2id configuration requires 2GB RAM. This makes it feasible for most servers to handle fairly easily, as long as they don't have to verify too many passwords in parallel, but it means that GPUs don't help the attacker, and it's also slow enough that while you can get some traction by using a large botnet, it's really not very much. If a PC requires 500ms per attempt, and you have a million-machine botnet, you can still only try 2M passwords per second. If user passwords have, say, 30 bits of entropy, your massive botnet can find one every five minutes on average. If they have 40 bits, your botnet can find a password every ~3 days, on average. That's not nothing, but if you have control of a million machines, you can definitely find better uses for them.

Of course, even better is to use passkeys or similar, but as a practical matter you probably have to have a password to fall back on.

You're confusing "life" with.... I dunno "consciousness" or "intelligence" or "aware" or something. Bacteria are most certainly alive and they don't do much more than just follow programming in their DNA. Not even complicated instructions. Goomba-level intelligence. You know, from Mario Bros. The first one.

"Self-conscious" is just a type of anxiety. Usually anxious about doing something wrong. Likewise "self-aware" is something we have a very good test for and it only kicks in for humans after about 18 months. The moment that you can reliably ask GPT if something looks like it was written by GPT, it's self-aware.

A fly is certainly alive, aware, intelligent, but not self-aware, and.... man, probably not self-conscious? hell if I know.

You're confusing consciousness with free will. These things will generally do what they're trained to do. Just like you.

And while you definitely shouldn't rely on these things as some sort of paragon of truth for all sorts of reasons, even fools who can't keep two words straight have their uses.

First off GIT YE TO THE SOURCE and read what he actually wrote rather than the mischaracterizations and interpretations and lies and propaganda about what people FEEL he said.

Second, I fully understand why this discussion is a mess because Unherd hides his paper behind a paywall. So practically NOBODY is actually talking about what he actually said, they're reacting to reactions and everyone is eager to shout over each other. ....but I do too: We've hit that philosophical moment where the words we're used to don't quite apply. Like an early astronaut talking about "down". I think everyone needs to remind themselves that ants, slime molds, and nematodes all display some level of intelligence, even if small. Every human with an IQ of 80 is most certainly a general intelligence. And that anything want to say about why this pile of billions of virtual neurons isn't this or that has to equally apply to the pile of billions of actual neurons in your head.

The fact that everyone decides to settle is a pretty strong signal.

Cite? I'm not a CPA but AFAIK, being a PDT has no direct tax implications, it just invokes brokerage/margin rules.

As I understand it (and I skimmed the law), 475(f) elections are entirely optional. The tricky thing is that you have to make the decision of whether you're going to elect to mark to market by April 15 (e.g. you have to decide by April 15, 2026 if you'll mark to market on December 31, 2026), and you generally cannot change that decision. So if you think it's going to be a bad year, it's a good idea to elect, because it removes the cap on loss deductions. If you expect to make a lot of wash sales and don't want to bother tracking them, that's another reason to elect.

But as far as I can tell, it's purely voluntary. Can you point to evidence to the contrary? Ideally in the law, but a reputable investor information site would be fine. I checked several (e.g. https://www.optionstaxguy.com/...) and they all describe it as a choice. One that is binding once made, but still a choice.

It's also possible to pair it with a large residential roof solar installation. I installed solar recently (just in time to grab the 30% credit) and my system routinely generates 3X what my home uses in the course of a day (I typically use about 40 kWh per day, and often generate 130+kWh per day). I've been thinking I'd really like to find something to suck up that extra power, because the monthly net billing plan I have means that once I've zeroed out my bill for the month, I get no benefit from additional production.

As deployment of renewables continue, this "problem" of what do do with excess capacity will increase and spread.

However, if power for the mini-datacenter is only intermittently available, the cost of the hardware effectively increases on a per-token (or per FLOP or however you want to measure the system's work) basis... and hardware cost is already going to be a tough problem for this kind of deployment. Even if it could count on 100% utilization, it will struggle to compete with large datacenters for exactly the reason we build large datacenters: Economies of scale. Enclosures (buildings), cooling, maintenance... all of the overheads fall with scale.

Intermittent utilization just makes that problem worse.

On balance, I'm skeptical that this makes sense, unless the cost of the hardware falls significantly. It seems like that's a baseline requirement for a lot of the alternative datacenter ideas, though: orbital datacenters, floating datacenters, etc.

What you just said is super-creepy in a "one of us, one of us" kind of way. Have you ever read Brave New World?

Bartz v Anthropic is not a binding precedent. It could have been binding in the 9th circuit, but they settled before the appellate court could consider it. And, of course, it's always possible that the appellate could have reversed Alsup.

I think this question is still very much in undecided. It's trending against Meta's interests, but AFAIK isn't there yet.

Put the tinfoil hat down and step away...

There's really no irony here. TPMs serve a different purpose, that of ensuring that the software you're running isn't maliciously modified.

It's really no different from keeping the password database encryption key in RAM, or the capability which grants access to the database encryption key (however many layers of that you want to go down) which is what you have to do if you want to be able to use the passwords on-demand without an authentication step.

If Chrome has access to them without user authentication, then so does any attacker who can dump Chrome's RAM.

If you have a process that provides a service that hands out passwords, it's irrelevant whether the passwords are plaintext or ciphertext. An attacker who compromises a rendering process can only query -- but can probably query a lot. An attacker to breaches the process separation, well...

Note that this is separate from whether the on-disk database needs to be encrypted. There are additional threat vectors there.