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Comment Re:Self-selection (Score 2) 60

Turning the link purple to go to the report, then following that link to the actual study, you can look at those concerns.

Oddly enough, the post-doc researchers at University College London doing research in behavioral science and psychiatry, published through Oxford University, do indeed answer the questions.

The paper shows is something they noticed and want to investigate further, presented as "the first evidence" not a final conclusion. They started from the UK Household Longitudinal Study data, data going back to 1991 and publicly available to any registered researcher, and cross checked against a few others with related sampling information. They looked at ages from 16 to 90, marital status, children, education level, employment status, household income, area deprivation index (living in poor areas to rich areas) and reported disabilities.

Comment What a joke... (Score 1) 29

If they weren't ripping people of with every purchase there would no need for a "discount". I was the "guy" who was forced to replace our really nice Commodore Pet computers with that crApple BS in HS. Apple never did anything for the schools that they didn't get paid for. Their software SUCKS, their networking SUCKS. In an effort to be "cool" and trendy apple has made supporting their stuff annoying time consuming.

Comment Re: What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 1) 393

If we are held in low esteem because we can spot a tautological non-sequitur from a mile away, then so be it. That doesn't mean we are wrong.

I strongly encourage you to engage with the literature on the topic. You dont even have to read philosphers, there are plenty of cognitive scientists and neurologists who have excellent treatments of the topic.

Comment Re:let me get this straight (Score 1) 57

Yeah. China *does* have a shit load of coal , but considering their population and the relative underdevelopment of the "backwater" areas , I've been impressed by Chinas attempts at turning the ship around.

I guess shitty dictatororships at least seem good at making the trains run on time

Comment Re:Environmental impact probably overstated (Score 2) 158

I'm assuming (the article really isnt clear on this) that its refering to the energy of a bunch of billion computers actually running the AI model, as GPUs running AI chews a tonne of energy. At those scales it does add up.

I've gone and deleted chrome. I'm using Brave, but its crypto-bros in charge of that so I dont exactly trust them either. They just have a really effective adblocker that doesnt seem to trigger youtube into issueing shrill threats about breaking TOSs with adblockers

Comment Re: What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 2) 393

If it can, then it breaks the deterministic behavior of the known and understood physical components.

Ok. Maybe its the philiosophy graduate in me but....... lets hit the breaks on this non sequitur. Determinism has absolutely no bearing on the question of what is consciousness. Practically no philosopher, cognitive psychologist or neurologist thinks indeterminism is a necessary condition for consciousness.

This seems to be your tautological invention, and your attempting to argue it as a fait acompli. Well no, that isn't sufficient. For the most part, consciousness is , to badly summarise Heidegger, the state of paying attention to things (ie your never just conscious, your conscious OF things), Viewed this way, and pretty much any other definition of consciousness we've come up with (and there are many), not only is indeterminism NOT a requirement, in fact on the contrary determinism is required for consiousness, because when you are consious OF something there is by necessity a transference of state. The outside world CAUSES an impression in the mind.

You *really* are going to need to expand on why you seem to think what you do.

Comment Re:What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 2) 393

Nah. He's still sharp, and he's been like this for a while. Its a variant of the "Nobel disease". He's accomplished great things and is a recognized expert in his specific field (evolutionary biology). This unfortunately means he also thinks he's an expert at everything else. And because he spent so much of his spare time arguing with a minority of christians that even the other christians think are whackjobs, the young earth creationists and flat earthers, he now thinks everyone who disagrees with him are superstitious fools.

Unfortunately the turbo-atheist scene has seen a few people fall down this dark path. In my home town Iain Pilmer went from accomplished geologist and notable skepticalal talk circut pundit to ratshit-crazy climate change denier, because he has a vested interest in oil extraction and therefore anyone who disagrees with the oil industry must therefore be like the crazy creationists, never mind that the people he's accusing are a global community of PhD having physicists with 150 years of evidence based science behind them

Dawkins needs to go speak to actual AI researchers. While yes there are interesting philosophical questions raised by modern AI, there is no scientific basis to conclude they are conscious and they have no analogue to the parts of the human brains that consciousness actually arises from. Like the example of Pilmer I gave above, he's not recognizing his own lack of expertise.

Comment Re:have your cake and eat it too (Score 3, Funny) 28

Honestly the only thing I find LinkedIn interesting , is watching people posting horrifically racist rants and then seeing their employment status flip to unemployed the next day. (Life tip: If you have an opinion you'd be nervous about sharing in a crowded bar, dont go blasting it out on a social media environment your boss uses to speak to investors)

Comment Re:What gives? (Score 1) 46

OTOH, it's a local vulnerability, so many systems aren't affected.

We keep acting like we're still in the world of bare metal and VM based servers. But so much of the world is running on containerized (kubernetes, docker, etc) and lambda compute nowdays, and thats where these sorts of bugs get dangerous. It takes one docker container running a shitty unpatched version of wordpress or some nodejs slop and you have your platform for bypassing the containers CG Group and pwning the kernel, granting access to potentially hundreds of vunerable targets sharing the compute node.

Its hard to understate how much of the internet runs on this sort of thing. From old school cpanel hosts to modern kubernetes and lambda rigs, chances are a *very* large portion of the services you use online are vunerable in this way.

Now the caveat here is that larger companies tend to not be sharing their container hosting. AWS will usually still be renting you container resources at the VM level of granuality, and I *think* thats also true for digital ocean. I'm not sure how Azure or Google rolls with this however. And I'm not sure how it works with lambda.

Comment Re:Conciousness isn't as mysterious as you thought (Score 1) 393

Dawkins is right. Detractors are just clinging, faith-like, to the idea that our brains are somehow magically more than computation devices

It's not that. LLMs reproduce an output of consciousness, but they way they do so isn't fundamentally any different than a tape recorder or even a book. It's a deterministic process that we can fully reproduce by doing calculations on a piece of paper.

It's not that there's some "magic" in our brains, but there's obviously a very complex process at work that we don't understand. It's also true that the "neural networks" used to run LLMs have only the most superficial similarity to actual brains. Just because LLMs can produce similar reasoning it doesn't mean they're suddenly able to produce other second order effects.

Is it possible that LLMs reproduce this process? We can't authoritatively say no if we don't understand the process. But that's no different from saying a rock way also be conscious.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Dawkins doesn't have any.

Comment Re:Yeah right (Score 1) 19

oner also elaborated on why the board, including herself, voted to remove Altman as CEO in 2023. "There were a number of things -- the pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor, his resistance of board oversight, as well as the concerns that two os his inner management team raised to the board about his management practices, his manipulation of board processes,"

That's a long way to say, "We fired him to get his stock."

Nah, there's more than enough smoke to conclude that Altman's style rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Whether you think that's a problem or a virtue is another matter.

Comment Re: Come on, Orange lovers! (Score 2) 126

I think it's great. I've been hoping the AI industry would crash in a firey heap for a year now so I could finally afford some fucking RAM again. Nothing will kill it faster than locking it behind some Orwellian process of approvals by turbo ideological partisans. The whole industry will shit the bed and die and we might get some of our RAM chips and SSDs back again

Comment Re:yes, they are terrible (Score 1) 100

As a musician I can promise you trying to figure out the "foreign" context wont help you understand Angine de Poitrine. The whacky costumes and the like are part of a very english speaking tradition, punk absurdism. Likewise musically, they are coming from a group of musical genres thats about as english speaking as you get , prog rock and jam bands. That they are french speaking canadians is almost irrelevant, other than the fact that they've been known amonst qubecans longer than the rest of the anglosphere. The "foreignness" of its part of the whole show. They are *intending* to not seem familiar.

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