I would totally support a ban on activities that alter climate or weather on a global scale. Like, for example, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere. Shall we start enforcing it?

We're already changing the climate. If we're not going to ban all geoengineering, it doesn't make sense to ban only the carefully thought out interventions that have a chance of helping, while continuing to allow the ones we know are catastrophically harmful.

https://www.energy-storage.new...

This article from 2022 reports their 2.5 MW, 4 MWh demonstration system being fully operational.

All of those were localized events affecting the north Atlantic. Not a lot of tropical coral reefs there, and it's half way around the world from the Great Barrier Reef.

Current global temperatures are 1 C higher than in any of those periods and climbing fast.

That is exactly hyper-capitalist ideology. When a group of people join together to form a company, all their moral obligations to other people disappear. Their only goal should be profit for themselves and their investors. If they prioritize anything else, they're doing a bad job and should be punished.

Why? Because you say so.

Recognize that this is ideology. There's nothing objective about it. It's not justified by anything. It conflicts with common standards of ethics and morality. Yet you flatly assert it as true. That's what ideology means.

Don't you mean diminish their profits, not diminish my profits? There's so much prejudice displayed in that one word.

If someone is a bad employee and doesn't do their job, that's a failure by them and they should be fired. If someone is a good employee and does their job well, but you can't find anything useful for them to do, that's a failure by you. You should cut your own salary before punishing them for your failure.

Let's do the math. Suppose a laid off MS employee has $100,000 in an index fund that tracks the S&P 500. MS is currently the second largest stock in it, accounting for 6.66%, or $6660. If the layoffs cause the MS stock price to go up by 5%, that will earn them $333. That's really going to cover their expenses for a long time.

On the other hand, Satya Nadella owned 864,327.244 MS shares in the most recent disclosure, worth $123,331,718 at the current price of $142.691 per share. A 5% increase in stock price will make him over $6 million dollars. Of course, he feels really bad about the harm he's causing to the laid off employees, but that's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

I'm sure the laid off employees are so grateful to him for laying them off. They don't care about losing their jobs, only that it led to a small increase in value of the tiny fraction of their 401k that's tied to Microsoft's stock price. That's the way you take care of your employees.

Here's what he's really saying: the company has no loyalty to its employees. He's going to do what's best for the company, or rather, what's best for the investors. (They're probably the same thing in his mind.) They don't need to have layoffs. They have plenty of money. But keeping those employees would mean less profit going to investors, and investors matter more than employees.

This is what he's paid to believe. His compensation is linked to profits and to the stock price, not to protecting employees. The rules were written by investors, not by employees, and he's following the rules. If the rules were different, say if he couldn't get a bonus for any quarter when the company had layoffs, he'd think and act very differently.

This is the modern, hyper-capitalist world we live in.

It's pretty easy to get a laptop that meets all of those except the trackpoint. I think my System76 laptop does. (Not sure about the OpenBSD support, but the components are definitely all open. It comes with Linux.)

Your problem is wanting one particular feature that just isn't very popular anymore. When I had a Thinkpad years ago, I never used the trackpoint. I found it too imprecise to be useful, and the trackpad worked much better.

Is that sad? Why?

I'm honestly curious, because your viewpoint is foreign to me. I care about people, not countries. I don't think some people are better or more important than others, just because they live in the same country as me. It makes me happy when people in my country do good things, and sad when they do bad things. But that's also true with regard to people in other countries.

Why do you see that as sad?

The sad thing is, both sides are right. Parts of Europe are likely to become unlivable without access to AC. If people don't have places they can go to cool down (not necessarily in their homes, but somewhere convenient), the deaths will keep increasing. And yes, if too many buildings have AC, the exhaust heat can become an issue. And yes, it consumes energy that makes climate change worse.

Short term, there's no good solution. We created this problem by polluting the atmosphere, and now we're stuck with it. Medium term, the solution is to install AC on lots of buildings and power them by solar. Long term, the solution is for humanity to finally get its act together and bring CO2 levels back down below 350 ppm. I don't expect that to happen in my lifetime. Even becoming carbon neutral is frighteningly far away.

"For the present purpose the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving." From the proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 1955. That's the definition that's been used in the field ever since. Also see Turing's classic 1950 paper that introduced his "imitation game" that later came to be known as the Turing test. It made the same point: intelligence is defined by behavior. If we consider that a human uses intelligence when they perform a task, and if a computer can perform the same task, then by definition the computer also uses intelligence. The mechanism used to implement the behavior is irrelevant. This is the definition that's been used in the field for 75 years. Whenever a practitioner in the field speaks of "artificial intelligence", that is what they mean by it.

The Turing test is just a metaphor. It illustrates a point about intelligence: that it's defined by behavior. Everyone agrees humans are intelligent, so if you can make a machine whose behavior is indistinguishable from a human's, by definition it's as intelligent as a human.

Turing didn't intend it to be a literal test you would actually perform. Unfortunately, lots of other people have treated it that way. This leads to some common misunderstandings, including the mistake you just made: thinking intelligence is defined as the ability to trick someone into thinking something is intelligent.

Do the experiment. Enter that exact description into each of the major commercial AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) and see what sort of answers they give. Then stop ten random people on the street and ask them the same question. I predict the LLM answers will be more coherent and reasonable than many of the human answers.

Not that it matters. You asserted without justification that AI is neither "intelligence" nor "thinking", without bothering to define what those words mean. Then you picked a completely arbitrary test and asserted, again without justification, that it's a more valid criterion.

AI is intelligent as that word has been defined in the field for many years. That's not even controversial. There's an accepted definition, and it's really easy to show AI meets the definition. If you want to make up your own definition, fine, but tell us what it is. And don't say the definition everyone in the field uses is wrong, and they all need to switch to your definition instead.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say no, these concepts don't have much to teach us about AI. All of them are subjective, non-rigorous, poorly defined, and impossible to describe mathematically. Which is to say, not useful to modern science and engineering.

Modern ideas about AI mostly begin with Turing, who said it's pointless to argue whether a machine can "think", and instead we should focus on properties that are well defined and measurable.

The good thing about this is that they don't need to prove it to anyone. The only proof is to wait decades to see whether these babies grow up to have the diseases they were supposed to avoid. And even if they do, who is to say you didn't reduce their risk? Anyway, these companies will probably be long gone by then, or if they somehow still exist they can say, "Our methods are much better today."

Sell someone a promise that they can never tell whether you kept. It's a great business.