Clearly, my example was poorly chosen. It's the principle that if life really did originate independently twice, then I'd expect the structure to be different as well. A whole lot more different than N1-methylpseudouridine vs. uridine. In the scheme of NDA, that one difference is akin to the difference between the DNA of Europeans vs. Asians.
Oh my yes. This quote proudly displayed on Watts' own webpage is spot on:
Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll
By the way, you can legally get free copies of the Rifters trilogy (as well as Blindsight and a host of short stories and essays) directly from his website on the Backlist page here. Creative Commons licensed.
Just went there - Thank you sir!
It *is* understandable. It's also a bar to understanding. (IIUC, the original computer bug was a moth.) But viruses are VERY different from bacteria. They're called bugs because they're all small and at a quick glance you don't even see them. (And entomologists don't even call beetles bugs. Bugs are hemiptera.)
Oh, that seems like thinking people believe that computer virus' are the same as biological virus'.
Kinda like people calling an attractive female a "hottie", but knowing she is the same actual temperature as all other women, unless she has a fever from some illness. From a bug maybe? 8^). This is really not that complicated, and other than people who feel that everything needs heavy categorization, it really is.
If you are treating Windows devices as much like chromebooks as possible (autopilot deploy into S-mode; fairly draconian setup) you can get away with not too much IT; but at that point you really have to ask yourself why you are using Windows devices. Most of the things you actually need windows for don't play all that well with that level of lockdown; and between chromebooks being cheap and defaulting to that level of lockdown without additional effort and the low end Apple stuff being nicer than wintel hardware that costs the same it's a bit tricky to make a strong case for running Windows systems as 'edgebooks'. You can; but it's not a super compelling option.
Definitely not compelling! I can't imagine the level of lockdown to get a W11 system to behave itself.
Yeah, Im still dealing with the Windows 11 apocalypse, messing with update breakdowns, and a worrying new trend - the damn computer is working then failing with no update taking place. One of the "fixes" involved setting up a non-internet connected network to run beside my normal network. But most people expect internet access these days.
> arise even now in the benthic environment
*twitches uncomfortably, having read Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy*
I haven't read it, but the outlines are a little disturbing.
If two types of living organisms developed completely independently, what are the chances they would both share the same exact ACTG building blocks of DNA?
We know that ACTG is not the only combination of chemicals that are able to form the reproductive backbone of life. For example, when pharmaceutical companies developed MRNA COVID vaccines, they substituted natural uridine with a modified version (N1-methylpseudouridine) in the RNA strands, in order to evade the body's immune responses. The replacement molecule works just as well for purposes of reproduction, but is not in fact uridine.
If life developed truly independently at two different times, intuitively, I would expect to see many such differences, at the very least, if not an entirely different mechanism. The fact that they use identical building blocks of DNA, makes me think they didn't in fact develop independently.
I don't understand the American urge to call everything "bugs". Viruses, bacteria, and insects are different things. Some precision wouldn't hurt.
The back story is occasionally we'd find actual bugs inside electronics. Extended from there to include surveillance devices, which were often small bug like things.
It's a nickname - Sorry that it is not understandable.
If any coherent society still exists, anywhere in the world, it needs to ban AI, and take an aggressive posture against any other society failing to do so.
The first mistake was to abandon hunter gatherer lifestyle for an agrarian lifestyle. We've been doomed ever since.
Seriously though, students have always cheated - and these were caught, just like all the rest.
Humans have been performing genetic modification ever since we abandoned Hunter gatherer days. Technology is a genie that won't go back in the bottle. A lot of people think the USA "invented" the nuclear bombs. A fission weapon was inevitable after Uncle Albert figured out mass-energy equivalence, with the simple formula e=mc squared. Others knew the formula. Others knew it could be a game changer. Radioactivity pointed to the trigger and energy supply. The Allies spent a lot of time interfering with Germany's efforts during to develop one during WW2.
Point is - this is happening.
The main issue with LLM at present is the concept that we are going to build structures that will have an infinite demand for energy. It is one of those things "How much electricity do you need? answer "How much electricity do you have?" So they look toward re-starting 70 year old nuc plant technology, and using a remarkable amount of cooling water.
Anyone with two functioning brain cells should realize pretty quickly that this is not sustainable. The present day data center concept reminds me of the early days of computing, huge energy sucking heat producing tube based computers, some that required nonstop replacing of the tubes. Then along came transistors, then integrated circuits, eventually almost all of us carrying a computer in our pockets that is so much more powerful then the old Colossus and Eniac, that it is mind numbing to consider the trip from utter secrecy to ubiquity.
I'm pretty certain that the same will happen to LLM's either by miniaturization, specialization, or lack of available energy.
But it is not going to go away.
I tried knitting a sweater like this but there wasn't mushroom in it
You win the internet this week! Well played indeed.
A chemical system that can reproduce via a stored code and copy that code is the hard part of life , wrapping it inside some sort of bubble its probably relatively simple, and given how small cells are and how large the earth is I wouldn't be surprised if once genetics got going it happened multiple times but only 2 lineages made it through.
I was just about to say the same thing. I would not be surprised if new forms of life arise even now in the benthic environment. Probably not successful, but possibly.
The whole thing about not being able to define life, FTA, is partially, the moving goalposts regarding human created life, and the desire by some to heavily categorize things.
That's how virus' are not considered life even though they evolve, reacting to their environment, and reproduce. They rely on other life to metabolize. Perhaps we've adventurously defined life?
So while very intriguing, we have to determine if this first "life" was "life as we presently define it.
Those Wuhan scientists needed something to do after COVID.
They'll get other LLMs to verify.
It's true that many of these are done by combining different AIs. But Claude actually *has* solved some old math problems on its own.
Yes, and that's exactly how the hackers got into the systems. They didn't have to hack every hotel, just those outsourced service providers that the hotels all use.
Technically, 10 minutes is 600,000 milliseconds. So any amount of time would qualify as "milliseconds."
Yet magic and hierarchy arise from the same source, and this source has a null pointer.
