"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all, which is my point. There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Also, nearly all of the definitions are extremely fuzzy.

Indeed.

The claim you made was not about whether machines can currently perform like a brain, nor about complexity. The claim you made is that the human brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which is a much, much stronger claim.

So I repeat, why do you think that?

38 of the 50 US states are "one-party consent" states, which means that as long as one person present (e.g. the person wearing the glasses) is aware of the recording, it's legal. Roughly half of countries around the world either allow any party to a conversation to record it without telling the rest, or don't have any restrictions at all.

Since there's no clear definition of what "intelligent" means, much less one that is widely accepted, that's a pointless argument.

You clearly have not used them much. Try using an LLM (one of the top commercial models, e.g. Claude Opus 4.7) to debug code that has never been on the Internet. I don't think anyone knows what "intelligent" means, so arguing that point is a waste of time, but LLMs clearly can observe results, reason about them, form hypotheses, devise ways to test those hypotheses, perform the tests, evaluate and reason about the results, etc.

My guess is that the face blurring happens on the car, before the data is even uploaded to Waymo, as a way to protect the privacy of random passersby from Waymo and Waymo employees. They likely never had possession of imagery with unblurred exterior faces, so there was no way they could provide it.

There's no way that Waymo is just defying a court order.

Why do you think that?

Free open source models that cost a tiny fraction as much for the same capabilities?

I can understand your stance if you think that AI is just a fad. But for those who believe that AI is going to kick off a new industrial revolution, it's the difference between that new industrial revolution being in the hands of people like Musk and Altman (who are profiting off of having scraped the commons), vs. the public as a whole.

What open source is capable of, when it comes to AI models, depends entirely on how much compute it has available.

If I was deliberately trying to cause a nation-wide backlash against data centers, I'm not sure what I'd be doing differently from what the AI companies are currently doing.

Has nobody told them that people don't like having their lives disrupted, particularly when they don't see any compensating benefit, or even a convincing reason for having any of it? If they were to ease off the gas pedal just a bit, they could probably do a boil-the-frog and get a larger number of smaller/less-obtrusive data centers built over a longer time period, and without the voter revolts and strict legislation that are likely to hobble them now.

Objective C's syntax is objectively terrible; it mixes Smalltalk syntax with C syntax, confusing everyone. Its implicit heap usage makes it unusable for real-time programming (e.g. even Apple had to fall back to C to implement CoreAudio), and ARC is only a partial substitute for RAII.

Apple was right to switch over to Swift.

Prompt:

Hey ChatGPT, who is being reasonable in this argument?

---
Rei: " ... We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own.... "

Synonymous Homonym: "Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

Rei: "That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees"."

Synonymous Homonym: "What you actually said:

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)

Suggesting that the word "drone" means "mindless bee.""

Response:

Rei is being more reasonable here.

The key issue is whether Rei's original sentence implied that all bees are drones or that "drone" as a metaphor comes from bees.

Rei wrote:

"We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)"

The parenthetical "literally, we took the very word!" naturally reads as:

The figurative word drone (meaning a repetitive, unthinking worker) comes from the bee term drone.
Therefore, our cultural association of bees with "dronelike" behavior is reflected in language.

That is a claim about etymology, not about bee taxonomy.

Synonymous Homonym's first correction:

"Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

is technically true, but it doesn't actually address what Rei was saying. Rei wasn't claiming that all bees are male drones.

Then Synonymous Homonym shifts to:

"Suggesting that the word 'drone' means 'mindless bee.'"

This doesn't accurately paraphrase Rei either. Rei never said the word means "mindless bee." The sentence only suggests that the metaphorical sense of "drone" is derived from the bee term.

If I were judging the exchange, I'd say:

Synonymous Homonym's factual statement is correct: drones are male bees.
But it's responding to a claim Rei didn't make, making it a misreading.
Rei's clarification directly matches the ordinary reading of the original sentence.

So the stronger interpretation is that Synonymous Homonym misunderstood the original remark, and Rei's correction is justified.

Or to put it more simply: you're attacking a straw man (a claim I never made) because you cannot defend your actual scientifically inaccurate comments about bees having half-hour memories.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

I am not.

Your entire argument was that bees have short-term memories. The example you cited demonstrates precisely the opposite - that bee memory is if anything too durable>/i>, such that bees will refuse won't even bother searching for their hive if it has been moved, that they always go back to the spot where they remember it being last.

However, what you are choosing to ignore is that, once a bee has been accepted into a different hive, it becomes part of that hive

That's like claiming that if you move to a different city, you've "forgotten" where you used to live.

When a bee, due to a navigation error or its previous hive being gone, enters a different hive (drifting), it absorbs the pheromones of the new hive. It is now chemically marked as belonging to that hive. Chemicals are communication to bees, just as much as vocal commands are to you. Bees do not learn all of the other bees in their hive, they don't have some sort of rolodex. If you smell like hive A, you're allowed into hive A. If you smell like hive B, you're allowed into hive B. Bees don't particularly "care" which hive they're in; they have their own individual motives and drives, which simply involve being in "a" hive. Once they're marked as belonging to hive B, they can no longer enter hive A (at least not safely).

Note in the above what has nothing to do with any of this? Memory. It's just about smell. Memory is about where the hive can be found after foraging (which is also about memory) - and it remains, even after drifting (they'll continue to return to the same spot - again, even if the new hive is moved). Smell is about which hive you can enter. Or for a summary version:

1) A bee leaves the hive to go foraging

2) It remembers where the best spot to visit is (usually from having gone there before, but occasionally from having seen a waggle dance) and what flowers (shapes, smells, sizes, etc) will be yielding best there at what times of day, and what areas to NOT go to, where there may be threats. This information persists for days, weeks, or even the bee's entire life. It can target an area to an accuracy of a couple hundred meters, and then begins a search.

3) When done, it returns back to where it remembers that the hive should be (this memory is highly persistent, and can only be reset by an orientation flight.

4) The bee starts by using the sun and broad navigational features as with outbound flights to get to within a couple hundred to a few dozen meters (the "visual catchment area"), then gradually switches to small-scale features and searching. This is all based on memory.

5) For the final approach, the bee relies on a mix of sight (remembered), sound (generic), and smell. The latter is not a learned trait, it's "whatever you happen to smell like". While it's usually described as recognizing the smell of their sisters, that's not exactly right. The actual underlying mechanism not so much learning what something does smell like as it being unable to detect what they do smell like

The mechanism the same as how humans become unable to notice their own body odour or perfume: sensory adaptation. Because they're constantly smelling themselves, their brain learns to tune out their own smell. However, it doesn't tune out the smells of others. When they return to their own hive, the scent is something that they're adapted to tune out. But when they arrive at a different hive, they're hit with a scent that they're not adapted to, and that they can detect.

If you want to put it in human terms, the underlying mechanism is "this hive thinks you're stinky, that one doesn't smell you because you've all been around each other for so long".

If you want to call sensory adaptation "forgetting", then you're going to need to call human sensory adaptation "forgetting" as well. And again, none of this has anything to do with actual memory tasks, such as navigation and how to find the best flowers. Bee memory is exceptional with them.

Who said the word "small"?

(My personal hot take is that, both for copyright reasons ("Purpose and Character of the Use", aka for-profit, is a critical factor in determining copyright violation, such as from scraping), and general moral reciprocity argument (closed commercial models extracts profit from the commons without giving back), closed source trainers should fundamentally be required to give back to the commons in some meaningful way)

... some public ownership of compute, to offer out for grants to Open Source development, so that the commons can better keep up with the closed source providers?