// .... the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a _paradise_ in this life - we went soft, we lost our edge ...

So, imagine a world where athletes are not allowed to "train". All athletes must be out-of-shape, pudgy and short of breath. I believe this world would be the antithesis of paradise.

Of course all life on Earth is "carbon based". So what is all this "phosphorus-based" nonsense about.

Actually, It's a reference to the structure of DNA itself, which is sequence of nucleotides linked by sugar-phosphate bonds:
https://www.genome.gov/genetic....

So replacing the little Ps with arsenic, but research now shows that life cannot exist without the phosphate bonds.

... I hear tapping daily from red-headed woodpeckers, banging their beaks on a hollow metal lamplight cover across the street. They are certainly not tapping to find bugs. These sounds travel for hundreds of feet and seem to be a kind of communication to their community.

"I legitimately laughed at the hashtag"

Just remember that these LLM's are not literally creative. They just rearrange stuff to optimize various cost functions. That #hashtag would not have been used unless it was in the LLM's training data. Yes, computer "intelligence" is just a series of calculations, but it is very well 'crafted' in human standards.
Sure enough, google "#FightMsinfo" and you'll see it seems to come from a 'Brett Labach' on TikTok.
   

Subglacial volcanism is impacting the flow of the Thwaites Glacier. Subglacial volcanism and other lithospheric processes have increased basal geothermal heat flux and basal melting.https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf2639

"How does a machine reading a book fundamentally differ from a human, and why would the act of reading constitute a copyright violation?"

Interesting question. It is well known that there are tons of copyrighted intellectual property (IP) embedded in the datasets used to train LLM's. And I think it is also known that some clever users of these LLM's have figured out ways to coerce the models to regurgitate significant portions of this IP verbatim (more or less), which could (theoretically) violate the "fair use" standards of copyright laws.

So the administrators and governments will probably see the need to create additional regulations, rules and laws to minimize the impact of this problem.

... if you actually want to understand what this research is all about:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.039...

No, it does not work "just like the human brain", in which neural activations across synapses consist of streams of ions activated by molecules known as 'neurotransmitters'.

Instead, this research deals with something entirely different called 'ferroelectricity', which is a property of some materials that have a spontaneous electric polarization. This polarization can be reversed by applying an external electric field.

This is new research in this area which is expected to have applications in using digital computers to mimic human intelligence.

... what could possibly go wrong?

It's not about being "faster or more efficient" but avoiding the cost of expensive license to use ARM instruction set. RISC-V is free to use to design CPU.

| Every system moves towards chaos.

That is correct, if you define the system as the Universe or, at least, the environments from which living systems draw their resources.

What is remarkable, however, is that living systems can reduce chaos strictly within their system. For example, a human can unshuffle a deck of played cards and put them back into their canonical order. That is virtually impossible to happen in randomly organized non-living systems. But the human who did the unshuffling had to generate more chaos in his own environment: eat food, generate garbage, operate machinery etc.

Gamma rays are the most energetic variety of particle-waves (aka electromagnetic radiation) known to physics, way above radio, heat, light, ultraviolet etc. There is currently no well-defined upper limit to these entities. So the observations of the HESS observatory are certainly not unexpected.

In fact there is a multinational, worldwide project, Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) , to build a new generation of ground-based gamma-ray instrument in the energy range extending from some tens of GeV to about 300 TeV. It has been under construction since 2015 and will be operational in 2022. Here are some links for more information on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.cta-observatory.or...

| ... I don’t believe that intelligence is a computation.

But your pocket calculator can compute sinusoids, take square roots, some of them can solve polynomial equations and do calculus. Those have always been viewed as 'intelligent' operations, more or less.

Now the so-called "GPT" engines have shown that they can generate "intelligent" looking output by correlation query inputs with jillions of bits of previously generated human documents, by using an entirely deterministic algorithm known as "self-attention". It merely selects the most salient bits of info which correlate best with the query and the database info, and interpolates/extrapolates it to some desired output format.

The important aspect of this is: GPT is not "aware" of reality or itself (even though it can say it is, along with a lot of other misinformation).It is just a "computation" as you put it. GPT shows zero "self-organizing" or "reproductive" or "willfullness", which are the hallmarks traits of human intelligence.

So, for the time being, no big worries. You can just pull the plug on a GPT robot and it stops working.

But I do believe that, in the future, humans will build life-like mechanisms to duplicate Life in every aspect, especially in noticing and reacting to the reality streaming around all us in this world. But it will require further research in life principles to learn how DNA perpetuates willful, conscious behavior of living organisms. Most likely it will need to link consciousness to quantum physics phenomena, happening in DNA-regulated cells.

... claimed Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1968.

Did NASA keep their promise and start looking at quasars?
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...
"Shortly after its launch later this year, a team of scientists will train NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on six of the most distant and luminous quasars. They will study the properties of these quasars and their host galaxies, and how they are interconnected during the first stages of galaxy evolution in the very early universe. The team will also use the quasars to examine the gas in the space between galaxies, particularly during the period of cosmic reionization, which ended when the universe was very young. They will accomplish this using Webb’s extreme sensitivity to low levels of light and its superb angular resolution."

| whopping 57 octaves below the note middle C, making this black hole a real cosmic baritone

Actually, more like basso profundissimo