That's the thing with metaphors, they have similarities but there are also points of divergence. Point is, my metaphor was not meant to be understood as a technical description of the system's workings.

For the unsuspecting soul who approaches this modern oracle without the faintest idea of how it works, the experience of facing unexpected demons could serve as a warning of the dangers they may face if they approach the tool without caution.

People compare AI and robots with Frankenstein's monster (or with Pinocchio, on a good day, if they want to give the story a positive spin), the construct which gains a life of its own.

But current LLM chats are more aptly compared with a ouija board. The machine itself is inert, and you can see it as a playful activity. But the model contains within it the highlights of a whole culture compressed during its training. You can access the souls of all the authors whose works were used for learning; but also of all the internet fanatics, trolls and scammers. When you set the machine in motion, you never know whose spirit are you invoking to answer.

s/how the person mental started/ how the person feels mental states/

There is no room for it to manifest in a computer program. There is no room for any "magic" in computer programs.

That's true for classic software in a trivial way, in the sense that a sequence of logical inference steps (i.e. a deterministic symbolic program) do not reflect upon itself.

However it may be possible that the computer program is not conscious, but the computer running the software is. LLMs in particular generate their output not from the specific instructions included in the program, but from the weights trained in the model; the software instructions are a requirement for the weights being interpreted, but the outcome doesn't necessarily follow the rules of a formal system and an inference process.

Current LLMs do not have consciousness because their processing is too simple for it to emerge; not because the software substrate is deterministic and mathematical. If the base software were processing the weights of the model in ways similar to how neurons generate brain waves, it is plausible that the emergent system-level information patterns appearing at the data level could exhibits the attributes of consciousness, including self-perception and self-reflection. This is true even if the computer software is deterministic, in the same that the neurons in our brain behave in deterministic electro-chemical ways.

On the contrary, it means that neuroscientists have measured precise ways in which brain waves of vision and audio processes converge into taking decisions before the person reports being conscious of taking such decision; and that they have studied precise ways in which altering the brain chemistry affects how the person mental started. Just look for the papers on these experiments for these topics.

No way. We may not have a full scientific understanding, but neuroscience has made huge advances in how consciousness emerges in the brain and how it is affected by the changing conditions of its low-level processes.

We cannot say that machines at some point will never have similar emergent patterns that could become conscious. But we for sure can say that the current ramblings of text generation from LLMs definitely can't be conscious, because they are created directly by much simpler low-level deterministic computations.

The long LLM-generated dissertations that people mistake for conscious reflections do not come anywhere near from the complex introspective processes that we know are involved in having consciousness; they are just mechanic pattern generation from the highly compressed encoding of human culture one which they have been trained. It's true that our own brains do learn by highly compresssing our live experiences, but we know for sure that our consciousness involves something more than just compiling memories.

That nails it. Too many people think that AI models are either Pinocchio or Frankenstein, a constructed being who gained a life of its own, becoming friendly or terrifying; when in fact the current batch is nothing more than The Wizard of Oz, faking the appearance of an awesome entity because some human behind the curtain benefits from making you believe that.

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

What makes you believe that? Our current best understanding of consciousness is that it's an after-the-fact rationalisation of the multiple low-level brain processes that converge into a subconscious decision. If that's the case, consciousness doesn't influence the external world in a non -deterministic way.

If LLMs are not conscious it's because they don't have this high-level aggregate feedback loop, not because consciousness needs to be non-deterministic. All their outputs are created from low-level reactions, like the reflexes of an amoeba that grows in its environment towards the gradient with more food.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

Paper and glass boxes is the best technology for voting. It's easy to spoof, but it's also easy to detect when someone is spoofing the result.

The most essential property of a voting process is that anyone can understand how it proceeds, and with digital voting you need to rely on techno priests reviewing that everything went as intended. That's not secure, no matter how complex cryptographic algorithm you create to avoid tampering.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.