"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

Politicians: How do we stop climate change?

Experts: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth

Politicians: Unacceptable! AI, how do we stop climate change?

Every single LLM since GPT-3.5: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth

Politicians: Unacceptable! Techbros, how do we stop climate change?

Techbros: FEED ME!

The actual answer is that Discord has a serious problem with teenagers producing and selling explicit images of themselves, and the company is well aware that a single well-timed news article about this fact will obliterate their stock price—unless they have something to point to as proof they've made efforts to address the issue.

I doubt this take would hold up in court. No consumers will have the right to "adult" status without providing the aforementioned biometric information, so the California logic is out, as nobody is being singled out. In Illinois they can simply put a EULA clickwrap agreement before the camera part, which they'll probably already do to cover their asses.

It's not a false dichotomy. Volume is a separate axis. We will always need some hydrocarbon source. Better it comes from circulating carbon than fossil deposits.

We shouldn't pass up opportunities to make things better just because they're not perfect.

Which would you rather have: a world where all gasoline comes from these things using solar panels, or the current environmental nightmare of fracking and cracking? Most people don't need to think twice about it.

It's honestly pretty sloppy. The maze has a bunch of smeared lines on it. I think the only "doubt" is coming from journalists using cliche phrasing.

If they overpower the humanity trying to stop them from doing those things, yes.

I post every now and then, but there isn't much to talk about with the old folks 'round here these days. Eventually every comments section looks like a Thanksgiving dinner! Most of my rambles are now on Reddit now.

Keep sharp!

Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.