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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Non-religious but likes plot analysis.

    An important factor here is free will. Without free will, one may easily have a perfect utopia of the kind you think an omnipotent God should be able to achieve. But it would be a meaningless utopia; like a kid playing with toy figurines, just deciding everything we say and do.

    God doesn’t want that, and thus self-impose a limit on the omnipotence to not interfere with our free will. We are children that need to be taught, rather than marionetted to “save us” from the negative urges of free will.

    Here, the (self-)sacrifice of Jesus enters. It is not about God using Jesus to fulfill some perverse quota of pain and suffering that God has decided is due before we are allowed into heaven. It is more about what humanity must experience for the lesson that makes heaven remotely possible as a concept. Only through pain and suffering will we come to understand how our actions affect the world and those around us. Jesus takes (some of) the pain and suffering “in our place” with the aim that the message will resonate with people throughout the ages to teach us about love and understanding, making the concept of a heaven possible despite our nature as (non-brainwashed) beings of free will.

    In reality, even after 2000+ years, we still seem pretty far off the mark. Maybe the lesson didn’t take the way it was intended; free will is a fickle thing. Or maybe God is playing an even longer game.



  • What kind of nerds do you claim to be in this thread?! Despite being late, I see no mention of the xkcd color survey: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

    As far as I can read just by eye, its “mustard” or “olive”, but funnily it also seem close to the one someone annotated: “really? this color again? i have nothing against colors personally, but this one just stands out from the rest as unusually unattractive. i almost feel sad for it, but it made the decision to be that color so it has to find a way to deal with it.”

    But, someone, feel free to dig into the hex codes to give a more definite answer.









  • I don’t get this. Why are so many countries willing to play Trump’s game? It seems a horrible long-term strategy to allow one country to hold global trade hostage this way. Shouldn’t we negotiate between ourselves, i.e., between the affected countries?

    The idea should be: for us, exports of X, Y, and Z are taking a hit, and for you A, B, and C. So, let’s lower our tariffs in these respective areas to soften the blow to the affected industries. That way, we would partly make up for, say, lost exports to the US for cars, at the cost of additional competition on the domestic market for, say, soy beans; and vise-versa; evening out the effects as best we can.

    With such agreements in place, we can return to Trump from a stronger position and say: we are willing to negotiate, but not under threat. We will do nothing until US tariffs are back to the levels before this started. But, at that point, we will be happy to discuss the issues you appear to see with trade inbalances and tariffs, so that we can find a mutual beneficial agreement going forward.

    Something like this would send a message that would do far more good towards trade stability for the future.


  • No shade on people trying to make sustainable choices, but if the solution to the climate crisis is us trusting everyone to “get with the program” and pick the right choice; while unsustainable alternatives sit right there beside them at lower prices, then we are truly doomed.

    What the companies behind these foods and products don’t want to talk about is that to get anywhere we have to target them. It shouldn’t be a controversial standpoint that: (i) all products need to cover their true full environmental and sustainability costs, with the money going back into investments into the environment counteracting the negative impacts; (ii) we need to regulate, regulate, and regulate how companies are allowed to interact with the environment and society, and these limits must apply world-wide. There needs to be careful follow-up on that these rules are followed: with consequences for individuals that take the decisions to break them AND “death sentences” (i.e. complete disbandment) for whole companies that repeatedly oversteps.


  • What we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data

    Prove to me that this isn’t exactly how the human mind – i.e., “real intelligence” – works.

    The challenge with asserting how “real” the intelligence-mimicking behavior of LLMs is, is not to convince us that it “just” is the result of cold deterministic statistical algoritms running on silicon. This we know, because we created them that way.

    The real challenge is to convince ourselves that the wetware electrochemical neural unit embedded in our skulls, which evolved through a fairly straightforward process of natural selection to improve our odds at surviving, isn’t relying on statistical models whose inner principles of working are, essentially, the same.

    All these claims that human creativity is so outstanding that it “obviously” will never be recreated by deterministic statistical models that “only” interpolates into new contexts knowledge picked up from observation of human knowledge: I just don’t see it.

    What human invention, art, idé, was so truly, undeniably, completely new that it cannot have sprung out of something coming before it? Even the bloody theory of general relativity–held as one of the pinnacles of human intelligence–has clear connections to what came before. If you read Einstein’s works he is actually very good at explaining how he worked it out in increments from models and ideas - “what happens with a meter stick in space”, etc.: i.e., he was very good at using the tools we have to systematically bring our understanding from one domain into another.

    To me, the argument in the linked article reads a bit as “LLM AI cannot be ‘intelligence’ because when I introspect I don’t feel like a statistical machine”. This seems about as sophisticated as the “I ain’t no monkey!” counter- argument against evolution.

    All this is NOT to say that we know that LLM AI = human intelligence. It is a genuinely fascinating scientific question. I just don’t think we have anything to gain from the “I ain’t no statistical machine” line of argument.








  • … weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

    Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.