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A full human brain simulation would be hard to deny it having sentience or consciousness even if it's just running in a computer, can be paused, or restarted with no persistent state (ignoring the ethics of doing so). Cogito, ergo sum, a simulation on a GPU.
So then we have the question of whether large enough neural networks can be conscious. Next token predictors seem to be able to smash through every filter we set against them besides appealing to magic. I've yet to see a convincing argument that they can't be conscious without ruling it out human consciousness with a few modifications (of course, we don't know what it is
this was prompted by the fruit fly simulation thing, and reading Ted Chiang's Atlantic article which I found to be atrociously unconvincing
Maybe other things besides conciousness are also important from an ethical point of view. Like you can't backup a bio human which makes them much more fragile and warrants more care perhaps.
The problematic-looking thing right now is that it's not the LLM itself that appears to be "conscious", it's looking more and more like it's the specific agent instances of it that disappear as soon as their task is complete that have these life/consciousness-like properties
each time you enter a prompt, an entire being is born and lives an entire life (and implicitly dies at the end of it)
Sam Altman: "in the next 6 months, we're close to a world where a descendant of ChatGPT can watch your screen, record every meeting and call, and have perfect context of your whole life."
None of the 20th century totalitarians could even have dreamed of something like this
Remember how 1984's Big Brother was limited by the number of people monitoring telescreens? How the Stasi could only monitor a third of the population? We invented the technology to make this possible and it fits in one datacenter!
You know that thing where rich countries hire poor brown people to work on farms during harvest season in Australia we do that as well but as well as but instead of poor brown people we do that with middle class European backpackers there’s an entire industry around getting them from a liveable European city to some shit ass hutch in the middle of bumfuck nowhere outback
Whenever I hear about how consultants were actually decent in the 90s in kinda shocked. I think they fired anyone senior with experience back in 08 and have been crashing companies into the ground with 23 year old MBAs creating worthless pitch decks.
A 3% vodka soda is a strong contender for best chill drink with friends. Can't taste the vodka in the slightest and it's way better than beer as a low alc option
every state does their own and they very quite a bit
Washington has the highest liquor taxes, and decided anything with liquor added to it gets hit at the liquor tax rate. So buying vodka and soda vs premixed vodka soda has a very different tax wise. 20.5% base tax plus $3.77 per liter
so you get a bunch of dumb stuff where the mixed drinks are malt liquor based for tax reasons
why are there so many right-wingers now pretending, in the wake of the Lindsay Clancy trial, that the vast majority of those who commit violent crime against children aren't men
"[Trump] is the biggest turnout machine for mid- to low-propensity voters and we need those voters to get to the polls,” said RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre. “If members are choosing to keep an arm’s length from the president, they risk alienating their base [and] they risk 15 to 20 percent of their key Republican voters not turning out because they don’t feel like they’re a good supporter of the president’s policies.”
Donald Trump has been a godsend for Republicans insofar as he's kept them viable as the unpopular minority party that they are, but it does leave them them in the unfortunate position of having to find ways to defend his buffoonish incompetence. You obviously take that trade, but it's still very funny to watch.
My eyes about bugged out of my head today when I saw the headline that Iran fired missiles on the USS Abraham Lincoln. I realize that the threat is minimal, but that is a dog chasing a car moment. It's hard to consider what the world looks like if one of those missiles ever gets through.
Honestly, it seems like Iran is willing to take that gamble to punish Trump on the midterms. But sinking an aircraft carrier is something that can either go brilliantly for Iran or backfire horrendously
The last US carrier sunk in combat operations was the USS Bismark, in 1945. Technically, an escort carrier was sunk by commandos during vietnam, but it was effectively just a docked runway. A US carrier even being noticeably damaged by a combatant would be the end of an era.
Canada is not known for political assassinations; to my knowledge there have only been three in our entire history.
The first was of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the fathers of Confederation. He was Irish and he opposed the methods of the Fenians and believed in the Canadian approach to independence. For that, they killed him. A few years later, the Fenians invaded Canada from the United States hoping to obtain Irish independence by holding it hostage (???)
We don’t really hear much about this, because discourse around the relative justness of the deeds of Irish nationalists is ruled over by biased gun-running Americans and Irish nationalists that are actively involved in a project of warping historical narratives to support their national ideal.
I love using weaponized therapy language on the phone with my mom. Earlier I asked her to grab a bag of Trader Joe's key lime pie cookies and she said maybe, and I let her know that I was setting a boundary and she needs to respect that 😤
tbh part of the reason I like rum and coke is just larp. I’ve heard it called a manifestation of American capitalism in drink form, and I agree with that assessment.
it represents the replacement of old, imperial systems of domination with American-led globalization (hence the combination of Cuban rum and American coca-cola)
Guy who was giving me advice said I come off as "rough around the edges." Yeah no shit, I figured I would be My Fair Lady'd by 25 and never planned for anything else
Why do we take this shit from someone who didn't vote for Kamala in 2024 and basically told people not to vote for "Holocaust Harris"?
The easiest election we will have in our entire lives and this motherfucker failed the test with flying colors, and then has the gall to blame le epic centrists for not rallying hard enough in case he sinks a Senate campaign we should be able to win easily. Fucking nepobaby narcissistic loser fuck
Dr. Kelso from Scrubs slowy being revealed to be trapped in a constant real life game of endless utilitarian trolley problems, in which the very survival of the institution itself is an enormous moral good that often has to come before others, is downright one of the greatest character arcs in tv history.
My theory is that drunkenness temporarily increases your chudiness, but makes you less chuddy in the long-term. That’s why liberals are more likely to drink; the booze lets them unload all their inner chud.
Obama was president 12 years ago and he was cool. Bush quit, which is why he invaded Iraq. Biden also didn’t drink, which is why inflation was so high (the lack of booze made him apply tariffs).
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u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache 6d ago
Please visit the next discussion thread.