Yeah honestly there’s no point adding meaningless chatter either. I like the comment sections here because it feels like people have let their words settle in their minds before they started mashing the keyboard.

Claims it was Somalians (“who were not born in America”) who voted Ilhan Omar into Congress.

Across the entire US it’s estimated that 260k are of Somalian descent, 84k of whom live in Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Ilhan Omar’s district has 700k residents, 60% white.

Contra still holds up very well, really fun to play with a friend.

She barely even criticized Israel, she just said it broke her heart to watch children die and that she wanted to help them. That was enough to trigger the misanthrooy of these bigoted ethnosupremacist doomsday-accelerationist ghouls.

Yeah they make hair products.

If you need to wash something with hot water but don’t like the steam, mix it with cold water before applying.

Hell yeah Connections is incredible.

No it doesn’t. She’s blaming social media for actually getting the truth out there. She’s been at the center of US politics for decades, in the White House for a lot of the time. She’s just panicking because the narrative that she’s been part of pushing is crashing down.

Misinformation is a problem, yes. And traditional media also reports misinformation. Here is how responsible actors react to misinformation.

to engage in some kind of reasonable discussion, it was very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context

I don’t need context to know that it’s wrong to rape an autistic prisoner to death. I don’t need context to know that it’s wrong to bomb cattle and fields in order to starve a population. And why should I listen to Hillary fucking Clinton, the single cause for why open-air slave markets could open in Libya. Fuck her and fuck Bubba too.

I can see the ridges that cut across each segment in the rings of a fingerprint. And the fibers that make up the threads in a piece of cloth.

The thing is that we do not really know what consciousness is or how it arises. So I think we need to be careful when we decide how it does not arise, or what “true” consciousness is.

I think it is likely that consciousness emerges on the aggregate macro-level from processes that are simple on the micro-level. Such phenomena do lend themselves to be described or indeed understood best with statistics.

In particular, I think it’s a mistake to assume that consciousness can only arise by mimicking the exact functioning of a human brain. (Noting here that there is debate on whether other animals can be considered conscious with no clear cutoff or criteria). However I think that the criteria that you mentioned (continuous rewiring of neurons, oscillations of activity et.c.) could easily be added to an ML model, and I think those exact things will be added to ML models down the line.

I’m very near-sighted. Also means I have a built-in microscope.

I’m not very sensitive to bright lights. But I can also see better in low-light conditions than anyone I know. Not sure how that works.

A forum that started about anime fandom where you post anonymously without any registration. It has really lax content policy and a wide variety of categories, so naturally it is a breeding ground for fringe politics and social movements as well as dank memes.

I avoid it like the plague.

These pathetic morons think they’ll be safe through this exemption. In reality these deliberate security holes will affect everyone. How will these morons be safe when every person they have contact with IRL is a walking microphone for every foreign intelligence agency?

And? Why shouldn’t I expect to be able to find essential OS tools and settings by using the OS search?

It’s 403 because they are upfront about the resource being censored as opposed to unavailable, and they tell you who to contact if you have legigimate reasons to access it.

It was annoying as hell trying to download a LaTeX compiler and having the entire word be blocked, presumably because certain degenerates use latex - the material - for immoral acts.

Excuse me but what do you think memory is other than a huge database of key-value pairs?

But the Chinese room argument is very flawed, at least if we assume that consciousness does in fact arise in the brain and not through some supernatural phenomenon.

Suppose we know the exact algorithm that gives rise to consciousness. The Chinese room argument states that if a person carries out the algorithm by hand, the person does not become consciousness. Checkmate atheists.

This is flawed because it is not the axons, synapses, neurotransmitters or voltage potentials within the brain that are conscious. Instead, it appears that consciousness arises when these computations are carried out in concert. Thus consciousness is not a physical object itself, it is an evolving pattern resulting from the continuous looping of the algorithm.

Furthermore, consciousness and intelligence are not the same thing. Intelligence is the ability to make predictions, even if it’s just a single-neuron on/off gate connected to a single sensory cell. Consciousness is likely the experience of being able to make predictions about our own behavior, a meta-intelligence resulting from an abundance of neurons and interconnections. There is likely no clear cutoff boundary of neural complexity where consciousness arises, below which no consciousness can exist. But it’s probably useful to imagine such a boundary.

Basically, what if thinking creatures are simply auto-correct on steroids (as Linus Tordvals put it). What’s unreasonable about treating intelligence as a matter of statistics, especially given that it’s such a powerful tool to model every other aspect of our universe?