Yeah. Scientific papers may teach an AI about science, but Reddit posts teach AI how to interact with people and “talk” to them. Both are valuable.
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
Yeah. Scientific papers may teach an AI about science, but Reddit posts teach AI how to interact with people and “talk” to them. Both are valuable.
The term AI was coined in 1956 at a computer science conference and was used to refer to a broad range of topics that certainly would include machine learning and neural networks as used in large language models.
I don’t get the “it’s not really AI” point that keeps being brought up in discussions like this. Are you thinking of AGI, perhaps? That’s the sci-fi “artificial person” variety, which LLMs aren’t able to manage. But that’s just a subset of AI.
By the time intergalactic navigation is relevant we’ll have likely dismantled Earth. The vast majority of it is just sitting there generating gravity, a huge waste of its potential.
I was going to suggest the Great Attractor or the Shapley Supercluster, but I think your suggestion is better. It’s more point-like and since it’s farther away (well outside of the reachable universe) it results in a more uniform set of directions over long distances.
Of course, cultural influence will be big. If these explorers are Terragen then most likely the Milky Way’s north/south direction will be pretty deeply ingrained in their coordinate systems. They might keep on using that, since it’s not like manual astrolabe-style navigation will ever be relevant at that level of technology.
You do need to think about the economy, though. People aren’t going to accept environmental regulations that will significantly impact their quality of life, that has to be taken into account if you are in a democracy.
If this isn’t a military battle then that makes Israel’s actions look even worse.
They were triggered indiscriminately. Israel had no way of knowing who was holding each pager or where it was located when it went off.
Yeah. IIRC the only out-of-pocket costs from my whole experience was the occasional cafeteria food and the parking fees.
Of course, none of this is to say that we shouldn’t always strive to be better. There’s always room to improve, if only because medical technology itself is steadily improving so we need to keep up with that. But it’s good to recognize that the situation’s really not all that bad as it is right now.
It’s complicated, but this might be considered a war crime. A key quote from the article:
A booby trap is defined as “any device designed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object,” according to Article 7 of a 1996 adaptation of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which Israel has adopted. The protocol prohibits booby traps “or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”
The prohibition is presumably intended to make it less likely that a civilian or other uninvolved person will get injured or killed by one of these seemingly harmless objects. If you’re booby-trapping military equipment or military facilities then that’s not a problem, civilians wouldn’t be using those.
I’m Canadian. I would say that I don’t think much about it in terms of current events, I haven’t heard much in the news about it in recent years. And my assumption from that is that’s probably a good sign. There used to be a steady stream of bad news, and “no news” lies along the path in between “bad news” and “good news.”
I did see a video recently about Iraq’s plans for a giant new port facility on that little tidbit of Persian Gulf shoreline it has and road/rail link from it up through to Turkey, and thence onward into Europe. It sounded like a very optimistic development if it can be seen through to fruition, opening an alternative trade corridor to the Suez Canal. Anything that diversifies a country’s economy is a good thing, and anything that removes single points of failure in global shipping networks is also a good thing. I can’t imagine the Houthi obstruction of the Red Sea would still be a problem by the time that route opens up but at least it’ll be an option if something like it happens again.
I’ll gladly take the karmic hit on your behalf and wish it on Kissinger twice. Once going out, then again going back in.
Albertan here. A couple of years back my brother and my dad both died of cancer (an unrelated coincidence) and I had the same experience - there was never a moment of stress about money. There also never felt like there were any untoward delays; when a situation was urgent we were able to jump straight to the surgery/MRI/whatever. There were a few times where we had to wait a few weeks for an appointment, but those were always the low-priority or followup things.
I know a lot of people think of Alberta as “North Texas” and imagine it’s an American-style hellscape, but even if it might be a little below the general Canadian standards on some things it’s nowhere near. It’s important to be aware of the baselines that things are measured relative to.
Yet another case of the Russian military apparatus looking impressive but turning out to be made of paper mache and corruption when put to the actual test.
I assume that some of those bunkers had nice mixtures of explosives and incendiaries in them, and when they went off they fountained themselves all over their neighbors.
Things change. There was a period before this information was easily available; this repository only goes back to 2013. Now there’s a period after this information, too. Things start and eventually they end.
Here’s hoping that some neat new things start up in its place.
But yeah I mean there probably would be some survivors.
This is literally the whole point I’m making. I really don’t get the downvotes, it seems perfectly straightforward.
I’m not Malthusian. What does Malthusianism have to do with this?
It’s very straightforward math based on the article you posted. It’s not saying that a nuclear war wouldn’t be bad, or shouldn’t be avoided. Of course that should be avoided.
My issue is with the people who insist that humanity as a species is at risk from nuclear war. That’s the part that’s wrong.
So, a population of 3 billion afterward? That’s what our population was in 1960.
A lot of people conflate “the end of our comfortable familiar civilization” with “the end of humanity as a species, woe, all shall perish.”
Even if this prediction is sound it’s not the end of the world.
The Fediverse seems a lot “bubblier” than Reddit, with people quicker to hit the downvote button for views that intrude. I’ve lost a lot of drive to engage here, I find myself often dropping a comment into a discussion and then never looking back at it. Unfortunate, but I suppose not too surprising when communities are smaller.
Yeah, I’ve got my own anecdote to chip in with on that, my dad was in the hospital for a month with a plethora of various potentially-fatal difficulties he was fighting with. There were ups and downs but many of the problems were being addressed. Then the diagnosis finally came in that the root cause was advanced lymphoma and there was no realistic chance of “beating” it, he died later that very day.
I don’t think that it’s necessarily a question of “willing yourself to die” or “willing yourself to live,” but I do think that one can decide how much effort is worth putting into the fight versus deciding to relax and let it go. Whether consciously or subconsciously.