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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Yes, and so what? $5.5 billion was spent on the 2024 presidential election. That’s very little. There are individuals capable of spending more than that. So if spending more could actually affect the outcome in a significant way, why wasn’t much more spent? Surely the difference between Harris and Trump is worth more than just a few billion dollars to some person or group with that much money. My conclusion is that while some amount of money is necessary to run a campaign, even the relatively small amount being spent now is so far past the point of diminishing returns that spending more isn’t worth it even to billionaires who could easily do so and care a lot about the outcome.


  • I haven’t noticed this behavior coming from scientists particularly frequently - the ones I’ve talked to generally accept that consciousness is somehow the product of the human brain, the human brain is performing computation and obeys physical law, and therefore every aspect of the human brain, including the currently unknown mechanism that creates consciousness, can in principle be modeled arbitrarily accurately using a computer. They see this as fairly straightforward, but they have no desire to convince the public of it.

    This does lead to some counterintuitive results. If you have a digital AI, does a stored copy of it have subjective experience despite the fact that its state is not changing over time? If not, does a series of stored copies representing, losslessly, a series of consecutive states of that AI? If not, does a computer currently in one of those states and awaiting an instruction to either compute the next state or load it from the series of stored copies? If not (or if the answer depends on whether it computes the state or loads it) then is the presence or absence of subjective experience determined by factors outside the simulation, e.g. something supernatural from the perspective of the AI? I don’t think such speculation is useful except as entertainment - we simply don’t know enough yet to even ask the right questions, let alone answer them.



  • Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”

    Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can’t comprehend the human concept called “love”?

    *Or “sentience” or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.








  • I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn’t big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn’t the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.

    There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn’t get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row…

    I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn’t fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don’t think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.




  • I’m spiteful enough that I would have returned my new laptop (despite needing it for a trip in a couple of days) if I hadn’t been able to bypass the account requirement by disabling the wifi.

    What still pissed me off is that it would restart itself after downloading updates if it was left idle, and there was no straightforward option to turn that off. (I think I managed to break that “feature” but who knows how long that will work.) Turning my computer off is never acceptable unless I initiate it. It’s about as obviously wrong as walking into my house uninvited or borrowing my stuff without asking me.


  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    Today, I noticed that a restaurant I manage had its OpenTable booking integration replaced with Google Assistant.

    Replaced in what context? My understanding is that OpenTable still works just fine but Google is, on its end, no longer automatically referring its own users to OpenTable. I wouldn’t call that “hijacking” unless the restaurant had a prior agreement with Google.

    No Available Reservations

    That’s not the error message. Google says that you can’t get a reservation through Google Assistant not that there are no reservations available.


  • I can still enjoy far-future science fiction of the “humans in space” sort but I can’t take it seriously as a portrayal of what the future might be like unless there’s an explanation for why people haven’t been modified by technology to the point where they’re hardly recognizable as human. I really like Alpha Centauri (the video game) as a portrayal of a future where everyone is either a cyborg or a Luddite. The best part is that the game does this gradually until at the end the player realizes (or doesn’t) that the annoying Luddite faction (which usually gets eliminated early) had a point.