Exactly. It is obvious that this is trying to lie to you, because of course employees should be entitled to the employer match that employers paid into SS. If SS were a private fund, then those retirement funds would have been earning interest and the payors should be entitled to interest on their savings. “But, the index fund is paying you out more than you put in!!! The stock market will run out of moeny!” No, that is exactly what index funds, and retirement funds, are suppose to do.

It’s for farting. Previously the students were excusing themselves into the hallway to fart, and here they fart in the classroom.

This is your reminder that the president has no enumerated power to name things. The president can say “hence forth Alice and Bob will be known as Art and Betty” and we can all still call them whatever we want. You will not be sent to jail for talking about the Gulf of Mexico since that is what everyone calls it.

Trump voters live in the same state as Biden voters. If you collectively punish everyone who lives in a state that voted 55% Biden, 45% of the people you are punishing are Trump voters, because states don’t vote.

Our 401k will go down a bit, a bit of money will be transferred from retail investors to the big players, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. You won’t see so many ads for dumb AI services that literally no one wants. The big players will be fine, maybe, maybe, a few data centers shut down, but most of them don’t.

Release Barabbas! Release Barabbas! Seriously, is it any more clear that any pretense of good governance has been abandoned and it is all just turning into bread and circuses? I’d like to observe that while roughly 9% of presidents have been assassinated, about 40% of Roman emperors were, so this whole “bread and circuses” might not work as well as they think.

Not me.

You see, now they want to make sure you are dumber than the AI. You code as AI because you know too much.

I loved the NHS while I was over there. I got health care SO MUCH BETTER than in the US. And it was way more continent and less stressful. And, assuming that the “entry fee” I paid when I got my visa wasn’t subsidized, cheeper too.

This was maybe five or ten years ago. IIRC it was some sort of “insurance compliance” thing, but for legal compliance everyone accepts electronic document AFAIK, and they were providing electronic documents in the end so…. It sure seems like the profound ignorance of technology which is raising your blood pressure. 🤷‍♂️

Fair. I did mean shred the printout of the PDF.

I know someone whose job was to print out a PDF, highlight a set field on the PDF with a highlighter (say, SSN or sometning) then scan it back in and shred the PDF. All. Day. Long. Surely pushing a boulder up a hill is better than that

Or, the wall wart could be a network adaptor for an ethernet over power system, and the packets could be running though the power lines…. But almost certainly not that.

I’m sorry, but this reads to me like “I am certain I am right, so evidence that implies I’m wrong must be wrong.” And while sometimes that really is the right approach to take, more often than not you really should update the confidence in your hypothesis rather than discarding contradictory data.

But, there must be SOMETHING which is a good measure of the ability to reason, yes? If reasoning is an actual thing that actually exists, then it must be detectable, and there must be a way to detect it. What benchmark do you purpose?

You don’t have to seriously answer, but I hope you see where I’m coming from. I assume you’ve read Searle, and I cannot express to you the contempt in which I hold him. I think, if we are to be scientists and not philosophers (and good philosophers should be scientists too) we have to look to the external world to test our theories.

For me, what goes on inside does matter, but what goes on inside everyone everywhere is just math, and I haven’t formed an opinion about what math is really most efficient at instantiating reasoning, or thinking, or whatever you want to talk about.

To be honest, the other day I was convinced it was actually derivatives and integrals, and, because of this, that analog computers would make much better AIs than digital computers. (But Hava Siegelmann’s book is expensive, and, while I had briefly lifted my book buying moratorium, I think I have to impose it again).

Hell, maybe Penrose is right and we need quantum effects (I really really really doubt it, but, to the extent that it is possible for me, I try to keep an open mind).

🤷‍♂️

Gary Marcus is certainly good. It’s not as if I think say, LeCun, or any of the many people who think that LLMs aren’t the way are morons. I don’t think anyone thinks all the problems are currently solved. And I think long time lines are still plausible, but, I think dismissing short time line out of hand is thoughtless.

My main gripe is how certain people are about things they know virtually nothing about. And how slap dashed their reasoning is. It seems to me most people’s reasoning goes something like “there is no little man in the box, it’s just math, and math can’t think.” Of course, they say it with a lot fancier words, like “it’s just gradient decent” as if human brains couldn’t have gradient decent baked in anywhere.

But, out of interest what is your take on the Stochastic Parrot? I find the arguments deeply implausible.

So, how would you define AGI, and what sorts of tasks require reasoning? I would have thought earning the gold medal on the IMO would have been a reasoning task, but I’m happy to learn why I’m wrong.

I don’t see why AGI must be conscious, and the fact that you even bring it up makes me think you haven’t thought too hard about any of this.

When you say “novel answers” what is it you mean? The questions on the IMO have never been asked to any human before the Math Olympiad, and almost all humans cannot answer those quesion.

Why does answering those questions not count as novel? What is a question whose answer you would count as novel, and which you yourself could answer? Presuming that you count yourself as intelligent.

How do you know we’re not remotely close to AGI? Do you have any expertise on the issue? And expertise is not “I can download Python libraries and use them” it is “I can explain the mathematics behind what is going on, and understand the technical and theoretical challenges”.

In the US, sure, but there have been class revolts in other nations. I’m not saying they lead to good outcomes, but king Louis XVI was rich. And being rich did not save him. There was a capitalist class in China during the cultural revolution. They didn’t make it through. If it means we won’t go extinct, why can we have a revolution to prevent extinction?

I mean, that is sweat and all as something that particular professor thinks, but doctors in the United States don’t have to treat anyone they don’t want to, and we already see them denying prenatal care based on marital status. I’m sure sexual preference are just around the bend.