It’s that mysterious Individual 1.

Then stop calling it that.

Weee saaaw hiiim dooo criiimes.

… as opposed to what?

“Stormfront up in arms over moderator being a Nazi.”

If they arrest him again, arrest whoever did it.

Apply consequences.

As if that’s not the goal.

“If Herr Hitler isn’t careful, this may lead to conflict with Poland!”

There are no noncitizen voters. Essentially zero. This was always about manipulating the election to favor the fascists implementing it, and I’m so fucking tired of any framing which pretends that’s not nakedly obvious.

Have a backup instance in mind, if the culture of your current one doesn’t work out. Especially yours. People are not at liberty to express what’s what with this instance on this instance.

Do not be afraid to block people, because they will keep showing up, and some of them are psychic vampires whom their instances will never punish. Universal Monk has a sockpuppet on every instance and will probably respond rudely to slash angrily report this comment for pointing out they’re a block-evading ‘hmm curious’ spambot.

As on reddit, beware the cult of civility. Some communities (subs) will viciously punish ‘fuck off’ but not any behavior that frankly deserves a vulgar dismissal. Read the sidebar. Don’t be afraid to search for alternative communities if the sole moderator is intolerable. See also the Ye Power Trippin Bastards community on dbzer0.

They’re racists.

This is the agenda.

America has the only segregated scout program in the world.

I learned this at an international scouting event.

Bit awkward.

Indeed, my strong suspicion AGI is wholly impossible for computers as we presently understand them.

Hard disagree, right off the bat.

We do all this on three pounds of wet meat powered by cheeseburgers. It’s not special. It doesn’t take quantum entanglement or any silly business like souls. We simply don’t know how to fake it yet. Current neural network shenanigans are a definite step in the right direction, as we started from observed data and got spooky abstraction, via three gigs of lumpen algebra we also don’t understand.

If mere computing power were going to break the problem then we’d be getting there by now, or at least getting anywhere by now.

We kind of are. LLMs are the wrong shape of model, but still went from ‘that’d never work’ to ‘holy shit’ in like two years. The next-word-guesser has plateaued at a level where it can code, write poetry, tell jokes, and summarize complex articles. Badly. A real dog’s breakfast on all fronts. It can’t even count… but it tries. It has extracted enough from the end products of thoughtful writing, there’s a glimmer of recreating those processes. It’s already smart enough to call it stupid.

The fact it almost works is what “getting there” looks like. We’re not about to turn it on and be blown away by divine omniscience, as in the nightmares of the subtweeted Elizer Yudkowsky. (Or more accurately as in The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect.) All the money in the world won’t fix these models, but they’re a near miss.

It’s abundantly clear is that ChatGPT simply does not have a concept of a poem as an object. There is literally no meta-cognition about poetry going on; it no more understands what a poem is than your phone’s autocomplete does a booty call.

Oh fuck off.

You just had a conversation with a robot about the poem it wrote, and you still want to say there’s zero intelligence at play? Nobody told it how to do that. It demonstrably has the concept of a sonnet; it’s just bad at doing the thing. People mock these models for playing chess badly when fed screenshots of an Atari game, as if that whole sequence of events working at all isn’t science fiction bullshit made manifest. You wanna declare it philosophically incapable of comprehension, because of a D+ in English Lit?

are human brains Turing Machines?

A better formulation is - could a human brain be simulated? Would an atom-for-atom scan, applying all known laws of physics, work like the real thing? I expect so. I cannot imagine a reason it wouldn’t, aside from woo woo mystical nonsense. If a Turing machine can emulate a mind this way, then intelligence is computable, and there’s surely a less arcane technique.

The article eventually gets there, but not before entertaining this tiresome bollocks:

This forms the broad basis of one of the most famous objections to Turing’s claims about artificial intelligence, the Ch–

John Searle was a troll. He wanted to yank out a CPU and interrogate it, when it only does what it’s told. If a computer appears sentient - it’s the software. A book lets any idiot respond in perfect Chinese? Cool, that book speaks Chinese. Memorizing the book changes nothing because it’s already a metaphor for software. Where computation happens cannot matter. Math in your head gets the same answer as a calculator, or you’ve failed.

When you’re chatting up Ziyi, and open the box to find Raul and a lot of paper, Raul’s complete ignorance means nothing. His calculations could be emulating a Game Boy and he wouldn’t follow along. He doesn’t have to. If you want to examine why Ziyi’s last letter was ambiguous, then close the door, write it down, and ask her.

Turing’s own work in “On Computable Numbers” establishes fundamental holes in the reach of computability by proving that it’s impossible to construct a Turing Machine that can identify whether another Turing Machine running on a given input will halt and produce an output or get stuck in an infinite loop.

Because it’s a paradox, not because it’s magic. The core is literally ‘if true then false’ versus ‘if false then true.’ There’s not some higher class of automaton that would get the right answer, because there is no right answer.

It’s true that, if all of the atoms and cells comprising the organism can be mathematically modeled, a Turing Machine would then be able to simulate them. But it doesn’t follow from this that the Turing Machine would then generate thought. Consider the analogy of digestion. Sure, a Turing Machine could model every single molecule of a steak and calculate the precise ways in which it would move through and be broken down by a human digestive system. But all this could ever accomplish would be running a simulation of eating the steak.

There’s no such thing as simulated math.

This sophistry reeks of Descartes torturing dogs and insisting they only act as though they feel pain. Thought is an abstract process - when it occurs in simulation, it still occurs. You don’t need a mouth to consume information.

Consciousness, I would suggest, is similar—a biological process whose realization consists of the actual qualia being subjectively experienced.

If a brain’s entire universe consists of simulated events, in what manner did it not experience them?

The response to this is generally that the time and labor involved is fundamental to art. But even more fundamental is the thought involved. At the end of the day what defines art is the existence of intention behind it

And the intention of whoever’s directing the software doesn’t count, apparently. In reality, even if someone only selects from countless renders of “handsome portrait,” that selection is an aesthetic process. It demands and reveals their interiority. They didn’t make the result, any more than someone made the songs on a mix tape - but if the mix tape’s about their girlfriend specifically, that’s not the musicians’ doing.

Fuck off calling it a mistake, AP. They did it on purpose and they’re trying to do it again.

While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.

These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.

This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’

Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.

So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.

None of it matters.

Conservatives just make shit up to justify whatever they want next.

There is oxygen on Mars.

Not much. But it’s there.

Fuck software patents.

Copyright made sense when it was a decade or two. Industrial patents seem basically functional. Trademark’s mostly truth-in-advertising for consumer choice.

But software patents aren’t about how you do something - they’re claiming the entire concept, in the broadest possible terms, and killing it. Straight-up murdering that potential. It is denied the necessary iterative competition that turns dogshit first implementations into must-have features. Nobody’s gonna care in twenty years.

Entire hardware form-factors have come and gone in a single decade. Can you imagine if swipe keyboards were still single-vendor, and still worked like in 2009? Or maybe Apple bought them, and endlessly bragged about how Android can’t do [blank], because fifty thousand dollars changed hands in the 3G era.

How many games would not exist, if Nintendo had decided they own sidescrollers? A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says those mechanics are theft.

Great concept, B- execution. It’s just a little too frenetic. Which is saying something, for a fake 90s commercial. Some of those cuts are halfway to a Max0r video.

Fear and cowardice.

The point was preventing a recommended fix by lying about price and capacity. In that case, it was about cars, but it’s the same snake-oil act to stop the state from spending money to solve a problem.