AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Flowers nut on unsuspecting bees 1 day ago:
Who are we to say what bees suspect?
- Comment on Is geolibertarianism left wing or right wing? 1 day ago:
Most of the underlying concepts are left wing, but the people using the label aren’t.
- Comment on Is geolibertarianism left wing or right wing? 1 day ago:
It’s basically a version of Georgism, rebranded to avoid Georgism’s left-wing association.
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 3 days ago:
In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.
- Comment on People who care deeply about important events they have no impact on are abnormal, most people just go about their day without giving a shit. 5 days ago:
People care about events that make a compelling story. Whether or not they have an impact is secondary.
- Comment on Choosing to not to help your friends dying child doesn't make you an asshole 1 week ago:
You’re right, that doesn’t make you an asshole.
Being an asshole is the cause, not the effect.
- Comment on Turing speculated that acting human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise. 1 week ago:
The humans and machines that are behind the curtain have to be motivated to try and replicate a human
In a Turing test, yes. What I’m suggesting is to change the motivation, to see if the machine fails like a human even when motivated not to.
- Comment on Turing speculated that acting human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise. 1 week ago:
In the original Turning test, the black box isn’t the machine—it’s the human. The test is to see whether a (known) machine is an accurate model of an unknown system.
While the tester is blind as to which is which, the experimenter knows the construction of the machine and can presumably tell if it’s artificially constraining itself. When I say “the inability to act otherwise”, I’m assuming the experimenter can distinguish a true inability from an induced one (even if the tester can’t).
- Comment on Turing speculated that acting human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise. 1 week ago:
The problem with the Turing test (like Ptolemy’s epicycles) is that the real unknown isn’t the machine being tested, but the system it’s supposed to be a model of.
A machine whose behavior is a superset of the target system isn’t a true model of the system.
- Comment on Turing speculated that acting human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise. 1 week ago:
I was thinking of the example of syntax: the ability of LLMs to produce syntactic sentences is taken as evidence that they’re producing sentences the same way humans do, but LLMs can also (with training) produce sentences in artificial languages whose syntax is totally unnatural to humans.
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 13 comments
- Comment on I should assume I'm not going tomorrow, right? 1 week ago:
Is [contingency] something that may be contingent on other things that may take time to verify?
- Comment on Archaeologists Discover Mysterious 7,000-Year-Old Stone Wall Beneath the Waves Off the Coast of France 1 week ago:
a nearly 400-foot-long linear structure off the coast of France […] it measures roughly 66 feet wide at the base and stands roughly 7 feet tall
Sounds more like a jetty than a wall.
- Comment on When they named the planet Uranus they probably didn't know it was full of methane. 2 weeks ago:
Astronomers had pretty much all agreed on the name “Uranus” by 1850, and the first spectrographic studies began in 1861—so yeah.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Lots of actors never get into drugs, and lots of other people do anyway. We’re just more aware of the actors because they’re living under a spotlight.
- Comment on How long until we can start shorting years to 2 numbers again? 3 weeks ago:
I guess it’ll be when the majority of the working population is Gen Z or younger.
- Comment on Capitalism only asissts innovation for the first few years of existence. After that its a grift. 3 weeks ago:
Capitalism rewards risk-taking, which can be good when there are potential opportunities that are otherwise too risky to explore.
But after they’re exploited the highest risk/reward opportunities, capitalists increasingly rely on creating new risks, to the detriment of everyone.
- Comment on Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy 3 weeks ago:
I dunno—on the one hand, I can see where data consent that’s folded into a long user agreement might get overlooked and approved without thinking, and a second verification would be helpful; but on the other hand, the more times users are asked for consent, the more likely they are to agree reflexively to everything.
It seems like a user-configurable setting would be the best solution.
- Comment on what was the worst enemy of feudalism? 3 weeks ago:
It was a ritual of social inversion (a fool was crowned king, personal status was ignored and identities concealed, religious and social rules were relaxed, etc.)
There are differing views, but one theory is that it served as a reminder to both lords and commoners that the social order could be overthrown if the lords became too oppressive.
- Comment on what was the worst enemy of feudalism? 3 weeks ago:
Carnival.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 1 comment
- Comment on Does each country have a book/library of the laws of the land that a commoner can consult to check if they're about to do something illegal? 3 weeks ago:
From the article on Public.Resource.Org:
Malamud called for increased awareness that Westlaw was a commercial broker of the United States Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and Federal Appendix. While Westlaw had been adding value to the content by indexing it with their proprietary West American Digest System and accompanying summaries, the purchase of their products was the only way to access much of the public domain material they hosted.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 9 comments
- Comment on Why are there so many Christmas songs, yet hardly any New Year's ones? 4 weeks ago:
New Year’s is celebrated by everyone
More so than Christmas, perhaps—but you still have people with different calendars (Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, etc.).
- Comment on All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought. 4 weeks ago:
For anyone else trying to follow this research, the article is describing the paper by Moody et al. from a year and a half ago.
- Comment on Is there a word or (concise) phrase to describe the paradox of sharing something (like a website) that you don't like, but because you're sharing it you're tacitly helping it? 4 weeks ago:
“Feeding the trolls?”
- Comment on Why does everyone put celery in soup stock? 4 weeks ago:
Water Chestnuts are a fantastic substitute if you like the crunch.
My opinion of celery vs water chestnuts is apparently the exact reverse of yours.
- Comment on This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years 4 weeks ago:
@remindme@mstdn.social 14,000,000,000 years
- Comment on Are all dinosaur fossils 'replicas'? 5 weeks ago:
In the sense that the original organic material has been replaced by minerals? I guess that’s a version of the old Ship of Theseus question.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 5 weeks ago:
We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:
North
i North
-North
i^3^ North.And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance… or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.