MeImCounting

This comments and many of the others on this thread strike me as written by people who have either never worked at a real restaurant and/or tend to order bland and fatty food (eat like a toddler) by default when they patronize restaurants.

This is fine but really not reflective of good restaurants and the majority of the food they serve.

Yeah I cant imagine a use case for this

Perhaps they mean the finger thumb box thing bartenders do when asking for your ID?

Because they cost time and money to implement and there is no incentive to avoid data breaches. This should be up to legislation, if we as a society actually care about privacy we need to give data privacy laws some teeth and start really enforcing them.

Ahh yes two decades ago there was some issues. This clearly makes any disaster preparedness advice from this organization totally useless. You know what while we are at it we should all reject libraries, freeways, the park service, and the postal service as I am sure at some point all these institutions had a clear and public failure and that obviously totally invalidates anything else they do.

Maybe you should trust information from FEMA for instance? Or just the Department of Homeland Security in general? While there is certainly an aspect of consumerism in some prepper communities the actually serious people tend to default to advice given by actual authorities that deal with disasters in the real world. Serious preppers tend to focus more on rotating their potable water supplies and making sure the backup batteries are charged than buying whatever tacticool new PDW is being marketed on instagram

https://www.ready.gov/ Is the most obvious resource and has a whole bunch of valuable information.

Runoff from mining? Activist groups I'm sympathetic to have been screaming for years about certain types of mining specifically open pit mining obliterating watersheds. At a guess I would say either new mining interests are being developed around the relevant rivers in Alaska or old mining interests are being improperly decommissioned. Either way id bet my guess is right or close to right.

Why? How is that relevant? Isnt it well established that open source security research is the number one way to have a secure app/ecosystem? Why should tooling be kept secret when another team can potentially find more exploits using these/similar techniques?

Your primary source of face time should not be coming from your work.

> Are you saying that these two claims have some sort of scientific ~proofs

No. I think this statement is a conclusion only indirectly supported by scientific fact. This is a logical leap from more and more behaviors and internal states being correlated with various external stimulus over time. I believe it only a matter of time until it becomes entirely possible (though silly and will likely not be done because it only serves to prove a foregone conclusion and would be a unfathomably huge undertaking) to provide a complete accounting of all the factors that influence a system bringing it to the state where it reacts in a given way to some stimulus.

The only other conclusion I can see is that human beings are not deterministic and there is some magical spark IE everlasting soul making randomized decisions for us.

So yeah I dont disagree with you that attempting to exert control over oneself is a desirable thing or that it generally results in things that wouldnt have happened if one didnt work to have control over ones cognition, behavior etc. This isn't at all at odds with my deterministic view in my opinion.

I guess what I am asking is what is causing you to exert control over cognition? I would say its the sum of too many variables to count (including previous states of the system) acting on you to cause you, the system to be in such a state that that is just what it does. Given enough time and resources we could probably come up with a half decent accounting of the most important of those variables and be able to explain why the system is doing a given thing. In this example that means explaining why the system is modifying its own state in some way. What would you say is the cause?

> Have you an opinion on whether your opinion is necessarily true?

Yes my opinion is that my opinion is likely true as I believe it is supported by evidence. I would bet on it but I am not certain about it.

Still not entirely sure what exactly youre getting at here.

Yes what I am describing is my opinion which I have formed from looking at evidence. My opinion isnt really a measurement in the sense that one can measure activity in parts of a brain with an MRI. It is really just the state of the system.

I'm not really interested in abstract epistemological definitions of free will because they arent useful in the way that neurology psychology and biology are generally. I am interested in predicting or explaining behavior or observations mostly. You might be interested in that kind of exploration which is great! If you think it does have bearing on such things I am totally interested in hearing how.

Well most of the explanations I personally am interested in have a public and therefore high epistemic value. Since they are published and repeatable. Certain behavioral tests or self-report surveys on the other hand have lower value because of the private nature of what were intending to test. They still have some value though.

Private experiences may be very important for individuals and like I said elsewhere, free-will is certainly a useful idea in religious contexts. I do not believe this has any bearing on practical matters such as our ability to predict or understand the actions taken by any given system such as humans or computers.

Im not really sure what you mean here, could you elaborate?

> How would thinking be determined by exterior stimulus, when we all vary to some extent to the same stimulus?

Because, and this may shock you: we are not all the same person

You make an excellent point that people respond differently to a given stimulus. This is explained by those people having had different genetics, environments, upbringings and even breakfasts leading up to the point of the test. It has been demonstrated that your metabolic state will vastly change your response to stimuli throughout a day.

I ate something different for breakfast today than yesterday because one sounded tastier than the other. I made this decision not because I have an eternal soul making randomized decisions like a roulette machine but because yesterday I craved salty food and today yogurt sounded better. I am different person today than I was yesterday. My gut, brain and everything else has been changed by all the stimulus I experienced yesterday and is now influencing my responses today.

Yes it is indeed possible that in that small and shrinking gap of behavior that isnt explained by some complex set of circumstances and stimuli there lies some magic immaterial soul that grants the ineffable quality of free will. Bbbut since we have yet to find any evidence for such a thing I wouldnt keep my hopes up. Also theres much more interesting questions to be asking.

Theres actually a ton of different ways. The most obvious is probably MRIs of which many have been conducted with the subject having a huge variety of different stimulus. Then theres the good old fashioned behavioral studies ranging from the classic "does the subject jerk their hand back in the presence of heat?" to the more recent hungry judge phenomenon.

I wouldnt think the fairly self evident assertion that exterior stimulus changes both the internal state of a person as well as their behavior would be controversial.

At this point in history "free will" is really just the god of the gaps and those gaps shrink every year. Its probably a useful religious concept but as far as reality goes its the least interesting question one could ask about the whole human experience.

"Clearly" refers to the obviousness or self-evidence of the statement. In this context, "just" means "similarly" or "in the same way," or ig "exactly" if you like.

"Clearly" because exterior stimuli clearly influence both thinking and feeling, a concept supported by common experience and scientific understanding of human cognition and emotions.

Thinking isnt even a path to "free will". Thinking is pretty clearly determined by exterior stimulus just like feeling is.

Not only that but Israel is keeping the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties well within the acceptable norm for this type of combat.

Claims of genocide undermine actual criticisms of israels handling of this whole situation.

You dont lose lift in a barrel roll, you merely change the direction that lift is being generated.

Does it? The sophons are capped at light speed though they communicate FTL. The whole curvature propulsion I thought had the ships moving at light speed, not exceeding it. Three Body has plenty of clarketech but most of the drama comes from it being grounded in something kind of like actual the laws of physics.

Yeah I guess it has FTL but its not really FTL in the same way I think GP meant. It could just as easily be simulation or something else. Its not warp or hyperdrive and it doesnt really violate the internal consistency of the world building since its totally alien clarketech

Its really not hard! I am with GP in that most scifi with FTL comes off as silly, perhaps fun and well written but not to be taken seriously in the sense of its worldbuilding being immersive or intriguing.

Almost all my favorite books almost exclusively occupy settings with laws of physics that are internally consistent and believable and therefore have no FTL. See "The Expanse", "Three Body", "Blindsight", "The Sunflower Cycle", "Rendezvous with Rama" and too many others to name.

This is baseless fearmongering. This has been talked to death here and elsewhere. First this overestimates the capabilities of AI second it misses the historical precedent set by the creation of other GPTs throughout history. Yes some peoples lives were negatively influenced by the creation of the railroad or the printing press but that doesnt mean the downfall of society.

The problem of AI being concentrated in the hands of the powerful few is certainly a problem. Which is why its very clearly of the utmost importance that we stomp out AI doomerism now before they can convince congress to enact braindead laws limiting open source AI. Unfortunately Brandolini's law is in full effect and the meme of "The Terminator" and "The Matrix" are way too pervasive.

I would be happy to kiss crypto goodbye and though AI might be stifled it would still be developed further just with a mind to efficiency. This is because it has actual real world uses unlike crypto.

Polyethylene is similarly a good shield because its got high hydrogen content so is pretty good at moderating neutrons. I image a polyethylene structure containing a layer of water is probably something like what we'll end up settling on. Its also quite strong and would make decent structural components.

Indeed. This means upholding international law wherever possible as thats the biggest single mechanism thats kept us in something approaching peacetime for all these years. This means holding our allies to a higher standard than those who oppose us. This means being willing to oppose tyrants and hostile actors.

We cant get complacent about these things because thats how we do get WW3. Lets all work to prevent that. Lets give Ukraine what they need to fight. Lets be more strict and hold Israel to a higher standard. Lets strengthen our presence in the south china sea and lets do it visibly and believably.

“Piles of bloody clothing had been cut off and dumped out of the way in corners; coffee cups and cigarette stubs littered the decks, plasma bottles hung from cords, and all the fearful surgical apparatus for holding broken bones made shadows on the walls.”

This account drives home the horror and scale of that day that other accounts dont really match. It is always the reporting on the wounded, the innocents and the personal suffering that hits the hardest. This focus on the consequences of all the sacrifice on that day does more to honor the people who did the sacrificing than any story of the glory or tactics or generals ever could. Gellhorn says:

"There has to be a better way to run the world, and we had better see that we get it."

It is never more important than now to remember that. War is horrible. It is our collective responsibility to promote reason, compassion and peace in the hope of preventing as much war as we can. This was a good article.

The problem is that paradoxically, thicker shields can cause higher doses of radiation due to secondary radiation production. Theres a balance there to minimizing primary and secondary dosage but you cant really get it below a certain threshold without some form of active shielding. Theres a lot of promising ideas for active shielding but they all require alot of power. All this to say that someone on a trip to mars will indeed get a high dose and this is something that needs to be given thought. Its not an intractable problem but it is also not even close to being solved or trivial.

Folks on Mars is still quite a ways away. Not impossible or pointless by any means but it will require significant advancements in many domains before we can really do it safely.