card_zero

> I don’t think there are many of these people

I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.

Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.

Like how if you bought a box of chocolates, and it was actually filled with rocks, you wouldn't dislike it until you found out.

Immediate glamor followed by gradual disappointment is AI output all over.

Yes, really. "Positive proof" opposes the concept of falsification. You can only have it within a system formal logic, and science can contain those, but isn't one.

Basing science on proof (or anyway believing that you can) is Logical Positivism, a mindset that opposes the method of falsifiability. But of course mathematics is all about proof, and for that reason I was wary of it for a very long time.

I wish to defend the hammers analogy. I don't know, our whole world is analogies, isn't it? Plus it's funny, that's worth something right?

Ha. Well, OK. What do you mean by conscious, though? I think the vast majority of humans understand who they are and what's going on around them, if that's the definition. (The rest are in comas and etc.)

I don't think it's OK to skin pet rabbits alive. As soon as a human is in a relationship with a rabbit, or a pigeon (pigeons are lovely), the animal acquires rights, in my worldview, and I want to emphasize that point lest people think I'm a cunt. I mean they're going to think I'm a cunt anyway but I want to perform whatever damage limitation I can. The same applies to your beloved plushie too though (mine is Iron Man), it's all about the human really.

So, not dogs? The mirror test is balls, and "mourning", give me a break, it's anthropomorphism don't you think?

I am not at all impressed by the concept of suffering, which I ascribe to Jeremy Bentham, who I have down as a silly person and responsible for a lot of confusion.

It's a fucking berry.

No, I quite agree, I don't know what the point of saying that is either.

Oh, let's link to "lumpers and splitters"! This comes up over and over again in a million contexts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

That's very Popperian, I approve. And Hofstadter had anthills conceived as a unified consciousness, named "Aunt Hill" if I remember rightly.

What, a downvote, did I get that wrong? I wish downvoters would speak up and explain themselves.

OK, I searched GEB, it is in fact Aunt Hillary.

That's fine, but I'm a materialist and I don't think rabbits are conscious, so the whole thing falls apart. I'm down with Descartes, I think they're just a kind of proteinaceous Roombas, be they never so sweet. I don't think they have a clue what's going on, or any true ideas in their heads (probably rabbit memes though). So in my conception of consciousness, which is self-awareness, entailing understanding and explanations, they aren't conscious. Of course if you want to make consciousness into something more basic like reaction to a stimulus then sure, a rabbit is conscious, and so is the US, and a slime mold, and possibly a rock, since it will fall down when prodded. You could actually manufacture an argument for the United States being properly self-aware and understanding itself! But this isn't it. Besides, nobody really understands the United States.

Mostly personality I think. Individuality, opinions, purpose, things like that. Morality, except they have a kind of ankle-deep phony morality beaten into them but it's not like they're idealists with visions they strive toward. (Heading out right now to buy a CD player, so AFK for a bit, excuse me.)

Edit to add: I did buy my modern version of a CD player. It has no tone controls. I just have to accept whatever sound profile the manufacturer thought was normal and proper for everybody, which involves lots of bass and not enough middle. Nevertheless, albums! It's a way of life.

I don't believe in souls. But I believe in metaphorical souls, and an LLM ain't got one.

Well it's worth reading the linked wiki article section, which includes a link to another article "Copyright law of the Soviet Union", flatly contradicting you unless you maintain that the USSR wasn't truly communist.

Yes? I own a lot of books that were public domain when published (as reprints). I could read them on Gutenberg, but I'm paying for the nice paper formatting.

However, there is irony in a subscription to pirated material.

Do you really not like hammers? They seem quite nice. Hefty, tactile, purposeful.

I might object that being right-wing, or having fear of the effects of immigrants even, does not necessarily entail racism. But it would be more interesting to say that they are related, and that valuable ideas about nice traditional architecture and nostalgia for the good old days are also genuinely related to racism and colonialism and fascism, which means that there's something of value to extract from all that garbage before you can do a clean separation of the ideas. Mercifully I don't have time to write this comment right now, but it was probably going to include the word "culture" in several places.

France does some version or style of derailing Russian trains, you say?

So you raise the water, lowering the counterweight, and the balance makes it easy. Then you need to get the counterweight up again, so you ... haul it up with great effort? Or lower the water back down the well?

I think I've seen pictures of this type of thing for use with irrigation channels: like a giant spoon that pivots on a post, with a weight opposite the bowl. Still unclear how the return motion with no water isn't just as hard as lifting water with no counterbalance.

Here it is, the shadoof! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof

Doesn't seem to explain though. "The bucket can be lowered by the operator using their own weight to push it down; the counterweight then raises the full bucket without effort." So then, raise the water using your own weight, don't bother with the counterweight? Oh, I suppose the point is to have a bucket of water conveniently stationary at shoulder height, but held only tenuously in place when it's empty in the depths of a well, rather than the other way round. Right.

There's the matter of linking to copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...

If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.

Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.

It is there in that first link (search for "The Cyphral Distich"). It's missing, however, from this 1653 print: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... (It should appear on that page above the Latin motto.)

Pepper grinders have always impressed me, very effective devices, great at grinding out results, I mean pepper. I can't do it by hand at all!

They deny what: that they're very impressed, that they think it's cool, that their minds are blown, that they really really like it? Denying these things is allowed, you know.

Edit: if you're going to try to stage an intellectual wrestling match on the topic of is this thing awesome or not, you might as well make it a proper wrestling match and maybe get greased-up Turkish style. It would be more entertaining and you'd be more likely to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.

Stone age when? 40,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago? Göbekli Tepe is from a mere 11,000 years ago. I mean cranes for ziggurats, sure. Cranes for megaliths I dunno about. Maybe you just got a lot of beefy men to push the giant rock into an upright position, maybe brute force was the point. Giving them simple machines is a slippery slope (which is itself a more plausible paleolithic/neolithic technology) to a kind of paleo-punk where you retrofit them with Flintstones cars and apartment buildings and production line belts, all made from hide and rope and mammoth grease.

"Prove"? Like, a formal proof, about intelligence?

"Insert, now gone"? I press the INS key, I overwrite text, it's very useful. Though thinking about it I suppose that really turns insert mode off.

"Key beep" sounds horrific. :D

Dwarf Fortress (the ASCII version) was exhibited in MoMA. I think software sits in an interesting place between shovels and Fabergé eggs.

But what are you saying? YC are to blame for the unsavory future directions of the companies they fund. Counterargument, no they're not, what are you banging on about.