goatlover

The Congress, representing the will of the people as their reps, has the most power of three branches. The president is technically elected by the states via the Electoral College unlike Congressional representatives.

The president is supposed to answer to Congress. The purpose was not to have an exectuive wielding the power of a king or a tyrant, which the US founding fathers were worried about.

I didn't consent to being recorded in public, so don't agree that we just shrug it off.

It came from Congress creating those agencies as is their right to do so, and they were created with the idea of not being weaponize for partisan purposes. We really don't want the DOJ to be the personal enforcement of the president's whims against his political enemies.

Math as a field is unbounded. There's always more to discover, new systems to invent, new problems to find. It's not just some predefined set of unsolved problems.

Math is also a matter of what is both interesting and useful to humans.

For some reason there is this virulent strain of anti-human AI rhetoric that machines will replace us. But what is the purpose of math as a field of study if we're not in the loop?

The world could work differently if people decide it should.

Because our brains are part of bodies that sense and interact with the world. What would an LLM be conscious of? If I prompt it to to be a character that kicks a rock real hard, is it going to feel pain? How? When it's not being prompted what would it be conscious of? When it's being trained, does it have every conscious experience referenced in the training?

You can bite the functional bullet and just claim any system of sufficient complexity will be conscious, as long as you're okay with nation states, thermostats and meteor showers having experiences.

There are giant tortoises that live longer than humans. I don't think they require a prolonged childhood for training to become successful adults. Perhaps the "programmed to die" is just an artifact of different evolutionary branches for some other biological reason.

There is a vast amount of difference between growing old and dying by 100+ and living until the heat death of the Universe trillions of years from now. Surely something in between, say centuries or millenia without death from the ravages of old age would be ideal. Life is too short and tends to end in a bad way, would be nicer if it was a bit longer and more open ended without the decline until something fails.

What does consciousness have to do with reasoning? You're conflating two different things.

Consciousness is the what-it's-like of sensation you have as an organism from your sensory modalities and having a body. For human, that's colors, sounds, tastes, smells, feels, feeling of balance and what not that happen in perception, hallucination, memory, imagination, inner dialog and dreams along with emotions. Each sentient organism has their own sensations and emotions making up subjective experiences that nobody else has access to except inference from behavior and language (for humans).

That's not reasoning (just the having sensations/emotions). Reasoning is an adjacent activity that can be conscious but also unconscious. And it's hard to say that colors, sounds, emotions are illusions. What does that mean? We do experience them. There is something it's like to see color which is different from what it's like to feel pain or to be in love. And none of those (presumably) are what it's like when a bat experiences echolocation (there are many examples from the animal kingdom if one takes issue with echolocation).

They're not part of an evolved biological organism, so why would it be surprising if they're different? It is called artificial intelligence, and it's not a simulation of a brain like the Nematode OpenWorm.

So why did the tech CEOs and VCs get behind Trump's reelection if there's no meaningful difference? We can see it already, Trump is saying they should regulate themselves.

That's what lawyers and judges are for. To argue over and interpret the meaning of laws, regulations, contracts, constitutions. It's all human wording and concepts, which are not deterministic, one-time interpretable things that a compiler would understand. They have to be understood in context of legal history and contemporary culture.

The law isn't computer science as much as Silicon Valley would like to make it so.

What isn't self-explanatory in that 4th Amendment quote?

If a country is "thoroughly taken over by crime", wouldn't it stand to reason that the criminals are running the surveillance state? Certainly starting to feel that way in the US at the federal level.

Maybe more Brits should care? I've seen some complaining online and in the media about living in a surveillance state.

Significant unemployment leads to civil unrest, which leads to government intervention.

But people aren't responsible for taking advantage of gullible natures?

Problem is when it effects others. Addicts often have families. There's also a social cost when they go broke and lose everything. Just like with drug addicts.

But this is more about the companies preying on addiction, incentivizing it.

I do want the government to protect people from predatory and exploitative behavior.

You're making a statement of "fact" about a futuristic technology that doesn't exist.

Vote for the candidates that are willing to change the status quo.

There's no evidence that a doomsday virus can be created. There's a tradeoff between how infectious and how deadly a disease is. You would have to develop a two-stage virus, and that would require a large lab or labs with material being shipped there. Something humans would definitely notice. Even then, how would the virus reach literally everyone? People will take measures to not become infected once the threat has been identified, and some people and groups are isolated as it is. And no virus kills everyone. Rabies comes closest at 99%. But unlike what the zombie genre would have you believe, it has a poor means of delivery.

This isn't like vibe coding. The AI would have to make the virus in laboratory conditions and then disseminate it globally without prior detection.

You mean mo political willpower form the current US administration and Congress. I'm not sure what "endgame" is supposed to mean. There are future elections, including the US midterms just weeks away.

And a glorified database, and chart making tool, and whatever business app they can hack together.

Again, it is the states who administer elections. Full stop. The administration is trying to undermine that. Trump and his allies have already said the Democrats can't be allowed to win.

I'm not aware of foreign nations voting in US elections. That's up to the states to prevent as is their Constitutional duty. But no, Democrats are doing quite well in the polls, and have performed well in special elections with large turnouts in primaries.

Undocumented is the much broader term which doesn't carry the negative connotation that somebody living here is an "alien". They may have come here illegally, or their status may be in limbo, they could be a refugee seeking asylum, they could have overstayed their visa, they could be waiting on a ruling from an immigration court, or waiting to appear in court.

The administration could have decided to revoke their status. A judge could have put a stay in place because deportation would mean returning them to a dangerous situation. See the Abrego Garcia case. Some don't even know their status since their parents brought them here at a young age.

So you see it's not as simple as branding everyone an "illegal alien". That's political propaganda at work.

The purpose of my response was that using Friedman's quote was hypocritical when expensive wars are fought and taxes on the wealthy are cut (a point ignored). It's also unclear to what extend the undocumented are a burden on the welfare state in relation to the above. The current party in power, with the exception of Senator Rand Paul, seem remarkably unconcerned with the $40 trillion deficit.

As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.

Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?

The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.

An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.