griffzhowl

So it's lies all the way down?

I had suspected...

Photosynthesis was found to rely on a coherent superposition a few years ago

If someone steals my passwords and then does nothing with them, or just uses them for their private purposes, then there's no problem. The problems only occur if my passwords are used to take control of my accounts or identity, which would deprive me of my accounts or money etc. So your example actually reinforces that the relevant ethical distinction (the harm) is indeed in intending to deprive someone of something they possess/control

National security can mean protecting a society founded on the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It can also mean facilitating a militaristic surveillance state.

Not necessarily the same things, and at some point we might have to choose who's side we're on

It applies to anyone knowingly using false information to try to influence people

The point is to convince people who are undecided. Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported is then short-sighted and counterproductive, because enough false predictions will turn up that those undecided will tune out entirely

They are. I just used different words to refer to the same idea

Good points, but it any case, it's true that chimps in general treat group members very differently to outsiders isn't it? Those behaviours that de Waal mentions seem probably directed towards group members. Are there any documented chimp populations where chimps aren't violently aggressive towards members of other groups?

I remember reading, not sure if it's from de Waal, about chimp "raiding parties", where groups of young males will get excited and loudly vocalise as they gather together and head towards a neighboring territory, but when they get close they all go very silent, and will attack individuals from a neighboring troop if they sufficiently outnumber them. They tend to target the face and genitals when attacking other chimps, a different behaviour to when they're hunting monkeys, for example. I think Wrangham mentions that some chimps will hold the targeted individuals' limbs while others attack.

Aside from the brutality, these behaviours seem too cogently goal-directed and sophisticated to just be responses to environmental pressures. There's some deeper reasons involved, imo, even if the severity of the violence is exacerbated by resource and territorial pressures.

noob question: can't we just use longer classical keys, at least as a stop gap?

In the UK the main deception was the farcical Iraq Dossier, aka "the dodgy dossier", put together by Blair's propaganda chief Alaister Campbell. Colin Powell had seen it before release but not sure what role it played in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier

Looks like not much. The book is about using Python to implement numerical methods, mainly about teaching the Python part, and that's all explained. You might be missing motivation if you don't know any physics, but even so, basic mechanics using differential equations seems to be enough to give context, at least for the earlier parts

Dogs are allowed though, and used to herd sheep and cattle, so ground-nesting birds don't seem to be a big concern

Of course, but everything depends on context. Stating a mathematical theorem in English will also make no sense to someone who's not acquainted with the field

> People who really grasp a subject can usually explain it well in plain language.

That's very much a matter of style. An equation is often the plainest way of expressing something

Ah, I thought writing a bit was irreversible, because after writing say 1, the previous state could have been a 0 or a 1. But in fact writing a bit should be thought of as the whole process "0 to 1" or "1 to 1", including the initial bit, so that the process is logically reversible. Is that right? Then what I had in mind as an irreversible process of writing would be equivalent to first erasing the bit and then writing the new one.

> The platform doesn’t need to bother with individual prompts - it just needs to see where the questions cluster. A map of where the world is moving.

This was insightful, but is it much different to the kind of data google and other search engines have had access to for a long time?

And while LLMs might have sped up the rate of code generation, the tech giants have always been able to set a team on reverse engineering whatever they feel like, though they also often just bought up the startup that was producing what they wanted. I guess I'm not seeing exactly where LLMs specifically are creating the dark forest, rather than the consolidated, centralized tech landscape itself

Nice post. Just this bit:

> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.

I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.

I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained

Is the focus on the erasure of a bit, rather than writing a bit, just conventional or is there a significant difference between the processes?

Did you try turning your computer off and on?

I was talking about Greek texts rather than Roman legacy, whatever that means. Arabs certainly preserved some of the Greek texts, because many haven't survived in origianl Greek manuscripts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-Arabic_translation_move...

The Muslims also made original contributions to science, e.g. Ibn Sahl discovering what later became known as Snell's law of refraction.

Nevertheless, many of the texts from the Greeks were first translated into Latin from Arabic copies in Spain from the 11th century, because the Greek versions were inaccessible in Western Europe until Constantinople was conquered in 1453 and the scholars escaped to the west with their scrolls

Because sycophancy in humans is motivated not by the wellbeing of the person seeking advice, but by the interests of the sycophant in gaining favour.

It makes sense that this behaviour would be seen in LLMs, where the company optimizes towards of success of the chatbot rather than wellbeing of the users.

Well, maybe, but that seems like a deliberately uncharitable interpretation of the question, which I interpreted more as "Can you summarize the video in ~1 line?" - or at least closer to that than "Can you give me the answer the video comes to without specifying the question it asks?"

Even in those terms the answer given isn't really an answer because it just gives an expression with undefined variables.

But just a personal account with materials reportedly from 2011-2022, not an FBI breach

Answers that are only comprehensible to those who already know the answer:

This study finds a higher rate of correct identification for black people than for other ethnic groups, whereas a few years ago the problem seemed to be that the software was less effective at identifying black people.

Do you have some insight about why this reversal might have occurred?

But it doesn't seem like these physical factors would have reversed the effect between 2020 and now. Unless you can think of some?

If you're into atomic physics and getting a feel for the intricate structure of the basic processes, the best find I had recently is this MIT course by Wolfgang Ketterle. The first lecture is an informal overview, and he gives vivid and detailed descriptions of the phenomena they can create and control now, like why we see different kinds of thing happening at very low temperatures: the atoms are moving past each other so slowly that it gives their wavefunctions time to overlap and interact, using intersecting lasers to create arrays of dimples in the electromagnetic field to draw in and hold single atoms, this kind of thing. It gives a more tangible insight into the quantum aspects of matter that can otherwise seem inscrutable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agu68RGaoWM&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...

He also got the Nobel prize in the 90s for making a Bose-Einstein condensate iirc.

Yeah, soon after I posted this it became clear it's nonsense, a few people in the thread have referred to studies that trees underneath the landslide have been carbon dated to 9400BP, while the book this article's based on claims 5500BP for an "impact"

I mainly posted this because I was beguiled by the images of the disk. I hadn't seen it before, so even these shoddy images were impressive, with the circular form, radially arranged characters and lines looking both ancient and technical. Would you recommend a source for some proper information on it? I'm curious about what it says. Googling I keep coming up with rehashings of this meteor story from websites with "Atlantis" in their names and suchlike.

Very perspicacious remark that it's more likely than five or four... are you an astronautical engineer by any chance?

But I'm wondering about such shallow angles - wouldn't it bounce off the atmosphere or somesuch? Perhaps it's just about possible somehow: just imagine firing a kilometre of rock from a mountain at a six degree angle with enough velocity to get it into orbit, but in reverse.