hnax

National debt is a public millstone, and war makes it heavier; but just as a reminder, it was the US that has prevented Iran from having nuclear ballistic missiles on short notice (the acquisition of which would have instantly endangered the ME and the rest of the world, at immensely greater cost). Don't be fooled by "economic considerations": under the surface there is a battle going on the importance of which exceeds everything that the media throws at you. Try hard to understand!

Paul Krugman is an Economist, but the world is Multi-Dimensional. By using ideologically aligned proxies, Iran was well on its way to subjugate the Middle East and the World to its radical Islamism - the extend of its weapon capabilities undermined demonstratively the security of the entire region. This couldn't last, but Krugman only sees one horse: his hobby horse ...

100%

Midnight Express sounds like machine programmed.

The real thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pA2tXOjDto&list=PLxh03o1BpV...

The best funk band: early Earth, Wind and Fire (before 1976 when they lost themselves into disco). Their funk was harmonically rich and rhythmically complex: A blend of jazz, soul, funk and R&B. Listen to their live double record Gratitude (1975).

"if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, [...] his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. [...] up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect."

Not an expert on Aquinas but as a theologian he should have had to go no further than the opening book of the Bible, Genesis 1:26,27, where God says: "Let Us (plural) create Man in Our (plural) Image. [...] And in His Image He created Them, Male and Female." Indeed, that defines Man, Male and Female: Image bearers of God. How? Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- therefore, God is a Trinity, a Father, Son, Spirit perfectly loving relationship.

"AI is a direct assault on this final motto, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence)."

I can't see how "AI is a direct assault on this motto". Man's actions are most often far from rational, and unexplainable from an intellectual point of view. Rather, Man's intentions greatly exceed that of naturalist animals, both positive in doing good, and negative in doing evil. It all points to a fundamental difference between Man (who has a Soul) and Animal (who hasn't). The Soul is the seat of Man's passions, and it's a hard thing to control -- impossible even.

How does Scallop compare to PyReason (https://neurosymbolic.asu.edu/pyreason/)? Are they by and large the same, or tailored towards different use cases?

Me too!

FYI: The Old (or Skew) Jan Cathedral in Delft, Netherlands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oude_Kerk_(Delft)) is off by slightly less than 2 meters. As it was built adjacent to a canal, and pile-driving technology didn't exists in the 14th century, it was built on layers of wood and cow skins that started rotting already during its building phase, causing the tower to lean from the get go -- curiously, its four pinnacle towers are straight up. The church houses Holland's biggest bell (the Bourdon at 9 metric ton) which, to reduce vibration and further leaning, is only rung at special occasions re the royal Orange family (births and deaths). Holland's painter Johannes Vermeer also used to be buried there -- because of excessive bad small all graves were cleared late 19th century and dumped in a mass grave some place nobody knows. To the satisfying of many a tourist, an impressive grave-like commemoration stone for Vermeer was installed some years ago.

I'm afraid you're overlooking the fact that, since AI scales linearly with constraints and exponentially with compute, the importance of knowledge (i.e. constraints) dominates over data (i.e. compute) for AI to be useful.

"... science tells us that we are incidental, accidental."

And nonetheless, every second, when not sleeping, the author is trying hard to make sense (... notice how close to "science") of his actual space and time. Throughout the ages, most prominent scientists have managed to do this, with great success, knowing that the universe, and themselves as a part of it, were the opposite of incidental or accidental: they believed their existence had a Reason.

This may be helpful ("The 3 Parts of Man—Spirit, Soul, and Body") to unravel some of the soul's mystery: https://blog.biblesforeurope.org/the-three-parts-of-man-spir...

Where it's nowadays standard practice in science to conceive of time as the dimension along which events are tagged, I would suggest the opposite: process, as a sequence of events, induces time. But also in the modern conception, time is derived from atomic events produced by a nuclear source. So, fundamentally the two conceptions are the same, but the process conception allows for greater freedom in what the underlying process may entail.

Will they put her with Sam Bankman-Fried in the same prison cell?

This 'crackpot physicist' is still alive and kicking and, indeed, as per the (analytical) induction requirement to make the case, his work deserves a careful reading to assume the geometric algebraic understanding of QM (for the 'crackpot's latest, see: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joy-christian-oxford_comment-...)

Always, as a good hedger Zuck, anticipating regime change in the White House by November, is minimizing the potential fallout of his treacherous behavior. Hold him accountable.

I switched off at paragraph two:

"Prokaryotes emerged 3.5 billion years ago, their gene networks acting like rudimentary brains. These networks controlled chemical reactions and cellular processes, laying the foundation for complexity."

... for which there is no evidence at all. Psuedo-science, aka Fantasy.

lua-classy (https://github.com/siffiejoe/lua-classy) works like gem and is fast!

Very good (and concise) explanation. Thanks!

Why is XMake not mentioned in the list of build systems whereas XRepo is mentioned in the list of package managers? (subjective: XMake is a great tool if you like Lua).

Although you mention XRepo in the list of package managers, you don't mention XMake in the list of build systems.

Man's greatest advantage over (Generative) AI is his creativity, originality, ingenuity, spirituality and commonsense. Our defeat is sealed once we become more impressed with statistically produces results (including the obvious hallucinations and subtle lies by mission and omission), rather than trusting our God given qualities.

We are and should not try stopping technology: we just have to sublime our human qualities and keep proving technologies' limitations (many of which are so obvious as requiring only some commonsense).

It's a bit rich having the whole case hung up to the fact that YAML interprets numbers as numbers and not as strings. What when your go version moves to 1.20.1 ...? You'll have to stringify it. Iow version members should always be strings.

Yes, I have the same :-(London)