krapp

Humans are perfectly capable of writing code for old systems. Not all of the documentation that exists, exists on the web. If it doesn't, operations can be discovered by reverse-engineering the hardware, mapping the memory, etc. People do this all the time.

I think you may need to update your priors a bit. AI is already replacing professionals. Developers are already losing jobs. LLMs and agents are already running in the hot loops of our technological civilization, unsupervised, with root. Institutional knowledge and skills are already being lost.

>Feel free to extrapolate a reading like "I think LLM tech and a century of tinkering could achieve computer performance similar to what it appears the entirely fictional, voiced by Majel Barrett, Star Trek computers has".

But that doesn't mean anything. "Similar to" is vague enough that it could include video game NPC dialogue.

Fair enough. Your logic is unassailable. There is literally no difference between fiction and reality and no need to understand anything beyond "LLM talk therefore Star Trek real."

Plausibly based on what? The computer from Star Trek wasn't real. It was Majel Barrett talking into a microphone. You can no more extrapolate any real world computer architecture from that than you can determine amphibian evolution from Kermit the Frog.

"Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth has literally stated that war crimes are now American military policy. Not that they were really off the table for the US to begin with, but we're no longer even pretending to care about the rules, because rules are for soyboy virgin cucks and our warfighters are warmaxxing Spartan chads. "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality."

We should assume it was intentional.

I think LLM researchers understand how LLMs work and what the limits of using natural language as an interface are. The problem is everyone else thinks they're basically magic, expecting them to be infinitely intuitive but also strictly deterministic, like the computer from Star Trek.

Only realistic capitalist nightmares.

Americans were literally more up in arms over social distancing and masks than any thing Trump has ever done.

Christians aren't bad people, but it's undeniable that the one demographic that supports Trump more than any other are Christians. Trump is the face, heart and soul of American Christianity. Where else are Christians arguing that genocide on behalf of Israel is a moral imperative, or that empathy is a sin?

If so many Christians were so easily swayed by hateful propaganda then that's still a fault and failure of the religion, as is the utter failure of the "good" Christians to do anything about it. People aren't machines that blindly process inputs into outputs, at least not in any useful sense that takes morality and ethics into account. People have agency, they're responsible for their own decisions. And these people have a Bible probably at arms reach at all times and they know what it says.

Unfortunately, the Constitution (Article 1 Section 10) forbids states from entering into alliances and treaties with other countries, or with one another, without the explicit permission of Congress.

If you want to blame someone for Trump, blame the people who kept voting for him instead of the people who didn't.

>The american left likes to pretend trump is the problem, and if he goes then everything is fine. That is wishful thinking; he is just the symptom.

The American left has been screaming from the rooftops about systemic racism, misogyny and rape culture, capitalism, imperialism, right-wing Christianity, fascism and all of the deeper issues that Trump is a symptom for almost a century, and that Trump is just a symptom of those issues since 2016. Once again, Americans were warned. But because the warning came from people who weren't straight, white, male and Christian, no one bothered to listen.

You're pretending not to comprehend the simple concept of a barista.

I can see you're not interested in a good faith conversation here. I'm not going to waste any more of my time. Feel free to keep on berating me if it makes you feel better.

It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.

Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.

Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.

Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.

Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.

Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.

The article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website.

The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.

No. Honestly AI drives me to nerd out and tinker even more just to spite the homogenization and dehumanization of it all. If we're entering a world in which doing anything but blindly consuming whatever pablum the machine feeds us is seen as foolish then I guess I'll be a fool.

They own the business, they don't make the coffee, nor did they make the sign they had earlier.

It was literally just talking, though.

I didn't claim they did.

I love Star Trek, I love Star Wars, and I love Doctor Who. I have very fond memories of watching Tom Baker's episodes on PBS back in the day.

But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.

Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.

There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.

Main line Star Wars is a train wreck, unfortunately. I was one of the apparently few people who was looking forward to something new, even deconstructive, in the sequel trilogy. I'm so sick of Palpatine vs. Skywalker chosen bloodline nonsense you can't even imagine, and the last thing I want is to have my nostalgia pandered to.

The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.

Ok. That would be weird. Presumably if you have power, you have the power to just quit or resign.

Given how much effort people put into getting out of jury duty I can only imagine how something like sortition (which I think is what you're describing) would work. Would it be like military conscription, where you could go to prison if you're AWOL? If so, who really has the power in that scenario?

And there's also the problem of competence. Forcing some random to act as Secretary of HHS is more likely to get us an RFK type than someone who knows what they're doing. But then vetting candidates with some kind of voir dire like system is just voting, except only a few people get to do it.

"strawman"

Why is this only ever demanded of people who criticize the premise that LLMs are conscious beings, whereas the people who believe it simply have to gesture vaguely in the direction of some correlation in language between LLMs and humans, and the matter is considered closed?

What is the empirically tested basis for the null hypothesis that LLMs are conscious until proven otherwise?

Education makes you more efficient at exploiting people, but it also makes you more efficient at detecting and resisting the exploits. While no one is immune to it because the most effective kinds of exploitation are emotional rather than rational (see both religion and populism,) a solid educational foundation by the public makes it more difficult for the elites - who will by definition always be educated - to manipulate the public.

I feel like you're just arguing around education being an issue. When people cheat at their education, the outcome is they aren't educated. They can't practice critical thinking without a framework for understanding the world and so all they have is unfocused cynicism, which social media is designed to readily exploit.

They're called helicopters.

>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ?

A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0].

Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

>If AI were unleashed, in raw form today, it could cause havoc.

What is "raw form?"

Yes, it was set up that way to keep slave-owning states in the union, which one assumes should no longer be an issue.

I don't think you should be able to win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states necessarily, but I definitely don't think you should be able to win the presidency by only doing well in a couple of swing states.