It is written in the New Testament scriptures and the book of Revelation.
The author wrote, “It's like tech is making each one of us our own little village with a computer priest.”
Indeed it is. Make no mistake. We are building a false god in hopes that it will serve us. However, this thing is not of the creator but man. The technologists have forgotten history.
Penrose would say that logicians can’t compute consciousness, so no wonder they don’t agree with his argument; computers (logicians) literally can’t! That’s Penrose’s very argument, which so few seem to get.
This seems to be an anti-ivermectin narrative. Obviously, taking doses meant for horses is foolish. But people are conflating horse dosage ivermectin with human dosage. An anti horse dose narrative is perhaps necessary, but I still don’t see numbers to indicate the scale of that exact problem. The media seems hyper reactive to just about every idea these days. But the real scientific question is whether human dose ivermectin has efficacy in treating COVID. We are sidetracked about a debate about whether people taking horse dosages are foolish or not; this is a red herring. Again, we ought to be concerned with the question of whether a therapeutic dose of ivermectin for COVID exists. That horse doses are bad for people isn’t proof against the entirely different thesis that therapeutic doses exist.
The article has the number of Ivermectin prescriptions in the last month, but not the number of people seeking emergency care due to Ivermectin. “Clogged up” isn’t quantifiable.
Let’s upperbound an average worst-case situation. If every single person ingested Ivermectin and needed emergency care last month that did, that would be 88000/50 people in need of emergency care per state assuming a uniform distribution of such cases across the US by state, which I know is false but we are just concerned with the order of the problem. Still that’s 1700 people per state, or about 50 people per day per state in need of care. How many hospitals are there per state on average? Oklahoma has ~150, so that’s 50/150 cases per hospital per day. That’s .3 people per hospital per day seeking emergency care for Ivermectin. Does this “clog” the system? Maybe if it’s already overwhelmed by COVID, which it seems to be in Oklahoma.
Of course, this is a back of the envelope approximation, but I’m skeptical that this is the problem it is being presented as.
The problem here is that the police are buying $75k robot dogs. Sure, this one is being used to sniff out COVID. What’s the next version doing? It’s a slippery slope, and given the history of the police in America becoming increasingly militarized, it’s worrisome the direction we are going.
Those of us in science who are genuinely interested in the truth (of nature, of the world), and not the exercise of justifying some religious-esque dogma of our own unconscious beliefs, seem increasingly outnumbered and outshouted by the orthodox choir. It is frightening because “science” now carries with it a powerful authoritarian connotation. That the lab leak was written off so early, and whatever the cost of that to society, is a consequence of this. Our age may be one of dogma masquerading as science. But this emperor lacks clothes.
I felt like I was screaming about COVID-19 months before anyone I knew understand what was going on. I feel like I’m screaming about artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, and platitude society.
“In the U.S. and other rich countries, welfare states provide even the poorest people with access to housing, food, and other needs, though there are still those who go without because severe mental illness and/or drug addiction keep them stuck in homeless lifestyles and render them too behaviorally disorganized to apply for government help or to be admitted into free group housing.“
This is not exactly true. Welfare in some parts of the US may be minimal; for example, food stamps may be available but not enough to feed yourself every meal. Further, housing assistance may be non-existent or virtually so in the sense that many are homeless while waiting extended periods of time before they can utilize it, don’t qualify because their income is too low (it’s true, but how does that make sense?), or such housing is temporary.
Also, some of the “right” interpretations are rather optimistic or generous in their assessment. But fun read.
I shared this with my girlfriend, and she, without being phased even slightly, replied, “Can I tell you a secret? I’ve always known that Venus is alive.”
Also, naming things is hard. If the things you are naming are specific concepts, and the conclusions reachable by reasoning about such concepts are highly sensitive; that is highly dependent upon such specificity, then the problem of naming things is even harder. I think this may be because what is hard about mathematics is the degree to which specificity matters. The names are just pointers to ideas, and these ideas are often unique but similar to one another, with differences that matter. It’s as if in naming a mathematical concept we are performing a compression algorithm on an object of great detail. A loss of information is expected. Of course, this process is an art form. Are some names easier to remember than others? Are there good names? Bad names? Of course. But I do think generalizing that “naming ideas based off people is bad” to all cases is a bad idea — rather a mixed approach is fruitful.
I’m not opposed to naming things after people. That said, I often suspect that the naming conventions and rituals of mathematicians (and sometimes physicists) serve as gatekeeping mechanisms that make life extra difficult for newcomers to a field while preserving the authority of current experts in a field by turning their history and duration of involvement into a more powerful resource than it probably deserves.
On a related note, I recently tried floor sleeping. I started on a carpet, which was nice. Then we moved to a place with hardwood floors. Painful. So I bought a Japanese futon. I don’t feel much desire to return to the modern mattress. Since I began this experiment, I’ve only slept better and felt better than I did sleeping on various such mattresses over the years.
A wonderful and amusing anecdote that shows how both types differ. This comes from "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers," a book about the mathematician Paul Erdős.
Also, perhaps I’m mistaken, but the majority of Epic Games is owned by Tim Sweeney. Meanwhile, TikTok majority is owned by ByteDance, which I don’t think we can confidently believe is truly a separate, sovereign entity from the CPC. And all this is somewhat besides the point; Apple is clearly more dependent on TikTok (China) than Epic Games.
Remarkable that TikTok is still available on the App Store, despite the risk it poses to national security. I guess Apple and China sleeping together is truly a case of friends with benefits. Maybe Epic Games should please Apple more often?
I’d imagine the FBI has more than just the link to these individuals via their drivers licenses being used for verification. Surely, these drivers licenses may have been used fraudulently by a hacker who wishes not to be found out so embarrassingly?
If a 17 year-old gains access temporarily to a bank vault, while they’re in there it’s not possible they could also cause a nuclear war. The crimes are similar at face value but meaningfully different.
Revealing how an algorithm works only provides a false sense of understanding/security. At any time, the algorithm can be modified. Further, mechanisms will be needed to ensure that the published algorithms are actually the deployed algorithms. There is such a thing as lying and deception. It’s naive to believe that billion dollar companies are honest.