Rhaedas

What a ride that is, especially for Doom players going in blind.

Depends on the cat. If they’re simply going with tapping the roll to spin it, that may work for a bit. I’ve found that rolls accessible to a cat tend to morph into big balls of clawed unusable pulp.

First I was mad, then I was sad.

This is bad.

Does playing a white guy playing a black guy count?

“What do you mean, you people?”

“What do YOU MEAN, you people??”

One does not simply watch LotR once. It is folly.

It was a hook, and the media grabbed it. It’s really more of a way to continue to divide people and keep them in the voting groups. Trump won’t get anyone from the left to vote for him, but he has to keep those on the right in his camp. So these are tools to alienate each from the other and secure the base.

And it’s also him saying what he really thinks out loud, but it’s been shown time and again he can do that and it won’t be those words that drive people away. His biggest fear is silence, if the media isn’t talking about him then people might drift to other places.

Bad article. Didn’t answer the only question anyone is interested in. Did they get the spider?

Denvercoder9

If it looks to potentially reduce Republican votes, then Republicans will just compensate by more effort trying to restrict certain demographics and areas from getting their vote in. They never have been supportive of everyone getting a chance to vote, it skews things towards the left. Anyone still remember when Karl Rove lost his mind on live TV because he knew what the numbers should have been had everything gone to plan, and liberals getting more votes was inconceivable to him.

Don’t see mention of Q-Link (a C-64 specific large scale discussion service) much anymore, so had to comment. It was cutting edge to be part of something like that, and yes, it could be expensive - 5 cents a minute for some functions which could add up since it was all dialup. Anyone now looking back would see it as crude and basic, but it was a huge step up from the local BBSes. Chat rooms for all sorts of things, real time direct messaging with friends you made online, even file transfers while you chatted. Later years even played with 2d avatars that could walk around from place to place. Only years later after being an AOL user did I learn than a lot of AOL’s infrastructure was built upon the old Q-Link system.

As a a side note, it was mind blowing to be exploring the deeper parts of AOL and find the the door to the REAL internet. AOL wanted users to stay within AOL for all their needs and not as a portal to everything else.

The problem is that the cost doesn’t match the reward. I’d be totally fine with a 90/10 split for just a punch in the face. I’ll be over the injury in a week with a lot more than I started with. Raise the cost to losing an arm or leg for a cut, then even 50/50 seems a bit low as the victim’s life has changed but the other’s hasn’t.

I do agree with punching economists in the face more, just in principle.

If anything I think the development of actual AGI will come first and give us insight on why some organic mass can do what it does. I’ve seen many AI experts say that one reason they got into the field was to try and figure out the human brain indirectly. I’ve also seen one person (I can’t recall the name) say we already have a form of rudimentary AGI existing now - corporations.

LLMs are just very complex and intricate mirrors of ourselves because they use our past ramblings to pull from for the best responses to a prompt. They only feel like they are intelligent because we can’t see the inner workings like the IF/THEN statements of ELIZA, and yet many people still were convinced that was talking to them. Humans are wired to anthropomorphize, often to a fault.

I say that while also believing we may yet develop actual AGI of some sort, which will probably use LLMs as a database to pull from. And what is concerning is that even though LLMs are not “thinking” themselves, how we’ve dived head first ignoring the dangers of misuse and many flaws they have is telling on how we’ll ignore avoiding problems in AI development, such as the misalignment problem that is basically been shelved by AI companies replaced by profits and being first.

HAL from 2001/2010 was a great lesson - it’s not the AI…the humans were the monsters all along.

Not a great quote for a scientist, so I looked up where it came from, a conclusion of many paragraphs about the necessity of God in his final book.

It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Sagan had a similar take - he didn’t like the term atheist as it implied certain evidence of the lack of a divine being, proof of a negative, something that isn’t very scientific. Rather he preferred to be called agnostic on the topic of gods existing, saying there was no conclusive evidence yet for their existence.

A bit long, I just had to say something about the short quote since Hawking was very much a scientific person.