The difference is that Elon would have said “And we can do this today!” back in 2017.

The Mandarin from Iron Man 3 was obviously Jack Dorsey. He would win by selling his criminal gang for more than it was worth to someone stupid enough not only to buy it but to then crater its value by 90% in the first year, and use that money to found a competitor.

I’m so sorry and that’s lovely, in that order.

The Ada programming language being named after Ada Lovelace was like if they named the MS Explorer version of JavaScript “Turing.”

I agree. Jenny is not someone any of us (sisters, brothers, or others) would want to be. I think that we can identify with Forrest, but Jenny is truly broken. She’s not dumping him to go live some fabulous lifestyle. She’s on a completely self destructive arc while Forrest goes from strength to strength, even when suffering the loss of friends and family.

When you think about it, I can’t think of anyone wishing their life was like Jenny’s rather than like Forrest’s. Even taking the money and shit out of it, I know which I’d prefer.

I am going to add that to my hate-watch list.

I’ll tell you who pisses me off from Jurassic Park - Michael fucking Crichton.

So, I know the guy Ian Malcolm was based on. He’s a complexity theorist I worked with a bit. Jeff Goldblum famously (in our tiny science community) called him but rather than asking about things like chaos theory he just asked about the guys family and stuff. In retrospect it makes sense, but the guy was really thrown by someone not wanting to talk about chaos theory.

Anyway - Michael Crichton was a fucking asshole. I want you to hear that in the voice of your favorite character from What We Do in the Shadows. He turned into a conspiracy theorist, wrote that weird grey goo book about nanotechnology, and was generally just an unpleasant person who thought his intelligence was significantly higher than it actually was, as demonstrated when people actually tried to talk to him about complexity theory.

I was actually a fan of his work until I started working there and his brain headed south like a monarch butterfly on crack.

I don’t think it’s interesting to get pissed off at villains. That’s their point. Yes, it’s very easy to hate Dolores Umbridge. You’re supposed to. I want to hear from the people that hate Garp, or Forrest Gump.

I’ll start. Bill Shatner pissed me the fuck off as Captain Kirk. Part of it is backward-projecting from what the Federation became into the sexist shit they were doing in the 60s, but a much bigger part of it was from his SNL skit where he told fans to “get a life.”

Also: Life has no rewind button and shit can go south pretty fast.

It’s a bit of both, tbh. I use both it and Apple News for news curation. Flipboard is by far more ad-centric (and AN has more content) but Flipboard is pretty customizable for identifying topics so I keep it around. Flipping through it, every second or third page is an ad, but most of what they link to is available (at least for me) and they’re not overly swamped with clickbait (again, at least in my feed).

I probably use it about 1/3 as much as AN.

Many police departments in the US are explicitly trained to treat encounters with people as potential combat situations. They get taught lessons like “Your first job is to go home alive.” It’s continually drilled into them how dangerous their job is, even though that’s not statistically true. This obligates you to treat an encounter with an officer as a potentially life threatening situation.

If your window isn’t working, do not open your door. Police regularly approach a traffic stop prepared for a violent confrontation, sometimes going so far as resting their hand on their firearm.

I worked on a military base for a while, where each vehicle was stopped to show ID badges. The right approach is to say (and mime - eg point at the window, point down, and shake your head “no”) that your window isn’t working. They’ll probably take a step back and tell you to open the door.

It’s wrong, it needs to change, but until it does we need to adapt our behaviors to fit the situations we are put into.

First off, I’m very sorry about your situation. It’s something no one should have to go through and I very much hope your situation improves. I hope you live in an area with social services that you can use, whether it’s job counseling, health care, or housing assistance.

However, I do want to point out is that veteran status is something companies cannot ask about. I’m a hiring manager for a large tech company, and as a California company we are explicitly forbidden to ask about vet status or health issues. I have to stick to questions about skill sets that are immediately applicable to the position I am trying to fill.

That said, there are a number of federal jobs that use a points based system for evaluating candidates, and being a vet can get you some additional points. Although your current situation might need to be addressed first, you’re also going to have an easier time getting a security clearance.

I’d also advise you to seek out resources for vets. The VA would be an obvious place to start for healthcare (physical and mental, and they do have counseling services with staff who will be familiar with your situation). I know they can be a pain in the ass to work with and they’re overburdened and underfunded, but it’s be a start. There’s also private groups, both online and real world, who might be able to help with finding opportunities, making recommendations, giving advice, and giving emotional support. Online communities will be easier to find, but local groups will be able to give you more specific advice.

Best of luck, man. I hope anything I said might help.

Okay, I think I understand where we disagree. There isn’t a “why” either in biology or in the types of AI I’m talking about. In a more removed sense, a CS team at MIT said “I want this robot to walk. Let’s try letting it learn by sensor feedback” whereas in the biological case we have systems that say “Everyone who can’t walk will die, so use sensor feedback.”

But going further - do you think a gazelle isn’t weighing risks while grazing? Do you think the complex behaviors of an ant colony isn’t weighing risks when deciding to migrate or to send off additional colonies? They’re indistinguishable mathematically - it’s just that one is learning evolutionarily and the other, at least theoretically, is able to learn theoretically.

Is the goal of reproductive survival not externally imposed? I can’t think of any example of something more externally imposed, in all honesty. I as a computer scientist might want to write a chatbot that can carry on a conversation, but I, as a human, also need to learn how to carry on a conversation. Can we honestly say that the latter is self-directed when all of society is dictating how and why it needs to occur?

Things like risk assessment are already well mathematically characterized. The adaptive processes we write to learn and adapt to these environmental factors are directly analogous to what’s happening in neurons and genes. I’m really just not seeing the distinction.

Got it. As someone who has developed computational models of complex biological systems, I’d like to know specifically what you believe the differences to be.

I think we’re misaligned on two things. First, I’m not saying doing something quicker than a human can is what comprises “intelligence.” There’s an uncountable number of things that can do some function faster than a human brain, including components of human physiology.

My point is that intelligence as I define it involves adaptation for problem solving on the part of a complex system in a complex environment. The speed isn’t really relevant, although it’s obviously an important factor in artificial intelligence, which has practical and economic incentives.

So I again return to my question of whether we consider a dog or a dolphin to be “intelligent,” or whether only humans are intelligent. If it’s the latter, then we need to be much more specific than I’ve been in my definition.

So what do you call it when a newborn deer learns to walk? Is that “deer learning?”

I’d like to hear more about your idea of a “desired outcome” and how it applies to a single celled organism or a goldfish.

I’d like to offer a different perspective. I’m a grey beard who remembers the AI Winter, when the term had so over promised and under delivered (think expert systems and some of the work of Minsky) that using the term was a guarantee your project would not be funded. That’s when the terms like “machine learning” and “intelligent systems” started to come into fashion.

The best quote I can recall on AI ran along the lines of “AI is no more artificial intelligence than airplanes are doing artificial flight.” We do not have a general AI yet, and if Commander Data is your minimum bar for what constitutes AI, you’re absolutely right, and you can define it however you please.

What we do have are complex adaptive systems capable of learning and problem solving in complex problem spaces. Some are motivated by biological models, some are purely mathematical, and some are a mishmash of both. Some of them are complex enough that we’re still trying to figure out how they work.

And, yes, we have reached another peak in the AI hype - you’re certainly not wrong there. But what do you call a robot that teaches itself how to walk, like they were doing 20 years ago at MIT? That’s intelligence, in my book.

My point is that intelligence - biological or artificial - exists on a continuum. It’s not a Boolean property a system either has or doesn’t have. We wouldn’t call a dog unintelligent because it can’t play chess, or a human unintelligent because they never learned calculus. Are viruses intelligent? That’s kind of a grey area that I could argue from either side. But I believe that Daniel Dennett argued that we could consider a paramecium intelligent. Iirc, he even used it to illustrate “free will,” although I completely reject that interpretation. But it does have behaviors that it learned over evolutionary time, and so in that sense we could say it exhibits intelligence. On the other hand, if you’re going to use Richard Feynman as your definition of intelligence, then most of us are going to be in trouble.

The pod gun from Fifth Element is one of the most interesting from both a design and an effects perspective IMO.

Except it’s more intense, with older parts of the nervous system getting mis-developed.

I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I’m confused by what you’re referring to here. If you mean that the parts of the brain that develop in older children and young adults (eg the frontal cortex and prefrontal cortex) get maldeveloped, then I agree with you. If you additionally mean that this has deleterious downstream effects on the limbic system through loss of feedback and control mechanisms, I also agree wholeheartedly. If you mean evolutionarily older parts of the brain or parts that develop earlier in childhood (and there’s overlap there of course), I’m not entirely sure which specific aspects of neuroanatomy you’re referencing.

Could you include additional details if that’s the case?

In any case, the answer to “why shouldn’t one sexually abuse a child” is the same as “why shouldn’t one physically abuse a child,” “why shouldn’t one starve a child,” and “why shouldn’t one force a child to work on large scale heavy machinery in factories for twelve hours per day seven days a week.” It damages the child, it damages the abuser, and it damages society.

1. You’re sealioning.
2. There is nothing I know of that would make anyone think that a pedophile is only a single rational argument away from abusing children.

I caught Covid in Feb 2020, so I was part of the first wave when they weren’t sure it was a thing yet. I lost my sense of taste and smell for almost a year, to the extent I could stand next to a pan of frying onions or a trash can with rotting garbage and not smell it. It never fully recovered from that - I couldn’t say whether is 50% back or 30%, but it also still goes out sometimes. I’ve had every shot and booster available and have had a few influenza like illnesses since but with different levels of severity.

I’m going to hazard a guess here based on some related studies I’ve seen about the effects of covid and say that there’s likely a genetic component. I probably have a gene variant that makes this outcome more likely. I’m saying that because I’ve seen at least preliminary studies that looked at the severity of covid symptoms and found a genetic correlation.

For the majority of people who do lose their sense of taste and smell, they recover within a few weeks to a couple of months, but I am unaware of studies that show the degree to which they cover sensation. I know from my own experience that “recovery” can mean getting a fraction of your previous sensation back.