This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We’re overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.

At least we’re solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.

Was it news to you that religious nuts were kinda uneducated?

Regardless, I’m still asking about the content of the bullshit prophecy, not whether it’s bullshit or not. Discussing it’s actual merits or lack thereof seems like a waste of time to me. I mean, we’re talking about a literal prophecy. Those generally aren’t taken seriously by your average even halfway intelligent person.

Sure. But it’s legitimacy is irrelevant so long as they believe it, which they do.

Waitasec, I’m no expert, but I thought the whole Rapture thing required all the Jewish people to be gathered into one place first. So, they literally require every Jewish person in America to be deported to Israel for their whole process to even begin.

Did I misunderstand something?

Given the distance required, what kind of economic payoff could be possible from such an expensive project? It’s not like overland would be a cheaper transport option than Pacific shipping routes or anything. It’s not just the Bering Strait being the problem with connecting the two after all, but the fact that there’s nothing in NE Siberia or NW Alaska to bother connecting together. Are we making it for the polar bears maybe? Or are people going to drive the thousands of miles from Juneau to Vladivostok to sightsee?

I find it useful to remember that entertainment products are designed to be both understandable and fun, where real life was not designed to be understandable and fun.

With that in mind, no, I would not.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

In my experience it’s usually the whole factory farming thing that bothers them the most. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone complain about someone else having a pet dog, unless they weren’t taking care of it or something.

Would be interested to see a poll on how they feel about ethically raised livestock, if that’s more acceptable than most of the stuff you find in a supermarket.

Reminds me of a scene in the Lone Wolf and Cub comic I read when I was younger.

I don’t remember all the details, but there’s a panel where the two most dangerous samurai in all of feudal Japan are camping out before a fight, and some rando is astonished that these high bred, noble, elite warriors are cooking their own rice. One of the two rips into him about self-sufficiency and how there aren’t always servants to do your cooking for you, and what kind of warrior would just starve when he has no servants around?

Not off the top of my head. Cooking is frequently a recreational hobby though, it’s essentially an art form. So I think it’s about equally likely that dancing, painting or making music fade away.

Whatever. Yo momma so fat every step she takes gets picked up by LIGO.

lol Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of a good general relativity based yo momma joke…

tbf, “manipulating time and space” is a pretty low bar to clear. You’re manipulating time and space sitting in your chair, given that under general relativit,y spacetime warps around any mass present.

Exactly. It’s sort of like a massively scaled up example of the blind man and the elephant.

Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

Predicting the next word vs predicting a word in the middle and then predicting backwards are not hugely different things. It’s still predicting parts of the passage based solely on other parts of the passage.

Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

or maybe “national security adviser,”

lol

Digital feudalism… I suppose that does make it easier to call up large armies of peasant levies when you need to wage an information war.

Also just fear of going out of business by alienating any potential customers. When your revenues have been steadily dropping for decades now and it’s starting to look like you’re going the way of Kodak, it becomes more tempting to pander to the middle and try to avoid pissing as many people off as possible. This in turn means you can’t speak the truth anymore.

You very well might be able to, actually, though I’m not going to guarantee it. Regardless though, if the line is commonly parroted by a certain group, then the claims are not particularly wild, are they?

And yes, there are lots of very useful tips that can identify most propaganda based off of common traits. This is not foolproof though. Still very good to know, though.