Give him a taste of his own medicine. Absolutely bury the administration in lawsuits. Drag up ancient case law, twist the language of the Constitution beyond all reason, pepper in some frivolous ones to clog the system. Challenge everything; don’t let them so much as rename a bridge without a protracted legal battle.

I got Kim to dance with me in the church in Disco Elysium

Then simple question, why not use First Gentleman?

Because we’ve never actually had a First Gentleman, so the term isn’t familiar. This is a scenario where strict accuracy muddles the rhetoric beyond recognition, which defeats the purpose.

You’re speaking with a lot of confidence about the validity of the feelings of a group of people

When did I say anything about the validity of anyone’s feelings?

I don’t think you, or the people you’re claiming to represent, understand the joke. First Lady Musk refers to Trump, not Elon. The implication isn’t that it’s demeaning to be a woman or queer, but that the spouse of the President has no real power or authority. This has nothing to do with their gender, and everything to do with the fact that they are the unelected spouse of an elected official.

The only ones who benefit when you misinterpret things in a way that implies unintended and unsubstantiated bigotry, are those who can use it to reinforce their claims of a misguidedly hypersensitive left, and thereby undermine justified recognition of intended and substantiated bigotry.

You argued it’s “the most useless idea ever committed to text”, that’s a bad take. No one claimed that it’s a rigorous scientific theory, that’s your failure to understand the premise. It’s a useful analogy, like the useful observation that electricity in a circuit behaves in many ways like water in a pipe, or that Einsteinian spacetime behaves in many ways like a rubber sheet. Are these analogies “useless” because electricity isn’t in fact water, and space-time is not in fact rubber? Or would a self-righteous PhD make themselves look supremely foolish by attacking these illustrative analogies as useless because they aren’t rigorous scientific theories?

Having read most of your sources here, they do not support your conclusion. I see opinion pieces, confessions of the authors’ personal inabilities to imagine the granularity of a singular meme, lamentations over different authors’ conflicting definition of a meme, and smug conflation of memetic behavior and the substance of consciousness, but not claims that the idea is useless. Non rigorous, over extended, inconsistently defined, sure. But useless? Much less the most useless idea ever committed to text? That is your own myopic hyperbole.

I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.

Hard disagree. I don’t think you actually understand the premise.

Memetics in action.

The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.

Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.

Calling sex a true binary is strange for a talented biologist, intersex people definitely exist.

Transgenderism is a bit different though. Personally I think gender is a repressive, outdated social norm, and I disagree with transgenderism precisely because it reinforces this obsolete notion. Anyone should feel free to dress, act, and identify however they please, including but not limited to any body modifications they wish. But “switching” your identity to align with another set of stereotypical expressions only reinforces those stereotypes.

I can’t even see the point in “fitting in”, because those who care about how you express yourself aren’t going to accept you as transgender anyway, and the people who are going to accept you aren’t going to care if your expression matches the stereotypes they’re used to.

I dunno if that’s his objection because paywall, but I can certainly understand opposition to transgenderism that isn’t actually intolerant of transgender people themselves.

That’s as many as four tens.

And that’s terrible.

in their right mind

Did you forget about the brain worms?

Gaming is an absolutely massive economic sector, driven by the escapism of virtual worlds. The functional kernel of the metaverse is a universal game lobby, a place for people to congregate while they navigate between the games they play together.

humans can learn a bunch of stuff without first learning the content of the whole internet and without the computing power of a datacenter or consuming the energy of Belgium. Humans learn to count at an early age too, for example.

I suspect that if you took into consideration the millions of generations of evolution that “trained” the basic architecture of our brains, that advantage would shrink considerably.

I would say that the burden of proof is therefore reversed. Unless you demonstrate that this technology doesn’t have the natural and inherent limits that statistical text generators (or pixel) have, we can assume that our mind works differently.

I disagree. I’d argue evidence suggests we’re just a more sophisticated version of a similar principle, refined over billions of years. We learn facts by rote, and learn similarities by rote until we develop enough statistical text (or audio) correlations to “understand” the world.

Conversations are a slightly meandering chain of statistically derived cliches. English adjective order is universally “understood” by native speakers based purely on what sounds right, without actually being able to explain why (unless you’re a big grammar nerd). More complex conversations might seem novel, but they’re just a regurgitation of rote memorized facts and phrases strung together in a way that seems appropriate to the conversation based on statistical experience with past conversations.

Also you say immature technology but this technology is not fundamentally (I.e. in terms of principle) different from what Weizenabum’s ELIZA in the '60s. We might have refined model and thrown a ton of data and computing power at it, but we are still talking of programs that use similar principles.

As with the evolution of our brains, which have operated on basically the same principles for hundreds of millions of years. The special sauce between human intelligence and a flatworm’s is a refined model.

So yeah, we don’t understand human intelligence but we can appreciate certain features that absolutely lack on GPTs, like a concept of truth that for humans is natural.

I’m not sure you can claim that absolutely. That kind of feature is an internal experience, you can’t really confirm or deny if a GPT has something similar. Besides, humans have a pretty tenuous relationship with the concept of truth. There are certainly humans that consider objective falsehoods to be Truth.

It’s also pretty young, human toddlers hallucinate and make things up. Adults too. Even experts are known to fall prey to bias and misconception.

I don’t think we know nearly enough about the actual architecture of human intelligence to start asserting an understanding of “understanding”. I think it’s a bit foolish to claim with certainty that LLMs in a MoE framework with self-review fundamentally can’t get there. Unless you can show me, materially, how human “understanding” functions, we’re just speculating on an immature technology.

Huh, just noticed that.

I dabble in comics and manga too, so I prefer the full screen to an e-ink display. It’s also nice for videos.

I just got a foldable. The increase in functionality of reading on my phone is substantial, and that’s such a big fraction of my phone use that I consider it worthwhile. I wouldn’t be as productive if I had to carry a bulky e-reader with me all the time, it’s incredibly convenient to be able to fold it up and put it in my pocket.

It’s a bit heavier, but I got used to it quickly. My old phone feels suspiciously light now, like a toy. The expense is certainly a factor, but for me the utility is worth it in the long run. It’s not for everyone, but there are people it makes sense for.