How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10⁹ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.

You are either vastly overestimating the Language part of an LLM or simplifying human physiology back to the Greek’s Four Humours theory.

If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It’s like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog’s reasoning.

While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).

Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it’s designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don’t have the tech to make a synthetic human.

Anyways, the second amendment exists to combat tyranny.

Just want to step in here and say that no interpretation of the second would cover a civilian killing a foreign diplomat, no matter how tyrannical 😂

Unnamed “people” of some unnamed US spook organization

People employed by a state actor to screen hardware (or closely related to screening) probably aren’t supposed to leak stuff like this. Nobody wants a potential adversary knowing what you do/do not know.

rogue devices in an undisclosed number of Chinese solar inverters and batteries of not named brands

Again, there’s no benefit to telling, especially when this could tie back to a leaker. How could they disclose a number? They deconstruct a sample selection, not every single one that’s installed. What would the public even do with brand information? Throw away the commercial utility grade inverters tied into their nonexistent home grid?

which alerts Europe

Spain just had a very public massive grid failure. Even if they don’t trust the US diplomatically, they could very easily take this info and verify it on their own devices.

Every smart car on the road has a backdoor killswitch and GPS tracking, “just in case” it needs to be used against a private individual. You think a state actor supplying 30-40% of the global market (allies and adversaries alike) wouldn’t do the same thing?

Here’s a wrench for you: the Luddites were 100% right

The theory behind DEI policies is to formally challenge personal bias (both explicit and subconscious) in hiring and participation. There’s nothing inherently tied to unfairly favoring minority groups other than the fact that they are usually the target of negative bias.

It’s a pretty basic and logical idea that acknowledges human fallibility. I hate that it was rapidly co-opted on all sides as a shorthand for racism and opposition to cis-white-male dominance.

Forget 1914. Try 1905. George Cove’s solar electric generator is remarkably similar to modern solar panels.

Maybe we just didn’t let enough children die… 🤔

Step back everyone, we’ve got an Enlightened Centrist here!

Don’t call for violence, let’s just compromise to allow a little fascism! 🤏

Nobody here is calling for purging wrong-think. There are very obvious and visible threats to our society from an enclave of people tearing it apart. You’re making a strawman to conflate targeting them with targeting freedom of thought

That’s not totally true.

Republicans turned out at slightly higher numbers than Democrats relative to their representation in the U.S. population (8 points vs. 5 points).

And there’s a lot there suggesting a leftward lean from the independent portion (eg. disproportionately non-white, non-Christian and urban)

Edit: If anyone has a counter argument I’d love to hear it. Its just weird to dismiss the entire massive non-voting bloc in a country with a long history of right wing voter suppression and anemic left wing opposition.

Republicans put a ton of effort into voter restrictions, ostensibly to prevent mass voter fraud which study after study proves does not exist. Why do they go through the trouble?

Is that any worse though?

Fascista Leggera ⚖️ Full blown McFascism

Someone needs to make an inverse-xwitter platform. You’re only allowed to tweet if you prove you’ve been banned on X.

I’m sure, but a watch is 1000% more convenient if you don’t need any normal smart phone functionality (social media, games, internet access, media player, etc…). Its simpler to not have the option to use those features at all than to blacklist everything.

On top of that, it’s less likely to get lost or dropped/damaged like a flip phone. Probably has better battery life too. For small form-factor messaging + GPS its the most functional package.

You just described what the minimum wage was supposed to be, and plenty of red blooded American patriots already hate that.

Don’t knock schizophrenia till you try it. 9/10 voices in my head recommend it.

I see this in various flavors of anarchism and I don’t get how it would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.

As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.

Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives (“Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?”), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.

Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?..

And if you don’t do anything to bridge the ocean, what’s to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.

Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there’s nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.

I’m not sure how that link is supposed to refute anything? It says basically what the comment above says without using the phrase “mixed economies”.

If you meant the power structure and public/private balance is heavily capitalist for Nordic countries then you’d probably want to post something else supporting that statement.

I thought the concept of lebensraum was violently debunked nearly 80 years ago but apparently some people didn’t get the memo. Sounds like most of you skipped the lesson on how appeasement turns out too.

Sovereign state #1 ⚔️

Sovereign state #2 🛡

Its pretty morally clear cut when you use your own brain to think about it.

Yes, a lot of different states get involved in an international conflicts. Its not pretty or squeaky clean, that’s how war works. If you didn’t want that then you should have opposed the decades of aggression from Putin’s Russia, it’s a bit late to get your hackles up now.

But you do you man, you can whatabout and bothsides all the way to the firing squad. I’ll be rooting for your gold medal in the mental gymnastics event.

One of these two actors is actively and aggressively siezing strategic territory needed for a sound position in a changing climate. I’ll give you a hint: neither of them give a shit about living in Russia