I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
the linguist realizes that the alien creatures cannot be, in fact, conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding:
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding. The exact opposite of what Watts seems to claim.
That is an option. I think we are philosophical zombies a decent chunk of the time. Constant self awareness and mindfulness are calorically expensive. No reason consciousness has to be continuous.
Could be. However note that any current LLM passes this ambiguity parsing test with flying colors- both the implicit choice of the most probable meaning and the subsequent reflection on all the possible alternatives- so if that proved anything it would mean that they're conscious too.
Best explanation for vampires not liking crosses I have ever seen. I always enjoy vampires that are explained scientifically for some reason in fiction, its like some sort of challenge and they usually avoid the whole dislike of crosses, not here, thought it was a decent attempt along with many other ideas in the book, very enjoyable to me.
My favorite explanation for it - and I forget where it's from, but it probably isn't uncommon - is that vampires who were humans raised in Christian cultures believe themselves to be damned by God when they turn because that's what the folklore says, and that belief and self-hatred manifests as a phobic aversion to religious symbolism.
Not bad, think I still prefer that their visual cortex was more advanced such that they could easily perceive multiple perspectives (necker cubes) and maybe even higher dimensions but they had a "crucifixion glitch" such that too much euclidean geometry in the visual field of view caused seizures which doesn't normally occur in nature.
This helped explained their downfall with man creating euclidean geometry everywhere and was taken advantage of when they where brought back as they where very good at certain tasks while also requiring anti seizure drugs which kept them in control.
MSSQL (Clustered Indexes) and Oracle (Index Organized Tables) among others let you chose because there are advantages and disadvantages for different situations.
Not having true clustered indexes in PG is something I miss coming from MSSQL, it helps performance when the majority of access is always primary index avoid indirection from index lookup then tuple lookup and it also saves space if its the only index.
I have memories of supporting a Netware network with a custom Foxpro app used by a bunch of telemarketers in the mid 90's.
When there was application error the source code would pop up in dialog maybe a some sort of debugger and the end users would just type a bunch of crap in trying to get out of it and hit enter and save the changes and corrupt the app for everyone and it would have to be restored from backup.
Pretty sure it was Foxpro or maybe dbase, definitely wasn't MS Access as it was still a dos based client.
Very different idea about app security back then, was really nice to developed the db, GUI front end and printable reports all in single runtime though.
So it’s an overpriced middle of the road phone to signal ones devotion to Trump and doesn’t actually deliver on several of its core promises (like made in USA).
Just to be accurate, they don't say that it's made in the USA. They only say its assembled in the USA. Perhaps in the past they made some statement that it would have been, but the current box and marketing don't.
Yeah they updated it way late in the game when they couldn’t hide it anymore, well after money had exchanged hands. That certainly qualifies as a broken promise.
Last i read most of the money came from people not reading the fine print on their $100 deposit and only a few thousand have actually been distributed.
Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still
I don’t want to get bogged down in a source dispute - this is very easy to search and/but I only spent about 60s on it. I am hardly an expert. Feel free to look it up as well and tell me how I am entirely wrong. This was a combination of AI responses + thumbing through the sources linked to make sure it wasn’t invented whole cloth.
I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.
I don't think they are selling well, either. I was wondering at your source since it would be very atypical for any company to give any numbers at all, let alone a company that's so outwardly sketchy, let alone numbers like "This is the number of orders we have standing open despite being actively in production." This is the exact kind of thing I would not expect to be easy to search, and it'd be ripe for AI hallucination.
The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.
I much prefer Bryson City to Gatlinburg, and you can technically go into the park right outside Bryson City at Deep Creek, and even hike to Clingmans dome.
Gatlinburg is a tourist madhouse while Bryson City is a great little town and you can drive over to Cherokee if you want more and get into the main part of the park and over to Gatlinburg should you so desire.
Road to nowhere is always fun to visit, kids always laugh at the graffiti and like the creepy tunnel while the hikes around are beautiful.
Wonder if they will ever fix upload progress using XHR, pretty annoying to not be able show accurate progress to the user when using larger chunk sizes:
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