That’s not obviously the case. I don’t think anyone has a sufficient understanding of general AI, or of consciousness, to say with any confidence what is or is not relevant.

We can agree that LLMs are not going to be turned into general AI though

You’re still putting words in my mouth.

I never said they weren’t stealing the data

I didn’t comment on that at all, because it’s not relevant to the point I was actually making, which is that people treating the output of an LLM as if it were derived from any factual source at all is really problematic, because it isn’t.

You’re putting words in my mouth, and inventing arguments I never made.

I didn’t say anything about whether the training data is stolen or not. I also didn’t say a single word about intelligence, or originality.

I haven’t been tricked into using one piece of language over another, I’m a software engineer and know enough about how these systems actually work to reach my own conclusions.

There is not a database tucked away in the LLM anywhere which you could search through and find the phrases which it was trained on, it simply doesn’t exist.

That isn’t to say it’s completely impossible for an LLM to spit out something which formed part of the training data, but it’s pretty rare. 99% of what it generates doesn’t come from anywhere in particular, and you wouldn’t find it in any of the sources which were fed to the model in training.

That simply isn’t true. There’s nothing in common between an LLM and a search engine, except insofar as the people developing the LLM had access to search engines, and may have used them during their data gathering efforts for training data

Except these AI systems aren’t search engines, and people treating them like they are is really dangerous

It’s probably not just software. I’d expect it to be an entirely separate set of processors which track how the flight is going and do absolutely nothing except decide whether or not to terminate

BGA, like in the photo, isn’t the only option. There are options only slightly larger with hand-solderable packages (if you’re good at soldering)

That’s misleading. The shortest route would be the “great circular” joining the two points, which lines of latitude definitely are not.

The only line of latitude which is a great circle is the equator.

No, it’s not. It’s noth of the equator, so the straight line route would look like a curve towards the north. This route is curved south, which means it’s actually because of air traffic control routing them along approved flight paths. That might be for traffic management reasons, or because of terrain on the route, or restricted airspace.

How did you calculate that? The question didn’t even mention a specific speed, just “near the speed of light”.

The kinetic energy for a grain of sand near the speed of light is somewhere between “quite a lot” and “literally infinity” (which is, in a sense, the reason you can’t actually reach light speed without a way to supply infinite energy).

It was pointed out to me a while back that the paradox of tolerance is only a paradox if you consider tolerance to be a philosophical position.

In fact, we don’t treat it like that. We treat it as a social contract, in which context it is no paradox at all to say that if you aren’t tolerant then other people aren’t obliged to tolerate you in turn

Making a virus identical to one which existed in the past isn’t particularly worrying, because the original virus is already in the wild (except for the very few which are extinct, because of vaccination efforts).

The real trick is creating a novel virus, which our immune systems aren’t all accustomed to already, and that’s a whole different challenge. I don’t think our genetic engineering technology is at a point where that’s a realistic concern yet

True, that should have occurred to me. That’s what I get for not touching a compiler since the Christmas holidays started

That’s easy. The 2038 problem is fixed by using 64-bit processors running 64-bit applications. Just about everything built in the last 15 years has already got the fix

Using that fix, the problem doesn’t come up again for about 300 billion years

Stories about events we can identify in the archeological record, probably. Forest fires, major battles, geological events, things like that which can be used to line the stories up with specific real-world events

Thanks. I think I have some history of art to read before I understand much of that, but I know where to start now :)

I’ve been seeing these comics for a while now, but I still feel very out of the loop.

WTF am I reading?

You don’t need a force to prevent collapse if there’s no drag force to slow things down. It would actually be almost impossible for a cloud of dark matter to collapse since any individual particle has momentum and no way to slow down, so they’ll all be in some sort of mutual orbit

You’re mistaken. Dark matter, whatever it is, isn’t affected by anything except gravity. It interacts with gravity just like “normal” matter.

The evidence is also significantly better than you’re describing

I would describe it as being in free-fall whenever it’s not in being held up by any interaction with a solid surface, even indirectly. I’m not sure everyone would agree with my definition, but it’s not a term you’ll see used much in serious engineering precisely because it is a bit vague.

For example, an aircraft in flight isn’t in free-fall because it’s being held up by the air, which is in turn held up by the ground. An aircraft (or spacecraft) which has no wings is being slowed down by air resistance, but not actually held up and is therefore in free-fall.

An ascending rocket is generating forces which hold it up, rather than transferring forces to something which won’t move (like the ground), so I would consider it to be in free-fall