Stand By Me
The Kings of Summer
Mid90s

Anything before the internet.

I feel the same way about labels. It feels like a binary way of thinking, whereas I see this stuff more as a spectrum - and honestly even that feels overly simplistic. Maybe a 3-dimensional one. I’m not planning to medicate it anyway, so getting an official label is hardly new information or useful. I embrace it, whatever it is.

Enchanting!

Thought of this while looking up where the term “bootleg” comes from. Turns out people used to conceal flasks of alcohol inside the leg of a tall boot to hide them from authorities during Prohibition.

Similar one for the term “shotgun” when you call the front passenger seat. That’s where the guy with the shotgun sat when goods and people were transported by horse-drawn wagons. Also, a funny sidenote: in Finnish language it’s commonly refered to as “pelkääjän paikka” which translates to “seat for the one being afraid”

Edit: Goodbye - God be with ye

My reddit app stopped working one day and I had to choose between my mental health and more suffering and I chose suffering.

What will happen if a global pandemic breaks out? What about a hot war in Europe? Or if they close the Strait of Hormuz?

What seems to happen is the stock market dips for a few months and then we’re back to breaking all-time highs again. So in other words - discounts on the stock market for a while, and an opportunity for anyone with some expendable cash to make a nice profit. I’ve bought all these dips and I’ll do the same thing again.

It’s very much observable - you’re observing it right now. Consciousness is an undeniable fact of being human, but it can only be observed from the perspective of the conscious being itself. There’s no way for you to prove anyone else is conscious because it can’t be measured. They can seem to act in ways that suggest consciousness and they may claim to be conscious but whether it actually feels like anything to be them is something only they know.

Medically speaking:

Unconsciousness is a state in which a living individual exhibits a complete, or near-complete, inability to maintain an awareness of self and environment or to respond to any human or environmental stimulus.

Source

There it doesn’t imply the absence of experience. You simply lose awareness of yourself and your environment, but you may still keep having dream-like experiences in your mind.

Medical unconsciousness is a different thing. That’s not what’s being discussed here.

That’s not what the question was about.

You do realize that hoping for the death of 4 billion people puts you up there with the worst people in history when it comes to your aspirations?

While it’s true that “AGI” is vaguely defined and often used for hype, portraying it as a deliberate marketing trap designed to evade accountability goes too far. It’s more accurate to say the term is aspirational and commercially useful, but many serious researchers (at DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) are genuinely working toward more general capabilities. The vagueness is real, but the “evil master plan” implication lacks evidence.

General intelligence is basically synonymous with human-level intelligence. If it can do any cognitive task a human can do - either as well or better - then it’s generally intelligent. It’s not like nobody knows what that term means.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate.

Consciousness can only be observed from the subjective perspective of the conscious being. Nobody has ever proven the existence of consciousness anywhere outside their own mind. We only assume other animals are conscious too - we don’t actually know it.

I realize the stack of evidence supporting that possibility is quite high.

NIMBYism is a real phenomenon. People just don’t want stuff like that built near them - including schools. It’s not because they’re against education. You’re projecting your own views on AI onto other people while ignoring all the other possible explanations for their actions. You can say it’s inextricably linked to AI, but you saying that doesn’t make it so. I’m sure some of those people think that, but I’ve seen no evidence that it’s the main driver of it.

That obvious bad faith you demonstrate there is nothing but a confession about your own character.

I don’t think the people who don’t want AI data centers in their backyards are motivated by hatred toward AI. It tends to be mostly driven by things like environmental worries and energy and water demand.

This cancer sounds like a real jerk - you better kick its ass.

Horizontal ridges on the nails of my thumbs. I was suspecting everything from vitamin deficiency to cancer, but it turned out to be self-inflicted. It was due to my tendency to tear the skin on my fingers when I’m anxious. Somehow it just never occurred to me, despite how my fingers looked.

Another, slightly awkward one is the so-called “after-dribble” many men deal with - you keep getting piss stains on your underwear after taking a leak no matter how hard you try to shake it dry. I dealt with it for years until someone online mentioned that pressing the area behind the scrotum forward helps “milk” it empty. That person has no idea how big an impact that single comment made on my life.

As for keeping houseplants, what I do differently now that keeps them not just alive but thriving is soaking them completely - basically letting the pot sit in water for 12 to 24 hours, then letting it dry out fully so the top soil is dry and the pot feels light before soaking it again. I have a plastic pot with drain holes inside a decorative clay pot without any. Whenever I water it, I take out a marble from the pot and leave it on the windowsill next to it as a reminder not to leave the plant sit in water for multiple days. This kills the plant.

clanker wankers at Stanford

Just going to toss out a wild guess here, but any chance you might be emotionally motivated to find a source that backs what you already believe to be true rather than looking at the stats objectively?

I too am concerned about AI, but I’m not against it. Those things aren’t the same.

“All toupees look horrible. I’ve never seen one that doesn’t.”

Useful for what?

Checking writing for grammatical errors.