The only reason I don’t currently is that my phone’s VPN connection doesn’t handle network switching gracefully. Otherwise I try and tunnel all my traffic through my home network.

As a useful side effect, I need to expose far less of my IoT devices .

The worst bit is, it seems to work. At least if it blows up in trump’s face, it’s fairly unambiguous. I’m sure America’s right wing media would spin it otherwise, but it at least makes that harder for them.

The biggest risk would be the bubble holding together and the democrats getting into power, only for it to blow up in their face immediately.

While they might deal with it a bit better than trump, the damage he is already doing could tie their hands a lot.

We all know the right would get decades of mileage out of “look look, it was all awesome under trump, then the democrats broke everything”.

I changed provider after they tried to tell me 1/4 Mbps was more than enough. It didn’t even have packet shaping. As soon as Google photos tried to back up, the packet returns required to lead webpages started falling over. It was painful.

AI can be a force multiplier for humans, but often can’t replace them. The current usage is often idiotic at best.

E.g. excluding the issue of data misuse, an AI system could be extremely helpful to doctors. It could flag possible issues, complications and unusual conditions in a way that would otherwise require a deep dive by a specialist doctor. A doctor or nurse could then parse the results for useful points, while filtering out hallucinations.

Initially. It’s a link aggregator and discussion site, like reddit, but far more independent.

If they query it. It runs on a system a bit like how email works. Rather than 1 big monolithic system, it’s a bunch of small ones linked together. A federation of small services all acting as 1 whole. In practice it’s fairly transparent, just like you don’t care who’s hosting an email address, you can just email it.

It also makes it a lot more resistant to takeover and manipulation by big business. It can resist the Nazis bar problem better, like what happened to twitter. (Optional depending on the person involved).

The first gives them the basic idea. The second gives them a basic understanding of the structure, without overwhelming them, or panicking them with complexity.

Everyone now knows that email just works, but has lots of different companies involved. It makes a good comparison for how federation can work well online.

It’s not the worst smell, but not the best smell to walk into your home and be hit by. Particularly when stale.

Partner owns one. The smell gets into clothes, then transfers to anything in the house that can absorb it. The sofa is particularly bad.

And no, hosing them down as they approach the house doesn’t work. They just end up smelling of wet horse instead (as well as being pissed off).

I personally found it easier to just clear the house of anything I didn’t want hurt (humans, pets and plants). Then let it run for half an hour, while we go on a long dog walk. A few hours later, open all the windows and doors to air out what hasn’t broken down naturally.

Does an excellent job of getting various smells out of the house, Inc dog and horse.

Ironically, it actually did its job pre WWII.

Chamberlain realised he had fucked up. Britain didn’t have the forces to actually resist the Nazis. Appeasement was to buy them time to rearm. When the war actually started, Chamberlain fell on his proverbial sword, to give Churchill a clean slate and a functional military to work with.

AI can be a force multiplier for doctors. The catch is it needs to be doctor led. It’s quite trivial for a doctor to dismiss the obvious hallucinations. If it also points them towards more subtle signs they would potentially miss, then that’s a net win.

Given that they are scrabbling around like drug addicts looking for anything they’ve split, including checking the cracks in the floorboards…

For some models, it’s obvious they’ve long scrapped the erotic fan fic sites!

Trying to scan a monkey’s brain, while it’s awake and interacting is not a trivial task. MRI scanners are uncomfortable for humans, and we know what is going on with the big scary machine.

An anti-memetic counter agent.

That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.

Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.

All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

We are not there yet. Some of the theories put the energy requirements within reach of the LHC. They were at the extremes of possibilities however, and none have been detected so far.

It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.

It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.

In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.

I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.

My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.

Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.

If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.

The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?

https://xkcd.com/882/ This, but done retrospectively

There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.

I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.