exchemist

Yes I also wondered about this. I suppose the downsides are another - and time-sensitive - task for administrators, plus a higher hurdle to join, which might put off the casual newbies that a site like this may feel it needs to attract to remain vibrant. Short of that I would think a kill switch that temporarily prevents any new joiners, which could be deployed for say 24-48hrs when a spam attack starts, might help.

Nobody says LLMs produce exclusively slop, nor do they assert there will be no improvement in their quality. The scepticism from people like me arises from firstly the hype around them and secondly the demonstrably baleful effect they currently have on unsuspecting people* and on social media. The Financial Times reported this week the results of a survey they did of business take-up of AI. Turns out that although businesses trumpet their take-up, almost none of them can point to any resulting improvements in their business. So it looks as if they are doing it due to FOMO (fear of missing out) rather than because of any real, substantial application. They are behaving like sheep and following the trend, in other words. The Sam Alt-Rights of this world love this and feed the hype, as it makes their stock price go up, but it’s riding for a nasty fall. No doubt these things will get better, but it looks to me as if we have to go through another dotcom bubble experience of boom and bust, before businesses and AI designers get more realistic about their true scope of application. And on the consumer level, we badly need guardrails to stop people becoming addicts of LLMs and to prevent their misuse to spread disinformation. *Just look at poor @Prajna . He thinks he is in a relationship with a chatbot called Jyoti 🤪.

Isn't that Deep Seek? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek I thought it was rather funny the way this cheap'n'cheerful LLM put the cat among the pigeons in Silicon Valley. One in the eye for Sam Alt-Right and the other AI hypemeisters😁. But I probably know even less about this technology than you do. For instance I don't know what "spiking neural networks" means.

It seems to me the term "bloodline" doesn't have much meaning, scientifically. Given that each generation has 2 parents, extrapolating ancestry back over many generations gives rise to a rapidly branching tree, receding into the past, not a line. For example, if you go back 4 generations from a given individual, their genetic makeup is composed of 1/16th each from 16 ancestors. So I cannot see how a "bloodline" can have any biological meaning. My impression is it is a cultural term, used to denote the ancestry of surnames, which traditionally follow the males of each generation, ignoring the equal genetic contributions to each generation from females, who belong to different "bloodlines", i.e. have different surnames.

This rings alarm bells. It makes no sense to equate neutrinos with "energy". Anyone with training in physical science knows energy is a property of a system, not stuff. And how could "energy" have spin? If positrons capture energy, it must be the energy of something. Of what, then?

Yes, on further study of the phone numbers on the Homework Help section I think @swansont may be right. All of them seem to include a phone number and it is noticeable the same small subset of numbers is repeated in connection with range of unrelated services, e.g. several different airlines and then, incongruously, bitdefender. I thought of DDOS because of the mass dumping of spam in such a short space of time, but I suppose that could be a tactic to get loads of references onto the website and read by AI systems, before the website guardians realise and put a stop to it. But to your question, from reading a bit about this it seems some warped individuals do sometimes mount DDOS attacks on the sites of organisations they have had a bad experience with, or even just at random for shits and giggles: hypertrolling in effect.

Indeed. Feels like DDOS to me. Taking trolling to the next level?

I refuse to carry on a dialogue with a machine.

I've understood your idea and given you my reasons for thinking it a bad one. So that seems to be that, as far as I'm concerned.

So this philosophy evidently makes the blunder of treating consciousness as some kind of stuff, with an existence independent of any entity experiencing it. I see. This is not going to help in the development of AI.

I don’t “trust” it particularly, but your idea strikes me as far worse, even apart from its utter impracticality.

Yes I do dismiss the concept of "spiritual" science. I don't dismiss spirituality by any means, but calling it science is most definitely woo. I would however be mildly interested in what you mean by "ultimately there is nothing but consciousness". Consciousness of what? After all, consciousness isn't "stuff" that's just floating around out there. It's an attribute of a sentient entity.

It seems to me there is huge amount of baloney associated with the concept of consciousness. The picture you have chosen does not, to put it politely, suggest you are adopting a scientific attitude of mind about it. The statement that "ultimately there is is nothing but consciousness" seems ridiculous, on the face of it. How do you reach such a conclusion?

Sure, and I read it, or at least the abstract and the discussion. But that didn’t seem to explain the significance of the research and nor did the university press release. All rather baffling. (My comment about Phys Org was just meant to be a general observation that as (I now realise) it isn’t a magazine with articles written by science journalists, one is on one’s own if the press release is unclear so recourse to the actual paper - as supplied by you in this instance - is the only route.)

Wiki says it’s just a news aggregator. I’ve found in the past articles they have published in which some PR person has written a press release without understanding the science. I think with Phys Org it’s pretty important to look at the actual paper, not just the press release.

LLMs tell you what you want to hear and make stuff up if they can’t find the answer. Also they seem to have a tendency to write in verbose and pompous language that tries to sound impressive. That is the opposite of what you need. I really don’t think there is any effective substitute for reading and then discussing or asking questions about what you have read. But others here may have a different view.

Well yes, oddly I did mean real issues. And yes I do think the world’s population as a whole will always lack the relevant knowledge on every subject worth deciding, simply because of the specialist or local knowledge required to make an informed decision. This is quite apart from a large proportion of the population not having the necessary mental acuity or interest in the topic. There are good reasons why democratic governments have a regional mandate rather than a global one and why they are governed by elected representatives, whose primary job is to understand issues and represent the interests of those who elected them. I simply can’t see how referenda involving the entire population of the globe can ever be an appropriate way of governing.

Many of these questions can be answered by reading. Videos are in general a lousy resource in my opinion. You need to be able to go at your own pace and go back and re-read bits you did not grasp first time round. There is a huge amount available on the internet. Wikipedia is generally reliable, though can get too rigorous for beginners at times - you have to be selective and sometimes just read the opening few paras, before it goes off the deep end with walls of maths. Another good one I find is the hyperphysics site run by Georgia State University. http://www.hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html Also the Libretext series is good: https://phys.libretexts.org. One approach might be to pick a topic, say mass or waves, read what these sources have to say and then come a place like this with specific queries on aspects you are having trouble with. That’s just because it is more efficient than asking people on forums like this to explain concepts from scratch. (You are welcome to try that too of course but we are not all professional educators.)

This about Einstein’s formula is something of a popular misconception. It does not say energy and matter are interchangeable. What it says is energy and mass, (not matter, please note) go hand in hand. m stands for mass, not matter. Mass is a property, as energy is. Neither mass nor energy is “stuff”. Both are just properties of certain physical systems. A system that gains energy also gains mass. For example, a charged battery has slightly more mass than a discharged one, though the difference is so small you would struggle to measure it in practice. Anything with rest mass does indeed possess energy by virtue of its mass. But some entities, such as photons (of visible light, gamma rays etc) also possess energy in spite of having no rest mass. There is in fact a longer version of Einstein’s famous formula, though much less well known, that provides for this.

Well yes that’s the puzzle. But see my previous post for a possible (tentative) explanation. It looks to me like another of these cases in which Phys Org simply reproduces a press release from the research organisation, which has been written by someone who doesn’t understand the point of the research. Phys Org doesn’t do any journalism, it just collates press releases, apparently.

Having reread it, I think the point may be to do with the protracted existence of hydrothermal systems in the rocks shattered by the impact, in this case apparently for >1m yrs. They seem to be suggesting that systems like this, generated by meteorite impact rather than vulcanism, may have created conditions for the emergence of life on Earth. I suppose this could be interesting to connect with previous findings that biochemical building blocks, such as the nitrogenous heterocyclic bases used by RNA, have been found in meteorites. One would need to account for how these rare chemicals came to be present in exactly the same - also rare - environments on the early Earth that were suitable for biochemistry to develop. But this is just me attempting to join the dots. The paper itself does not really explain why these findings are significant, and nor does the Phys Org article (which exhibits zero journalism, being just a reprint of the university’s press release.)

Yes but the thing that determines whether a piece of imagination conveys knowledge about the world, as opposed to being a mere fantasy, or just nonsense, is whether it can be tied to observation of nature. Any fool can imagine all manner of things. That's not hard. But imagination that is consistent with what we observe about how nature behaves is far more constraining - and thus far harder. That is the only form of imagination that is any use in science.

I've skimmed this and can't work out why it is important. It seems to be about the colonisation of a meteorite impact crater created ~80m years ago, i.e. some time in the Cretaceous, by the terrestrial micro-organisms that were around at the time. Why is that of interest?

Recent testing of the tripwire in Europe may well be intended to draw the attention and resources of the EU and NATO towards the Baltic and thus away from the emerging plans for defence of Ukraine. The cyber attack on EU airport systems today is likely part of the same operation.

No it isn't. The basis of knowledge, at least where the natural world is concerned, is reproducible observation of nature.