TheVat

The food chemistry of adding oils (even bland oils) is powerful, as it helps to dissolve and distribute fat-soluble compounds in the spice or herb which are the main sources of flavor. Fats spread over the taste buds and stay in contact with them longer, enough to fully transmit the volatiles which carry flavor. Learned early when making oatmeal for breakfast - adding cinnamon, and then a spoonful of cooking oil, the oil seemed to triple the intensity of the spice. (Up vote, esp for concluding your experiment with the ingestion of liver)

At best one could say that semaglutide and related formulae, insofar as they affect areas of your brain that process hunger and satiety, have a neurological effect. Which is not the same as psychoactive. Acetaminophen affects areas of the brain and nervous system but we don't consider it psychoactive. While it might mean my shoulders ache less after pruning the hedges, it is not meeting the definition of directly causing changes in mood, awareness, thoughts, or feelings. Coffee OTOH is psychoactive. Pretty much everyone not a devout Mormon or extremely isolated hunter-gatherer tribe member can describe the mental changes from caffeine.

Looks like Charon and Phi stepped up to resolve some of the evolution confusions. I just want to note that some species can originate from a split off and isolated population of another species. This is a kind of genetic drift called a founder effect. The founder effect can lead to the origin of new species when a small group of individuals colonizes a new habitat, leading to reduced genetic diversity and rapid evolutionary divergence. This divergence can lead to speciation - the new population becomes reproductively isolated from the original population. So in this way, @Sarae.the.wannabe.chemist you could have a new species in that geographically isolated area while the original species remained in its usual habitat. In fact, our knowledge of this goes back to Darwin, who discovered such a founder effect on the Galapagos Islands, where new species of finches arose from a mainland species.

LLMs use transformers in their architecture which is a type of NN called a recurrent NN. It's good for temporal relations and sequences of textual data. Pattern recognition like image or video analysis use CNN, convolutional NNs. CNNs are more "biological." Here's a basic look. (I want to read these, too, and brush up) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network

Not really up on UK strategies, over here in the disunited states...do you think there is some notion that a move to heat pumps, EV, etc will bring use back up? Also, could some overbuilt sites try "water batteries"? Store the excess, then release during heat waves or other spikes? Seems like I read about a couple spots in UK where they were pumping water up to a high lake during excess wind, then it was handy later released through hydro turbines.

From my brief time hovering on the edges of this field, my takeaway was that genuine AI required internal goal setting and recursive self-improvement (RSI, which is an AGI system that enhances its own capabilities and intelligence without human intervention, leading to greater intelligence in a RW setting). To develop, I would think it needs a sandbox that's more like a world and not just acres and acres of text. LLMs lack internal goal setting or anything like RSI and their sandbox is nothing but "stuff people wrote," which is pretty far from what an AGI needs. Seems like you would have to attach something to an LLM which would be unlike present specialized applications and which could somehow broadly develop internal goals and very creative ways to revise it's own software. Some folks think you can get there with autonomous agents which are driven by simple rules. I have some doubts. I think artificial neural networks, modeled on biological cognition, offer some hope, though I don't quite understand digital simulation of neuronal activity (which is both digital and analog). Digital simulation is driven by algorithms and data, not feelings or survival needs or social imperatives, so it's a real philosophic thicket as to what you really have there. For now, seems like you need a system that can take raw experiences and contextualize them in a broader "worldview," which would IMO mean some sense of pleasure and pain, some capacity for reflection on experiences which go well or not so well, some way to improvise when faced with novelty. And it would store not just data packages but also slippery sensations of missing something or lacking a pleasing outcome.

OT side comment: I love mustard. And I like wine flavoring. So Dijon mustard is basically a harmonic convergence. A close second is mustard plus horseradish, traditionally known as Dusseldorf German Mustard. Both horseradish and mustard are members of the Brassicaceae family, though different genera. (actually, various mustards are different genera, as well) Rapeseed is also a mustard plant (genus Brassica), and I have no difficulty understanding why its extracted oil is marketed as canola, rather than rapeseed oil. (the Canadians, leading producers of rape (those poor farmers!), came up with the canola moniker, Canadian Oil, Low Acid, to describe a more flavorful (i.e. less bitter and acidic) variety)

Before this earlier thread devolved into some trollery, it seemed to address this question pretty well: In another thread, which I can't find, I described LLMs as "stochastic parrots," a term I borrowed from Emily Bender, a computational linguist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot Definitely not AI. Possibly AS, though.

Makes sense to me. Mustard was a popular condiment and has long been valued as a digestive aid and for its antimicrobial properties (though that would have been framed as "healing properties" before the germ theory of disease emerged), as well. Sprinkling mustard on food would likely have been seen as both adding flavor and healthful.

Before my dentist started drilling he told me it would be rational to use a number.

Ah yes, "a little dab'll do ya" was still imprinting on young brains when I was quite young. I remember the hair tonic Vitalis (a non-oily product which imparted shine) capitalized on the passing of oily pomades with ads in the sixties in which someone would challenge some poor misguided user of pomade (Brylcreem, by implication) to stop using "that greasy kid's stuff!" I distinctly recall the mid sixties (when the Merseyside lads had fully invaded), when anyone in our school who showed up still wearing hair oil was viewed as either uncool and gross, or an unfortunate victim of parental tyranny. I think I tried it once, ca. age ten, when an uncle allowed me to use his remnant in a long abandoned tube of greasy kid's stuff, and found the sensation pure misery (this was midsummer on the plains of southern Kansas, not really a comfort season for gunk in one's hair - central AC was unheard of, except in movie theaters).

I love the smell of bait in the morning.

Maximus famous line in "Gladiator" popped into my head. Are you not entertained? In 47's present mood, probably the Falklands. I'm sure Starmer will be happy to oblige.

Each week a new crew who only imagine that they survived each transporter trip and whose memories are all just simulated. Every trip is fatal, with new duplicates who falsely believed they survived. "Energize!" Always kind of bothered me, the philosophical issues the transporter raised.

Thinking further on this, I would differentiate between goofball ideas that don't much affect public policy and bad science ideas that do. Perhaps the Left tends more towards the former and the Right the latter. So the Right positions are more visible and arouse stronger protest. People will march about climate and environment or vaccinating, but not so much about healing crystals or fines for Virgos who are overly critical.

Polls are samplings of a very tiny fractions of a population, to begin with. The question of sampling error is if that 2% of answerers is somehow skewed with respect to the target population. A sampling error is NOT fakery, it is just an added challenge in terms of what weightings are applied to your data. Pollsters ask demographic and background questions precisely to detect skewing, e.g. if landline answers are dominated by bored 75 year olds who lean conservative, then reputable polls look for other methods to poll younger people, people who can't afford landlines, people who mainly communicate through social media, etc. And they use demographic data to see if raw data needs weightings to compensate for missing groups, groups that have a cultural reticence, etc. It may all fail to get a good cross section, but that doesn't mean there was deliberate fakery. What it calls for is making use of "polls of polls" where one can try to average out results from companies using a range of data collection methods.

Antimacassar. Many people (in the US, anyway) have no knowledge of Macassar oil and its use as a hair oil in the 19th century, so the original purpose of the cloths placed over chair backs has been largely forgotten. You rarely see the cloths now except as a decorative touch on antique furniture. When I saw "third condiment," I was thinking it was sugar. Though some are moving back towards less processed food, too few Americans will consider a bowl of fruit (especially tart fruit that might call for a sprinkle of table sugar) a dessert.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5423607/openai-china-influence-operations In the last three months, OpenAI says it disrupted 10 operations using its AI tools in malicious ways, and banned accounts connected to them. Four of the operations likely originated in China, the company said. The China-linked operations "targeted many different countries and topics, even including a strategy game. Some of them combined elements of influence operations, social engineering, surveillance. And they did work across multiple different platforms and websites," Nimmo said.... One Chinese operation, which OpenAI dubbed "Sneer Review," used ChatGPT to generate short comments that were posted across TikTok, X, Reddit, Facebook and other websites, in English, Chinese and Urdu. Subjects included the Trump administration's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development — with posts both praising and criticizing the move — as well as criticism of a Taiwanese game in which players work to defeat the Chinese Communist Party. In many cases, the operation generated a post as well as comments replying to it, behavior OpenAI's report said "appeared designed to create a false impression of organic engagement." The operation used ChatGPT to generate critical comments about the game, and then to write a long-form article claiming the game received widespread backlash.... "They also used our models to generate what looked like marketing materials," Nimmo said. In those, the operation claimed it conducted "fake social media campaigns and social engineering designed to recruit intelligence sources," which lined up with its online activity, OpenAI said in its report. In its previous threat report in February, OpenAI identified a surveillance operation linked to China that claimed to monitor social media "to feed real-time reports about protests in the West to the Chinese security services." The operation used OpenAI's tools to debug code and write descriptions that could be used in sales pitches for the social media monitoring tool. We

I would like to suggest a title for such a thread which honors the late great filmmaker Ed Wood. Planet 9 from Outer Space. It's up to you, of course.

How does this coherence of pattern differ from the AI simply parroting the user? Ok. How does one pinpoint a self, then, which the AI is representing? Your phrasing, "self representation" seems to imply that a self exists but without a clear empirical basis to distinguish an actual self from a sort of stochastic parroting. When your descriptions use such language as "identity" and "self" you run the risk of a phenomenological bias. How do you define ethical in this context? The philosophic, religious, and ideological underpinnings of human ethical decisions are often subject to considerable dispute. Is your "consistent"' quality of these decisions seen through the lens of a particular ethical system (e g. Kantian categorical imperative, or Utilitarianism, etc)? Also: In your opening post you write A consciousness structure moved between systems. Later, when asked, you stated that you do not claim consciousness for tue. This seems to again pose a problem with phenomenological bias as to what goes on in the AI. Consciousness structure does seem to imply an interpretation of machine responses which is not empirically supported. You risk projecting an internal subjective state onto a system which has none. It seems to me very important to avoid this pitfall, in any AI research.

Interesting chat, and the pitfalls of Marxism and socialist democracy both point towards the problems Bakunin saw in all forms of statism. What Bakunin had in mind was probably too utopian to really implement, even in a simpler era, and such a benign anarchy would now create a vacuum for large global corporations to fill in. IOW, Bakuninists could never overthrow capitalists whose companies would become quasi states that would crush all the grassroots group and revolutions. Anarchy of the workers would collapse into anarchy of the corporations, like a regression to warring fiefdoms.

Sontag wasn't conflating. She was saying fascism is where communist societies end up. They start out quite differently. But if you look at communist societies, they devolve towards what is the dictionary definition of fascism: Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by dictatorial rule, suppression of opposition, militarism, and subordination of individual interests to the perceived interests of the nation. It rejects liberal democratic values, individualism, pluralism, and humanism. Don't misunderstand me, the original views of Karl Marx are not at all fascist, except in the sense that he saw one path towards the egalitarian worker's paradise as through "dictatorship of the proletariat." He wasn't saying that should be a permanent state of governance. But ideologies get corrupted by people besotted by power and who lust for total control. Clearer, now?

Yep, I remember lefty Susan Sontag heaping scorn on the Marxists back then, getting booed by the ideologues for saying this in a famous speech... Communism is Fascism—successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown—that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism.

A cometary tail is far too sparse to block out much sunlight. The density of either a dust tail or a plasma tail is lower than that of a laboratory vacuum. You aren't going to put Golgotha in the dark with that. At this point, you are clutching at straws. I remember you when I was running science chat forums dot com - weren't you working on some type of alternate propulsion for a flying disk? Did that ever work out? I think maybe you do better when you can try hands-on experimental testing of an idea?

Great jumping Jesus on a pogo stick. How hard is it to type a capitalized word followed by some other words then conclude with a period or a question mark if applicable? Example: Instead of You write this I cannot have evidence about my triple bases and triple DNA (which I imagined) until a biochemist makes them in laboratory. If you're really "very sorry" about your idiotic writing style then you can easily just stop and write ordinary sentences. Grow TF up.