iNow

They’re already claiming states of emergency for bullshit things like potato chips are too delicious. They’re already extracting people into foreign prisons without due process, including citizens with “guaranteed” rights and paying no penalty for ignoring court rulings to reverse. They’re already normalizing having military on the streets to enforce the whims of the administration. They’re already normalizing the idea of killing people found “guilty” of their false accusations and having militia style gangs scoop people up off the streets without a warrant or charge or even an uncovered face. They’re already using pay to play to take over industry and already punishing harshly all dissent. Their riots are exactly what are needed to reverse these trends, yet paradoxically will be used to amplify them. This gets worse for a long while before we see something better. The globalization and saturation of propaganda and PsyOps only intensifies and accelerates it. I think Rob Sand (the ONLY democrat to win statewide office in the last cycle, specifically for auditor) has a decent shot at the governors office. He’s a smart decent guy though, so voters will surely reject him despite being a hunter and fiscal conservative.

Here in the use case you cite, I expect AI to flag potential infractions which themselves will need to then be validated by human reviewers before assigning penalties. Accuracy rates will never reach 100% IMO, but my intuition is 95 -97% based on feedback from real life human reviewers is easily achievable (and that feedback can also be used to train and further refine the AI). Getting to 99% accuracy will likely remove the need for independent human review and any flaws in the process would likely be addressed through appeals.

Try therapy

An immune system exposed to the virus is stronger than an immune system not exposed to the virus. Those who are not vaccinated and get exposed get far more sick and frequently die. Vaccines reduce that risk and intensity. At the individual level, vaccines are clearly better for the immune system and clearly make it stronger than not. Perhaps if there is a valid point in your argument somewhere it's at the population level... in that we're allowing the weaker members of the herd to survive and reproduce thanks to the vaccines instead of letting them die and only allowing those naturally born strong enough to survive without vaccines to reproduce. 20-40 million people have died from Covid in the last 5 years, even with vaccination available. I'd say the herd has been thinned enough already, but YMMV.

There’s like 900 products called copilot. Assume you mean Microsoft. For that, no. It’s fairly useless overall IMO. Where it shines is searching across multiple internal work platforms like all emails and chats and sharepoint pages for one word typed by one person on some random topic, or summarizing key points on some arcane topic Depends on the model. Think of the prompt as a key. Not all keys fit all vehicles. A lorry doesn’t drive the same as a Ferrari, and both are different from motorcycles and jet skis, even though all are motorized vehicles used by drivers.

Different models have different strengths, weaknesses, processes, and even personalities. For those (like GPT-5) which use a router, that one addition to your query can result in a far superior output. You need to frame the query properly to receive a proper response. (though even that need is getting smaller as models keep getting better)

Begin your prompt by telling it to think deeply and show its steps, that it must be correct to hold up under scrutiny. Will change which model it routes to and how it processes the answer

Because praise is a concept that exists whether it’s voluntary or involuntary, authentic or insincere. It’s still praise when offered regardless of how or why. No Tell me, did you “choose” to stop believing in Santa Claus, or did it just sort of happen naturally when you became wise enough to see it for the nonsensical ruse it is?

The betting markets offer useful crowd sourced insights into questions like this

Depends on the model. They diverge in important ways and generalizations tend to miss relevant nuances Unsure I follow

He’s distracting from his placement in the Epstein files

Most newer versions have addressed the sycophantic response issue.

Sounds good

Precisely, which is partially why finding thresholds gets so maddeningly muddy. Except I’d pushback that here yet again humans are no different in that regard. We too are simply a more complex aggregation of automatic reactions. You and I have many times walked this path together though, in context of freewill, and my own automatic reactions lead me to conclude it has already been trodden quite enough.

Often the issue isn’t the software, but instead the configuration choices and corporate culture into which they’re deployed (exchemist touched on this with his first comment). First the CFO tells a team they have $100K to execute an implementation that should be budgeted at $600K, that they only get 8 months to do work which properly scoped should take 20, and that team further has only 3 people to manage it all when instead they should have 12. Then that team is blocked from following best practices and gets ignored when they pushback explain how the configuration decisions being made are illogical and unsustainable mistakes. They get a placating pat on the head as if they’re an overly emotional child and told to go do it anyway. The teams are told not to do what the end users wanted or requested and instead must follow orders from executives who behave in a command and control manner, who don’t much care how their own personally prioritized pet requirements decimate the overall UX and force that same understaffed, underplayed, under-appreciated group of sysAdmins to spend their thankless days smashing square pegs through round holes all to appease their many competing masters demanding conflicting workflows and outputs. The soup gets spoiled because there are too many inexperienced know it all cooks in the kitchen and too few quality ingredients due to penny pinching shortsightedness, not because the oven is a POS or the pots and pans weren’t of sufficient quality. Don’t ask me how I know.

So even plants and possibly bacteria too then, is that correct? Just at the lower end of the robustness spectrum?

House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story

Its strength seems to be in coding

As can those of humans Indeed. Hence the question I posed in my first reply to DrmDoc: Where is the threshold when drilling farther and farther down the evolutionary tree. I cannot, no. I’ve not formalized my thinking on this to that level of specificity.

I’m far more comfortable with this claim than the one asserting a cortex is prerequisite to consciousness, but I believe it too is mistaken. Jellyfish, for example, also don’t have a CNS but very much seem conscious. Slime molds are another potential example of conscious behavior in the absence of a CNS, though this one is admittedly easier to argue against despite the way they solve mazes and respond “intelligently” to multiple complex stimuli.

Thanks for confirming. According to this view, even an octopus cannot be conscious so I reject it from the start. They were mistaken IMO. People born without it may have various deficiencies of various severities, but they still can function, lead healthy lives, and are very much conscious when they do.

As always, your points are clear, consistent, and coherent and it's hard for me to challenge them given their strength. The one item which stands out to me right now, however (and it's possible I'm misinterpreting), is that you seem to be suggesting cortex is required for conscious experience (as do the authors you cited). I am not ready to accept that conclusion myself.

Believe the final comment from me on the post immediately preceding yours touched on similar theme

It’s a far more reptilian part of our brain. I was surprised too when I first learned it, but it makes intuitive sense. My understanding is sharks can smell a single drop of blood almost half kilometer away. I was with you until you said solitary. Is that maybe the case? Sure, but sense of self strikes me as one of those things where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

I said nothing about our brains being computers. I suggested they are prediction machines generating certain outputs