You axolotl questions.

I dont know if this is fixeable outside of massive automation

Why would that be a problem? Japan is one of the leaders in robotics. If they can build thousands of semi-autonomous drones on both sides of Ukraine war weekly, then shouldn't be a problem to create caretaker bots.

The history of AI is all about modeling human intelligence, just like the models we have in natural sciences. If the model happens to be a very good match with reality, we may sometimes mistake one for the other. OTOH, they may be the same thing for all practical purposes.

I'm not sure if I have any deeper intelligence than a fancy language model. When we say that LLMs don't really understand things, then what exactly do we mean by understanding? In my personal definition, the meaning of something is simply the graph of its associated things. I consider something very meaningful if the graph has a lot of nodes and edges, and this also explains why simple things gain more meaning as we age.

Well, if it's OK for a business to freely use copyrighted material for their commercial, for-profit purposes, then it throws out all arguments against non-commercial, non-profit "piracy". In other words, the court cases make a great test for the whole idea of copyright — they can't have their cake and eat it too.

How would an AI mine Bitcoin? Two extremes come to mind:

(a) It uses a language model to compute SHA2-256 hashes "by hand", and starts demanding more data centers to make a decent buck.

(b) It figures out a vulnerability in SHA2-256 and takes over the network.

you were told not to (a) copy that floppy and (b) waste precious energy on cryptocurrency mining. But when big companies are building data centers for industrial-scale copyright infringement, it's suddenly OK. Because it's "busyness" done by white men in uncomfortable suits, not by idealistic young hobbyists.

I basically keep listing of stuff I want to watch and what service it is on. For the obvious ones (Stranger Things S5, Andor's new season, Wednesday etc), it's of course obvious, but if I suddenly decide to check something out (recently: Star Trek Strange New Worlds), I just use justwatch.com to find what platform it is on.

Once there's enough stuff on one service and too little on the one I'm currently subscribed to, I just switch. Kid has also grown up enough that she doesn't demand Disney+.

I still hope they'd at some point get the equivalent of Spotify or Apple music or Tidal. Apart from very few exclusives, everyone is on all services, and musicians get their due depending on the number of plays. Why couldn't the streaming services just provide access to everything and pass the fees to producers depending on views? ...like, you know, Netflix used to!

I have sort of the same deal. I hate "exercise" without any real purpose than busy-work, but I still started swimming around 5 years go. I typically swim about 1 km three times a week. I chose swimming because at least you don't sweat while doing that (or rather, it goes directly to the pool) and you get to do different styles to alleviate some of the boredom.

Result: Weight has been exactly the same as before I started, around 100 kg. Bloodwork shows that cholesterol levels and other indicators are much better than 5 years ago, but absolutely zero effect on weight. Also tried changing my diet - several times. However, all "lighter" diets just results in hunger. I don't mind feeling hungry during the day, but can't go to sleep if stomach is growling for food - so also have tried the 16/8 variant where I only grab water for most of the day and maybe one cookie just to keep blood sugar up, and then eat just before bedtime - no dice. My supposedly ideal weight would be -20kg, and I've never been able to go below 95 for the past 30 years or so.

I *guess* some of that earlier fat has turned into muscle, but frankly, my dad belly still looks the same as ever before.

If a single book is 30 plus hours to read it'll never be a successful series.

To be fair, at least around 1/5 or even 1/3 of each book is
  - Recaps of stuff that happened as the storytelling pans towards PoV character.
  - Descriptions of scenery.
  - Slow as hell travel scenes

On TV, you can skip the recaps, scenery is implicit, and the travel montages can be made much faster.

I mean, story summaries are pretty much:

    - Book 1, works as an independent story, the three country boys and two gals are yanked onto the adventure, during which they learn a bunch of lore and at the end they have a bossfight
    - Book 2&3, the boss was just a sub-boss of the real Big Bad, need to grab a bunch of gear. Gals go to level up in wizard school, boys start hunting for that extra gear. Add a couple of prophecies into the mix.
    - Book 4-7: The main character does a bunch of level ups with Fremen (oh wait, Aiel) and defeats a few more bosses. A new group (Seachan) show up in force, while they have so far been only hinted at.
  - Book 8-11: Folks bounce around and nothing much happens, but getting a bunch of setup for the final battle.
  - Books 12-14: Payoff to the previous four books set-up. Plotlines finally getting tied up with massive battles everywhere.

(Yeah, personally at around book 9 I stopped for several years, but then when news got around that the series had finally finished, I got around to reading them. It was ok-ish in the end, but I'll probably not even try reading them again).

    Anyway, there's so much filler in the books that condensing those to around Book 1 = Season 1 and then 1 season for every 2-3 books is not *that* difficult if you just cull a bit of the plot kudzu.

If you jurisdiction requires communication software vendors to provide law enforcement with a backdoor and/or encryption decryption capabilities, your jurisdisction is not only broken; it is unacceptable.

So entirely unwritten legislation that you're supposed to just mind-read is the norm, got it.

What's the new test that AI is supposed to pass to be considered generally intelligent? Given that humans are defined as generally intelligent, it has to be a test that a below-average human would pass.

That's a rather philosophical question. Check out Chinese Room argument (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FChinese_room). LLMs are essentially filling that role. So the big question is indeed do the LLMs actually "understand" Chinese.

The big thing as it comes to AGI is probably emergence. At some point we just note that yeah, it is now impossible to even try to understand what exactly went down when the AI agent did $THING, even if you have full visibility to all the internal states. Yeah, that's an "if you build it, they will come"-type argument, but seems to be the way things are going.

At the risk of devolving this thread, I blame Nouvelle Vague. They play Bossa Nova versions of New Wave songs.

You breaking the license is not the problem of whoever sold you the item.

This, precisely. You might have purchased a physical item and do own it, but you absolutely were not granted ownership of the software running on the physical item. You were granted a license to use it. A license with terms and conditions. A license that can be revoked.