AI generated art is everywhere now.

Edit: The ai comment is a joke because the postman has six fingers.

Theoretical biologist here. I consider viruses to define the lower edge of what I’d consider “alive.” I similarly consider prions to be “not alive,” but to define a position towards the upper limit of complex, self-reproducing chemistry. There’s some research going on here to better understand how replication reactions (maybe encased in a lipid bubble to keep the reaction free from the environment) may lead to increasing complexity and proto-cells. That’s not what prions are, but the idea is that a property like replication is necessary but not sufficient and to build from what we know regarding the environment and possible chemicals.

I consider a virus to be alive because they rise to the level of complexity and adaptive dynamics I feel should be associated with living systems. I’ll paint with a broad brush here, but they have genes, a division between genotype and phenotype, the populations evolve as part of an ecosystem with all of the associated dynamics of adaptation and speciation, and they have relatively complex structures consisting of multiple distinct elements. “Alive,” to me, shouldn’t be approached as a binary concept - I’m not sure what it conceptually adds to the discussion. Instead, I think it should be approached as a gradient of properties any one of which may be more or less present. I feel the same about intelligence, theory of mind, and animal communication.

The thing to remember when thinking about questions like this is that when science (or history or literature…) is taught as a beginner’s subject (primary and secondary school), it’s often approached in a highly simplified manner - simplified to the point of inaccuracy sometimes. Many instructors will take the approach of having students memorize lists for regurgitation on exams - the seven properties of life, a gene is a length of dna that encodes for a protein, the definition of a species, and so on. I don’t really like that approach, and to be honest I was never any good at it myself.

I was really thinking they were going to challenge Musk since it’s not only their name, but he chose practically the same logo.

I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.

She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.

The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.

1. Chainmail provides little to no protection against impact damage. As we saw in Fellowship, evil beings who attack heroes in bed use slashing attacks with broadswords or similar weapons. While it might prevent cuts, it’s basically like being beaten with an iron rod that will break bones and rupture organs. It is unsuitable as armor. That’s leaving aside weapons like maces, hammers, and clubs, or a Seal Team Six scenario.
2. It’s aluminum. Or aluminium, if you’re that kind of person. This is basically a blanket designed by Jony Ive. It doesn’t warm. It doesn’t protect. But it’s thin and lightweight. Which is the opposite of what you want in a weighted blanket.
3. You can buy weighted blankets that come in a variety of weights and warmth characteristics for a fraction of the time investment used to make this. The money you save could be used to buy a home security system that includes a minefield or electric fence. If you’re impressed by what a claymore sword can do to an orc, wait until you see what a claymore mine can do.

Also: Life has no rewind button and shit can go south pretty fast.

I’d like to offer a different perspective. I’m a grey beard who remembers the AI Winter, when the term had so over promised and under delivered (think expert systems and some of the work of Minsky) that using the term was a guarantee your project would not be funded. That’s when the terms like “machine learning” and “intelligent systems” started to come into fashion.

The best quote I can recall on AI ran along the lines of “AI is no more artificial intelligence than airplanes are doing artificial flight.” We do not have a general AI yet, and if Commander Data is your minimum bar for what constitutes AI, you’re absolutely right, and you can define it however you please.

What we do have are complex adaptive systems capable of learning and problem solving in complex problem spaces. Some are motivated by biological models, some are purely mathematical, and some are a mishmash of both. Some of them are complex enough that we’re still trying to figure out how they work.

And, yes, we have reached another peak in the AI hype - you’re certainly not wrong there. But what do you call a robot that teaches itself how to walk, like they were doing 20 years ago at MIT? That’s intelligence, in my book.

My point is that intelligence - biological or artificial - exists on a continuum. It’s not a Boolean property a system either has or doesn’t have. We wouldn’t call a dog unintelligent because it can’t play chess, or a human unintelligent because they never learned calculus. Are viruses intelligent? That’s kind of a grey area that I could argue from either side. But I believe that Daniel Dennett argued that we could consider a paramecium intelligent. Iirc, he even used it to illustrate “free will,” although I completely reject that interpretation. But it does have behaviors that it learned over evolutionary time, and so in that sense we could say it exhibits intelligence. On the other hand, if you’re going to use Richard Feynman as your definition of intelligence, then most of us are going to be in trouble.

No.

GOTO Hell is BASIC.

I haven’t been able to find a good answer to that either.

One of the speculations that I’ve heard kicked around is that they were trying to do something that would light a fuse, but there was no follow up. Hamas isn’t a bunch of student rebels out of Les Miserables, throwing caution to the wind but not having done the actual groundwork. It was a small attack that happened to have what I suspect was a far larger impact than they imagined. They obviously were doing prep work for the attack itself, if the stories we’re reading are to be believed, but it was a modest-sized incursion without coordination with either the West Bank or Lebanon assets. I think it was a terrorist attack - and I am not someone who throws that word around lightly - but I don’t think that they thought it was going to be this big of a hit.

I think it’s analogous to 9/11 where OBL wasn’t expecting the whole towers falling thing, and while trying to provoke a response, the US over-response exceeded his expectations. I don’t know if Hamas will survive this as an organization, but it’s really affected the global perception of Israel.

One. Ping. Only.

Arizona iced tea in a state without sales tax?

This is what externalizing costs looks like. Neither the industries driving climate change nor the economies benefitting from those industries are forced to bear the costs of their decisions. Exxon profits are driven by their not having to account for the harms they cause.

Yet we’re still driving headlines about the “surge” in shoplifting.

I’m responding as a hiring manager for a big tech company.

I am not allowed, by law as well as very strict company policy, to ask any questions relating to the candidate’s health. I can’t know whether they’ve had four heart attacks, plan to get pregnant in the next six months, had a history of psychological issues, or anything like that. I think that most people would generally agree that’s a very good thing.

There are certainly roles where physical performance is key to the job, and so they’re able to take that kind of thing into account.

I guess what I’m saying is that, while your concern is of course valid, it feels different because we tend to see the president as someone with more of a job than, say, a senior software engineer. Okay, that’s fair in a very real sense. But I think that it’s different between the president and a prime minister, and that’s where it gets interesting. I think there’s an idealization of the role of president. And, bizarrely, that’s one reason Trump was so wrong but so beloved by so many.

This is a subject I know a bit about.

It is commonly felt that menthol makes cigarettes more comfortable to smoke. This was particularly important for cigarettes that used cheaper (and harsher) tobacco. However, it also allowed menthol cigarettes to be sold for less money. This lead to a popularity of menthol cigarettes in the black communities in the US in the 40s and 50s, when extreme racism drove much of US politics and economics, and thus a perpetually underemployed and underpaid underclass.

So then the civil rights war was started, and saw the emergence of a self-concept in some of the black communities of being an accepted part of American middle class culture. You remember the Jefferson’s theme song Movin’ On Up? That was the sentiment and the phrase used at the time. Kool cigarettes came out with ads in the black communities with phrases like “Move up to the cool taste of Kool” and crap like that. One company actually tried to launch a menthol brand called Uptown. Menthols are (or were) also popular in low income white communities, but there they had to compete with brands like Marlboro and Camel, and could carry a trashy image, as it were.

Anyway, it’s the tobacco companies making the argument about infantilizing the community. Black social and political leaders stand pretty uniformly behind the legislation, because of the toll the industry takes on the black communities.

And in any case, it’s legally no different than the government banning candy flavored cigarettes (which it can do). Menthol just had a carve out for a bit.

Fun fact - talking about overthrowing the government is legal

However, if you actually try to do it - like calling out people to do so - then that talking retroactively becomes a crime of conspiracy to commit (eg treason). That was a Supreme Court decision from early in US history.

Well, minimum age requirements are constitutional because they’re literally in the constitution. I’m about as far from a constitutional literalist as you can possibly get (I think it’s a deeply flawed and outdated document), but at least as of right now it’s literally the foundation of the US legal system.

There are a number of reasons to be concerned about adding additional requirements on top of the current set of requirements. The whole Trump thing highlighted the degree to which the entire system is built around an assumption of good faith, and I’m more concerned about that than the fact that DiFi has no business being in the senate at her age. The problem, as I see it, isn’t all of the old people. It’s systemic issues that go to the heart of this particular form of government. I mean, Reagan didn’t know where he was for most of his second term, but the real damage he did to the country has nothing to do with his cognitive decline.