Cool writing prompt: Elusive Dawn

There’s also ancient Greek and Rome which were republics 2000 and 2500 years ago.

Switzerland has it too, and while English isn’t the official language almost everyone speaks it.

It surprises me that bringing the server in house especially for emergency services isn’t a priority.

I don’t think a value judgement is valid here. It’s all bad and the magnitude of bad isn’t relevant anymore.

What this changes is our ability to predict his future actions and how to react to them. We can immediately dismiss any ideological arguments that he makes, as they are all transactional to him. ie:

Free speech claims mean nothing from him, it is merely a tool to accrue more power (obvious).

He works to prevent climate change through Tesla (maybe less obvious?).

We can predict he will (try to) ditch any affiliation with Nazism if it becomes clear there is no path to future power.

We can predict he will sell state secrets as soon as the potential rewards outweigh the risks.

I don’t think trying to evaluate whether this makes him better or worse is valuable. I think being able to better understand his motives provide us the ability to predict his future behavior.

If their claims are true, yeah. That’s how I read the implications.

I wish we had a brave new world, we’re getting 1984. While a brave new world was unsettling, almost every character enjoyed their lives. We’re getting “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.”

I know you were just using that title because it conveniently fit the sentence. I just needed to get this off my chest.

I’ve never understood this. It’s pretty easy to make some decent bread just by feel. I never measure, all you need is the right moisture to flour content.

But now after writing this maybe I just don’t have fear…

Hey! Fuck you chemicalwonka! Your nuanced, slightly different opinion enrages me! We’re enemies now.

Trump helps Chinas foreign policy so much. Their goal for decades has been to spread soft power and influence. They’ve been very effective even before Trump. What China is able to provide now is stability. The chaos that Trump sows drives nations away from the USA sphere of influence into the Chinese sphere. All they have to do is not rock the boat, do what they say they’re going to do, and let the US do the advertising for them.

It’s very sad to see an authoritarian state be the bastian of hope for developing nations. It feels like the democratic experiment has failed and authoritarianism is taking control worldwide.

What is the other meaning of undead?

That tiny smile made me smile!

I agree, LLMs have the amazingly human ability to bumble into the right answer even if they don’t know why.

It seems to me that a good analogy of our experience is a whole bunch of LLMs optimized for different tasks that have some other LLM scheduler/administrator for the lower level models that is consciousness. Might be more layers deep, but that’s my guess with no neurological or machine learning background.

This is a cool take! I don’t think I agree though. I assume we developed pattern recognition before music/language. Many animals have the ability to note attributes about plants and animals even without the ability to communicate complex ideas (ie language or oral tradition). I assume that type of pattern recognition was a good blueprint for functions like music and language, but my guess is it started from a general pattern recognition, then was retuned for music and language.

Again, pure speculation, but there is some logic behind it!

This seems reasonable to me, a very unqualified source in neurology.

I agree with you, that would be a much more effective use of resources. It’s a fantasy though, and it’s way more fun for me to daydream about design than manipulating public policy.

All that said it’s not a fruitless endeavor to think about how you would build something from scratch even if you can’t. It is a good way to hash out ideas without getting bogged down by the resistance to change.

I was thinking about this the other day. If I had half a trillion dollars (like the guy who just bought the presidency) I would spend it building a city from scratch. A walkable/bikeable city with free public transportation. I don’t have enough expertise to speak about affordable housing ideas, but with that amount of money I can pay someone to come up with some good regulations. Don’t know why but that’d be my passion project.

You can’t fail him if you try!

Been monthly for years. I truly believe it is the most important thing humanity has ever built. Nothing has done more to make knowledge accessible.

Ever heard of plastic explosives?