100%. I fall in the 'I hate MS (and Apple, and Google, and...)' crowd myself. I lose brain cells every time I have to use MS products, so I definitely make nonlogical statements about these companies sometimes. I admit that my biasies are strong and one can't fully trust my opinion when I talk about these companies. But I do try to lace mostly truth, even if I exaggerate.

Now I mostly use my self hosted cloud, but I do still have all of my short term things in downloads that don't need a form of backup

Good point. The age ban is based on the idea that it is worse for kids (and other exploits) when the big idea is that it is bad for everyone, just moreso for kids. Might as well protect the whole populace when one change of the app design will do that.

Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)

I can't argue with this, so I acknowledge that my interpretation is as bunk as anyone else's.

> my current assumption is that insects are not conscious

Some species act as hive-minds (like bees! How convenient for your example), so I imagine the hive as the consciousness, making each bee individually lacking conscious but collectively so. Like a single neuron is not consciousness alone, but the brain is... For some reason. Kinda like how you use different physics at different levels; Newtonian physics is always there, but negligible at quantum levels, so effectively not present at all. Even a human is a collection of minds, but only one conscious. My gut biome is independent biology and can even be removed and transplanted, but I don't believe my gut bacteria is conscious. So long as it is in me, it is nonetheless part of me, and I am one conscious. I also don't exist only at my brain, eyes, or hands (deaf/blind people have expressed to me that they feel like they are located at their hands in the way I used to think I was located behind my eyes), but as my whole body.

With this perspective, I still don't believe LLMs are conscious despite modeling thinking so well. At best, it is a highly accessible modeling software, like goat simulator but if it were so good that someone thought the goat was real. You are still steering the goat/LLM, and it doesn't exist when you aren't running it. I guess the missing piece for me is the lack of autonomy that a conscious has.

Then you can go into an argument on whether we actually have choice or it is an illusion, but that is a whole topic on its own.

> gravity is just launching countless trillions of parallel instances of the same computation, with nearly all possible initial starting conditions

Great take and conclusion, no issue with the playful language here. It makes sense that, entropy being a required output with time, and 'infinite' near isolated cases would find just about every way to create that entropy, to include the efficiency at creating it (life, as you said).

Lovely take. Earth is a supercomputer. And to play on sibling responses to your first comment, this supercomputer is solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The answer is entropy though, not 42

With that said, if Earth was compared to a super computer, the initial conditions and perturbations (weights and biases, or probabilistic inference) are very important, as most planets that are also performing ~10^38 ops/sec will never succesfully manufacture biochemistry/life.

Someone recently told me that when he worked for the BLM, there was a lot of LDS folk, which reinforced my observation that they are overrepresented in federal jobs in general (I have no evidence for this, just several anecdotes). I assumed it is because they usually don't smoke marijuana, so they are more likely to be eligible. That abstract gave more compelling possibilities that I didn't think of, that don't seem conspiratorial, like the higher multilingual likelihood at concentrated places like BYU, making it a great spot for recruiting.

Does the article go into more detail on how they "corrupted" the FBI that is not easily explained by them simply being ideal FBI hires?

[1] I know a few people whose phones constantly beep and flash numerous times a minute, and when on, the top is completely unusable because any notification dismissed is immediately replaced, obscuring those upper buttons again. I don't understand how they tolerate it.

Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.

My workplaces have not had gyms, but I bought equipment for my home that maintains the streamline. I haven't been perfect at my routine because my work schedule isn't consistent which is annoying, but I do still get some exercise in at least twice per week with it. I doubt I'd be getting at least that otherwise.