I don’t know where you’re from but I’d bet money it’s not your land the Russians would be occupying, товарищ.

Lots of not so friendly countries are watching what goes on in Ukraine very carefully, and making decisions about their future military plans…

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/u-nearly-starte...

It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.

Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.

What is even being argued here - neuroscience is hard, so programming your PC thus makes it conscious?

> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

… what?

Given enough time, would that instance get bored and start e.g. reading files?

If I monitored it long enough, would there eventually be spontaneous outputs, or changes to parameters or architecture, even with the underlying software and hardware layers held constant?

Does GPT-n dream of electric sheep, or does it just sit there until interacted with, like every other file on my PC? Seems to be the latter with my local Qwen3.6, but perhaps 27B is too few params for consciousness to emerge.

Proponents of LLM consciousness could settle the argument in minutes by showing proof of unprompted autonomy, without first needing to define consciousness down to a rigorous mathematical abstraction. Why don’t they?

Evidently, even HN could only keep up the pretense that tech development is amoral and apolitical for so long.

And you appear to believe this is a pretext for humans to ignore their own laws and commit atrocities, when they could choose otherwise.

It may be reality that jungle law is currently how humans almost always handle conflict at nation-state scale. Non sequitur that it should remain so.

The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.

Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?

Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.

The belief is justified because the abstractions work for a big array of problems, to a number of decimal places. Get good enough at solving problems with those universal abstractions, everything starts to look like a solvable problem and it gets easy to lose epistemic humility.

You can combine physics and ML to make large reusable orbital rockets that land themselves. Why shouldn’t be able to solve any of the sometimes much tamer-looking problems they fail to? Even today there was an IEEE article about high failure rates in IT projects…

When most people’s reality is substantially human-defined and abstracted from nature - including a global advertising industry exists to create mass expectations, of economic significance for its clients, often enough to the detriment of their target markets - you can absolutely point the finger at “reality” for pissing on your leg while varieties of Stoic, Buddhist, and HN poster tell you it’s raining.

It’s good to start with ourselves when trying to create change, as that is where the locus of control should lie… but sometimes “reality” is absolutely the reasonable and proximate cause of negative emotion. Saying otherwise feels like anticipatory victim-blaming.

Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.