Do you imagine that the Russian people could possibly change their situation by voting?

I don’t trust Trump about this, but I trust Venezuela about as much as I trust Trump.

I wonder how they managed to target these guys after previous attacks, both by Israel and the USA, appeared to be largely ineffective. Was it a serendipitous opportunity or does it reflect progress on establishing an intelligence network in Yemen?

I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.

I think that then we actually agree.

I haven’t noticed this behavior coming from scientists particularly frequently - the ones I’ve talked to generally accept that consciousness is somehow the product of the human brain, the human brain is performing computation and obeys physical law, and therefore every aspect of the human brain, including the currently unknown mechanism that creates consciousness, can in principle be modeled arbitrarily accurately using a computer. They see this as fairly straightforward, but they have no desire to convince the public of it.

This does lead to some counterintuitive results. If you have a digital AI, does a stored copy of it have subjective experience despite the fact that its state is not changing over time? If not, does a series of stored copies representing, losslessly, a series of consecutive states of that AI? If not, does a computer currently in one of those states and awaiting an instruction to either compute the next state or load it from the series of stored copies? If not (or if the answer depends on whether it computes the state or loads it) then is the presence or absence of subjective experience determined by factors outside the simulation, e.g. something supernatural from the perspective of the AI? I don’t think such speculation is useful except as entertainment - we simply don’t know enough yet to even ask the right questions, let alone answer them.

This isn’t the Cthulhu universe. There isn’t some horrible truth ChatGPT can reveal to you which will literally drive you insane. Some people use ChatGPT a lot, some people have psychotic episodes, and there’s going to be enough overlap to write sensationalist stories even if there’s no causative relationship.

I suppose ChatGPT might be harmful to someone who is already delusional by (after pressure) expressing agreement, but I’m not sure about that because as far as I know, you can’t talk a person into or out of psychosis.

Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”

Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can’t comprehend the human concept called “love”?

*Or “sentience” or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.

I thought I could see piles of debris at the bottoms of some slopes in the after pictures which weren’t there in the before pictures, but now that I’m looking at them again, I’m no longer sure that what I’m seeing isn’t just a difference in the shadows. (Presumably the pictures were taken at different times of the day.) I’m going to edit my original statement.

The landslides at Fordow look extensive. The whole mountain must have shaken.

Edit: Maybe what I’m seeing is just shadows rather than new debris at the bottoms of some slopes.

Israel is an ally of the USA but Iran is violently hostile to the USA.

I interpret this as a way for Trump to position himself as the “good cop” rather than as a factual description of something that actually happened, or else I would be concerned about how such sensitive secret information is apparently being casually given away to news agencies.

I think many people learned the wrong lesson from GWB’s Iraq War. It was presented as (among other things) a way to stop an enemy of the USA from obtaining nuclear weapons and it was a mistake, so they conclude that using force to stop enemies of the USA from obtaining nuclear weapons is a mistake. However, using force (if necessary) to stop enemies of the USA from obtaining nuclear weapons is a prudent idea and the problem with that Iraq War was that it was not actually fought for that purpose. GWB was the boy who cried wolf but real wolves still exist.

How can the war realistically end?

1. A return to the pre-war status quo. The withdrawal of Israeli troops, presumably in return for the hostages, with either Hamas or another group equally hostile to Israel in control of Gaza. This is the worst-case scenario for Israel, because it represents a total failure to eliminate the source of more potential October 7 attacks. I suspect it’s the worst-case scenario for Gaza too, since future attacks on Israel would lead to future destruction in Gaza.

2. The destruction of Hamas and the establishment of a Gazan government friendly towards Israel, perhaps by the Palestinian authority or a coalition of Arab states. Very difficult and failure-prone, but a pathway to peace in the long term. I had hoped that this would be the outcome when the war started but it isn’t what Netanyahu is trying to accomplish and by now I’m not sure there’s enough goodwill left for it to still be possible.

3. Permanent Israeli occupation. I don’t think Israel can maintain such an occupation - it would be extremely expensive in money, lives, and international goodwill. Netanyahu and his supporters seem to think that Israel can, but many of them seem to make plans reliant on divine intervention.

4. Expulsion of the population of Gaza. Egypt wouldn’t accept that without a war. Maybe Trump thinks he can find another country that would, but even if he did (unlikely) then the logistics of moving two million people would be extremely challenging. I think this outcome is effectively impossible - another one of the “divine intervention required” plans. However, it would be a best-case scenario for Israel. The gain in territory means little, but no longer having Gazans as neighbors immediately ends the conflict for good, which no other outcome does.

If (2) isn’t going to happen then (4) may be the best case scenario for everyone. Even the people being expelled and their descendants would probably be better off than they would be if they remain in Gaza for for many more decades of conflict. However, I very much doubt that it can happen.

[subsidiary protection status] is for people who do not meet the specific criteria for refugee status under the Geneva Convention but who face a risk of serious harm in their country of origin, including the death penalty, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, or indiscriminate violence in the context of an armed conflict.

The title is somewhat misleading. It’s not refugee status as defined in international law and It’s also apparently not a permanent status?

That’s really clever. (And the people pissed off aren’t potential customers anyway.)

Are you aware that there is a significant population of white people in South Africa and a long history of racial conflict there between them and the black majority? The white minority ruled over and oppressed the black majority until the end of apartheid in the early nineties and the idea that the majority could now be persecuting the minority is not ridiculous per se the way that you imply it is, although the general consensus outside of the circles Trump listens to is that such persecution isn’t happening.