You did the thing you just complained about by not writing out 400,000,000 (400M) in relation to the 4,000,000,000,000 (4T)

To scale that down, it’s like someone paying 400 from a net worth of 4,000,000 (4M), or 4 from a net worth of 40,000, they would barely even notice. Of course that’s ignoring all the details of revenue and profit vs net worth or actual tax rates, and I can’t be bothered to look those up.
But imagine you own some land and a house that you bought for 4,000,000 (4M) that you have to pay property taxes on, and the taxes were 400 per year. That’s a 0.01% tax rate.

Shit, now I actually want to know what the real numbers are. according to Finbox “Apple’s effective tax rate for fiscal years ending September 2020 to 2024 averaged 16.5%.” although I think that’s specifically income tax.

Per macrotrends, apple profited 180,600,000,000 in 2024, from 391,035,000,000 revenue, a profit margin of ~45%, from which they payed 29,749,000,000 in taxes for an effective tax rate of 16.5% on the income.

Relative to net worth valuation of ~3,800,000,000,000 at end of 2024 that income tax paid is 0.75% of their net worth.

He played Wallace, the head of the company that’s blind or whatever , the guy who guts the girl in that ‘android being birthed’ scene

And we cannot forget one of the best comedy actors of all time, Leslie Neilson

One of the wonderful things about wood is that you can reshape it pretty easily with a nice sharp knife or some sandpaper. Turn those rectangles into octogons by flattening the corners and then sand the whole thing smooth and all your wooden spoons are usable again

Or fireworks. Many states have laws against selling fireworks to state residents, but all you need to do is cross a border or have an out of state license and you can buy them just fine.

I thought there was a relatively good explanation for ice spikes having to do with the volumetric expansion of water as it transitions phases from liquid to solid. Basically as an ice cube freezes there is a shell formed over the top surface and under the right circumstances it forms from the outside edges in leaving a hole, but then instead of the hole closing over ice starts forming downward into the bulk of the cube, pushing liquid water out of the hole which is then frozen into a protrusion

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_spike

It depends on the type/grade of magnet

https://e-magnetsuk.com/introduction-to-neodymium-magnets/temperature-ratings/

Wife and I have been watching Foundation. season 1 felt really good but season 2 has continued to have moments that make us go “Wait what? That’s not how that works.” Or “You’re just going to say/do that without any further explanation?”

The lights are also so others can see you, not so relevant when you’re really out away from civilization but there are many laws that require headlights to be on when windshield wipers are used

I have spent the last several weeks re-creating documents like this there were developed and maintained by one guy for 38 years.
There’s a half page drawing done in word that is lines and boxes and text all as text and positioned with spaces and tabs. I think I took a screenshot of it and just made it all one picture

An assembly line robot (like welding or material handling, I’ve worked with ABB, Fanuc, Motoman, Panasonic) are still called robot “arms” with the end portion often called the “wrist” so there is a degree of anthropomorphizing even if it’s not the whole body. And they do resemble an arm, however with 6 axis motion the motion is more like from your hips to your wrist than shoulder to wrist.

It’s 8 isn’t it. It’s ok, I liked it too

IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn’t factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.

There’s an old joke I remember about economists and the GDP.

Two economists are walking through the jungle and come across a gigantic pile of lion scat. One turns to the other and said I’ll pay you 100$ to eat a bite of that shit.
Being an economists and 100$ being worth a lot, the guy eats the shit and gets paid.
A little while later they come across a pile of rhino dung. The now richer economist turns to the first and offers 100$ for him to take a bite out of this pile. 100$ is again a lot of money so he does it and eats the shit.
As they’re walking along, both picking their teeth, one turns to the other and asks “did we both just eat shit for nothing?” And the other days “of course not, now the GDP of the jungle has increased by 200$!”

Diversity, Equality, Inclusion.

Yes, DEI is just the new name for “stop discriminating against non-white males”

Your analogy to mechanical systems are exactly where the breakdown to comparison with the human brain occurs, our brains are not like that, we don’t only have the blocks of text loaded into us, sure we only learn what we get exposed to but that doesn’t mean we can’t think of things we haven’t learned about.
The article I linked talks about the separation between the formation of thoughts and those thoughts being translated into words for linguistics.

The fact that you “don’t even know why the how the brain creates an articulated spoken word is even relevant here” speaks volumes to how much you understand the human brain, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence actually understanding the words it generates and the implications of thoughts behind the words and not just guessing which word comes next based on other words, the meanings of which are irrelevant.

I can listen to a song long enough to learn the words, that doesn’t mean I know what the song is about.

Funny to me how defensive you got so quick, accusing of not reading the linked paper before even reading it yourself.

The reason OP was so rude is that your very premise of “what is the brain doing if not statistical text prediction” is completely wrong and you don’t even consider it could be. You cite a TV show as a source of how it might be. Your concept of what artificial intelligence is comes from media and not science, and is not founded in reality.

The brain uses words to describe thoughts, the words are not actually the thoughts themselves.

https://advances.massgeneral.org/neuro/journal.aspx?id=1096

Think about small children who haven’t learned language yet, do those brains still do “stastical text prediction” despite not having words to predict?

What about dogs and cats and other “less intelligent” creatures, they don’t use any words but we still can teach them to understand ideas. You don’t need to utter a single word, not even a sound, to train a dog to sit. Are they doing “statistical text prediction” ?

Can I vote for rotate 90° counter-clockwise? I know it’s objectively wrong, but I also think it looks the nicest.