https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1q14kyj/playing_with_a_retro_floppy_disk_box/

They’re talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.

You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.

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While the tester is blind as to which is which, the experimenter knows the construction of the machine and can presumably tell if it’s artificially constraining itself.

In the case of intelligences and neural networks that is not so straight forward. The humans and machines that are behind the curtain have to be motivated to try and replicate a human, or the test would fail, whether that’s because a human control is unhelpful or because the machine isn’t bothering trying to replicate a human.

I see what you’re saying but I think the problem is that you would need to test an AI while it’s unaware of being tested, or use a novel trick that it’s unaware of, to try and catch it producing non-human output.

If it’s aware that it’s being tested, then presumably it will try to pass the test and try to limit itself to human cognition to do so.

i.e. It’s possible that an AI’s intelligence includes enough human-like intelligence to completely mimic a human and pass a Turing test, but not enough to know to keep to those boundaries; but it’s also possible that it both knows enough to mimic us and enough to keep to our bounds, in which case the test then needs to be done in secret.

Maybe reconsider throwing around words like “naiive” when your source is a Europol briefing document covering various threats at a high level with no stats or numbers.

Especially since if you actually dig into it, you’d find that Europe’s illegal gun trade comes partially from old military and police weapons from the Balkans / collapse of the Soviet Union, partially from the theft of legal firearms, partially from weapons that are imported (legally and illegally) from the US and Turkey, and minorly from weapons smuggled in from other war zones / 3d printed guns.

i.e. three out of four of the biggest sources of illegal guns in Europe are caused by legal firearm ownership, and one is the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The fact is that gun control works. Dislike that all you want but it doesn’t change the stats or reality of the world. Here in Canada the vast majority of gun crime is perpetrated using guns illegally smuggled from the US and another ~15% is from legal Canadian guns that were stolen. That’s not an argument that makes wide spread gun ownership look like a good idea.

Maybe so, but we live in a world where guns exist.

No, you live in a country that chooses to manufacture guns in response to people buying them, and you choose to actively perpetuate that by going and spending money buying guns and gun infrastructure, directly funding gun companies / their lobbies, and then by going online to try and spread that justification so that you can feel slightly less guilty about choices you’ve made that you know are wrong.

And where did they smuggle those guns from? Countries where it is easy to purchase legal firearms?

Even with 3D printed guns, literally no illegal entity is manufacturing them at scale, because that is still very, very traceable and catchable.

No, I misread your comment and thought it was from someone who had been in a situation where a gun would have made it better, rather than one where it had.

Interesting to note though, that at least one of those situations was caused by someone having easy access to firearms.

And some of you may be upvoting any plausible argument for gun ownership, even in the face of overwhelming objective evidence that it makes societies vastly unsafe.

Here’s the thing about guns and victimhood, access to guns causes far more victims then access to guns prevents, and it always inherently will. In that environment, a predator intent on committing a crime will always have one, and a victim only ever might have one.

If you rely on mutually assured destruction arguments, then you have armed and killing each other over road rage because humans are dumb emotional children who think they’re more mature then they are.

In this thread: Americans who literally cannot comprehend that they are not the only country on earth.

How did those situations resolve without having a gun?

If you want a heavy brick that doesn’t need to move around, then buy a desktop for the power.

If you want a heavy brick that does need to move around, then buy a Think Book so that it can survive a fall.

And if you want a light laptop that’s easy to carry around, then buy a Gram so that it can survive a fall and do basic 2007 things like include a numpad.

MacBooks heavy feel is literally just them overcharging you for something brittle. It’s like being charged more for furniture because it’s heavy only to find outs it’s made with MDF.

Macbooks have decent chips that are limited by Apple’s crappy software, a flat out badly designed OS, nice screens, and way too much weight for their utility.

I feel like there’s three types of buy nothing:

1. buy it for life - people looking to reduce consumerism by purchasing high quality, long lasting items that aren’t engineered to have limited lifespans. See https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

2. second hand trading groups - people who want to reduce consumerism by creating vibrant second hand marketplaces and encouraging selling, trading, and donating of old goods. Lemmy is the wrong format for this, these groups tend to exist in geographically focused platforms like Facebook and Kijiji.

3. true die-hard anti consumerists - want to never buy anything, including any items that are remotely consumable. Hard to find these communities as these people tend to head off grid, and / or self implode.

Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they’re worth and more than professional athletes?

It sounds like you’re nostalgic for a time that never existed.

Because indexing a structured field with limited values is different from indexing a “structured” document with fields that can be anything.

Fair enough, I am just being overly angry and hateful.

It’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.

It’s not the same idea, as I didn’t advocated s studying them when they were authoritarian shitholes who were actively slaughtering their neighbours.

Tl;dw: he has two points:

1. That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduced the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.

2. That there hasn’t been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it’s compute power at the field of physics? It could see wondrous progress and a world of plenty.

Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn’t mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn’t mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system… at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.

Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI’s computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it’s less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.

Again though, I think that point number 1 is incredibly valid. At the end of the day incentives, and specifically cost incentives, drive a massive amount of behaviour. It’s worth thinking about how how AI changes them.