I know people whose grants have been put on hold and these people don’t even know if they have health insurance anymore, since grant money pays for that too. This is wild.

I actually failed my molecular biology course, and I’m still a little salty about that. I understood molecular biology. I didn’t memorize stuff like the order in which subunits bind to assemble the pre-replication complex.

After ORC1-6 bind the origin of replication, Cdc6 is recruited. Cdc6 recruits the licensing factor Cdt1 and MCM2-7. Cdt1 binding and ATP hydrolysis by the ORC and Cdc6 load MCM2-7 onto DNA.

Note that they’re numbered but the numbers aren’t related to the order in which they act. I don’t need to know that. No one who doesn’t do research specifically on the pre-replication complex needs to know that.

(Excuses, excuses…)

I had an organic chemistry class in college where the average grade was a C. I was a chemistry major and I passed with a D. A couple of other would-be chemistry majors dropped the class. The professor actually told us that we were the worst group of students he had ever taught (and it was his last class before retirement).

I don’t think he was a bad teacher, because I certainly was a bad student.

Also he talked about the need to cut down on burning fossil fuels, but less due to environmental concerns and more due to the lost opportunity to make plastics and other interesting substances out of them.

I get permitting these blogs as part of a commitment to avoid censorship - someone with non-mainstream but far less extreme opinions can look at them and say “If Substack doesn’t censor even these guys, it definitely won’t censor me.” With that said, I’m still surprised that Substack apparently doesn’t manually curate its push notifications.

I’m not necessarily supportive of Thiel - he does some things that I oppose, and also some things that I think are silly. He’s not a very likeable man overall. I’m supportive of transhumanism. The substance of this article is merely that:

Peter Thiel hesitated when asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure.”

The article doesn’t even say what his reply ultimately was, but the implication is that even considering that a transhuman future would be better is somehow horrifying, and that’s the implication I’m surprised to see supported here.

Lemmy as a whole is more seems to attract neo-Luddites but I’m still surprised to see someone so against transhumanism in c/technology.

Are there currently any government contracts put at risk by this? I didn’t think that the feds were major spenders on AI. And is Trump aware that Musk is currently the one man trying to provide the sort of AI that Trump wants?

It’s not unreasonable to simply dismiss what Trump says entirely, but it’s a different matter to assign it a meaning other than the meaning that can be inferred from context. You’re just putting words in his mouth at that point.

$500 isn’t exactly much, given how long art takes to produce, how relatively infrequently that art will be bought, and how many extra expenses a “self-employed” artist has. I expect that most people selling art for $500 are hobbyists with some other means of financial support, because they’re not going to earn enough to live on by selling art. Portraying them as corporate sellouts is just silly.

(The exception might be some digital artists working on commission. But they’re probably drawing furry porn rather than something you might see in a gallery.)

The funny thing is that I empathize with the robot here - there’s no point in doing something like drawing a picture yourself if a machine can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Despite that, I insist on driving a car with a manual transmission. Let robots have art, but they’ll never take mechanical linkages from me! Using a lever to control which gears engage with which other gears is what it means to be human.

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.

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

Loving regardless of physical appearance doesn’t follow from loving for more than just physical appearance.

(I suspect that “don’t be shallow” is the sort of advice that people often feel good giving but don’t sincerely believe, but even the most sincerely non-shallow person generally can’t simply ignore sexual orientation. Once you allow for sexual orientation, then you’re already at the point where certain details of a person’s physical appearance are absolutely critical for romantic love.)

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.

Ah yes, an “unauthorized modification”. It must have been the janitor pressing buttons accidentally while mopping the mainframe room.

That lie was definitely inappropriate, but it would still have been inappropriate if it was told by a human. I think it’s useful to distinguish between bad things that happen to be done by an AI and things that are bad specifically because they are done by an AI. How would you feel about an AI that didn’t lie or deceive but also didn’t announce itself as an AI?

ChangeMyView seems like the sort of topic where AI posts can actually be appropriate. If the goal is to hear arguments for an opposing point of view, the AI is contributing more than a human would if in fact the AI can generate more convincing arguments.