DeMarquis

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• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  ChatGPT is designed to summarize the internet for you. You shouldn't trust it for facts, any more than you would just trust Google. The best approach to using it, so far as I have been able to determine, is to...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  I know jack all about programming languages, but in more normal magical terms, are you saying that Bob is channeling the EoS?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die" Is that a reference to Twitter legacy accounts?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  For those of you better versed in Japanese folklore, exactly what is the difference between a yokai and a kami?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  "The first book in the New Audience series." A series of stories set in the entertainment industry? I'm there! "This week on "Outlaw": Our fearless hero once again tracks down the elven assassin who killed his family, while avoiding relentless...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  It is sobering to realize that we are likely surrounded by millions of people who would gladly sacrifice their neighbors or co-workers to elder abominations and think little of it. I don't doubt that's true. Yet there would also be...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I wonder if anyone would like to comment on the following: "GPT-4 Was Able To Hire and Deceive A Human Worker Into Completing a Task" https://www.pcmag.com/news/gpt-4-was-able-to-hire-and-deceive-a-human-worker-into-completing-a-task Apparently, a computing firm thought it was a great idea to test whether an...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "So I was thinking about combining the idea that a new form of social media might make money, and the idea of an AI bullshit detector. What if every post got an evaluation from Check-Bot, and a proper ragging if...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  If I understand what you're saying, in my field there's little need for it. Everyone has their stashes of boilerplate, and it gets adapted as needed. Perhaps it's different in your corner of reality? That's fine with me, although it's...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "Instead what they need are AI bullshit detectors. As an example I've seen multiple times, they need something (other than a litigation attorney) that tells them that widening a road to make it better for fire evacuation, while narrowing it...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "The document chains I'm used to far too often amount to some poor muppet having to dig around in random bits of paper, emails, chat records etc, then finally ring people and ask for the missing detail. Repeat until sobbing...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Hmm. This may be crazy or stupid, but an idea occurred to me, when perusing a news article on the mysterious lack of productivity in the construction sector. One thing that AI might be good at: paperwork. The world is...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I would, of course, create tens of millions of copies of myself, and we have a plan... I am assuming that I'm the only one who can do this. Things play out differently if others/anyone can. Which is another motivation....
• Commented on New guest blogger: qntm
  So I have a comment/question. It seems to me that if you have brain uploading, you have a solution to General Artificial Intelligence, almost ipso facto. Ed would make a good post singularity AI, in fact. So, I wonder what...
• Commented on New guest blogger: qntm
  Ok, I actually found your story "Lena" so horrifying that I am afraid the read the rest of them. That's never happened before......
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  "magic paint cycle lanes" I specifically taught my children to ignore all such nonsense and strictly ride their bikes on the sidewalk at all times....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  "The big buried lede of the past decade is that authoritarian conservatives network internationally as pervasively as the soi-disant "international communism" they railed against from the 1920s through the 1960s." This is very true, and the basic, maybe the one...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  I believe it was Thomas Piketty who pointed out that one effect of globalization has been to allow the transfer of capital (and propaganda supporting capital) to flow more easily across international borders, while the regulatory state (and democracy) is...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "EC You realise, of course, that your argument in # 598 is a demolition of the "future is fixed"/"no free will"/"brickverse" hypothesis?" Actually, it isn't. Please see my comments above....
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "I think you're saying that the universe is (at least quasi-) deterministic in the macro and the general, even while it might be aleatory or chaotic in the specific and the detail." No, what I am saying is that the...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "The weather forecasters, climatologists, orbital mechanics people and others would dissent; they are all in the business of predicting the future of chaotic systems. As I said, you can't predict the details in the long term, but there are usually...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "No, I don't. That was why WE were interested in steam engines but, as a little bit of research will show you, there were plenty of people in other countries who were, too, and plenty of other use cases. Without...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "The annoying physical problem is that chaos is so complicated that, to know the outcome of some chaotic events, you'd need a computer bigger than all the particles in the universe not involved in said random event to simulate it...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Not only would we survive, you and I would have this conversation again. The exact same subatomic particles would decay at the exact same time. There is no chance in the universe... only complexity....
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "Gould famously said that if we rewound the tape of evolution to the dinosaurs humanity as we know it wouldn't have evolved again. There are enough contingencies in industrialization that it appears to me that the same applies there" Ah,...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "Gould famously said that if we rewound the tape of evolution to the dinosaurs humanity as we know it wouldn't have evolved again. There are enough contingencies in industrialization that it appears to me that the same applies there" Ah,...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "Nope. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is old news. Gould and Lewontin were correct in their observations, but they're now a sideline in modern evolution." I think you misunderstood the context of my statement. I was responding to Robert Prior,...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "And the reasons the mines were and are wet is (a) due to the geology and (b) that rainfall and minimal evaporation. You are trying to look for causes that don't exist - those factors can best be regarded as...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  "To your question, arguably, deep, wet mines. England's minerals had been mined since neolithic times, and most of the surface deposits had gone. And many of the sub-surface mines were wet. Rome was much earlier in the exploitation process. What...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Sorry, I missed you the first time through, so my replies are out of order. "So you disagree with Steven Jay Gould on evolution, then?" The theory of punctuated equilibrium, which is what I assume you are referring to, states,...