Oh man Garak is one of the best characters in Trek. And that’s a competitive list.

Holy hell yeah you did. How would you go about doing that in a single expression? A bunch of back references to figure out the country? What if that’s not included? Oy.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/perl_problems.png

I like the ‘:has’ pun in the title too. Supporting that is a real game changer!

Oh no, not Lucas!

Softly. With their words.

Do you have any theories as to why this is the case? I haven’t gone anywhere near it, so I have no idea. I imagine it’s tied up with the way it processes things from a language-first perspective, which I gather is why it’s bad at math. I really don’t understand enough to wrap my head around why we can’t seem to combine LLM and traditional computational logic.

Katamari Damacy is the first one.

Oh man that’s… Well done, well done!

Points for “sassy robot.” But you could have described it worse. This was the first one I could identify.

My sense in reading the article was not that the author thinks artificial general intelligence is impossible, but that we’re a lot farther away from it than recent events might lead you to believe. The whole article is about the human tendency to conflate language ability and intelligence, and the author is making the argument both that natural language does not imply understanding of meaning and that those financially invested in current “AI” benefit from the popular assumption that it does. The appearance or perception of intelligence increases the market value of AIs, even if what they’re doing is more analogous to the actions of a very sophisticated parrot.

Edit all of which is to say, I don’t think the article is asserting that true AI is impossible, just that there’s a lot more to it than smooth language usage. I don’t think she’d say never, but probably that there’s a lot more to figure out—a good deal more than some seem to think—before we get Skynet.

I was raised Catholic, but I’ve been an atheist for—oh fuck I’m old—more than half my life. But… Monastic life seems pretty dope. Why can’t there be a secular order that’s just devoted to knowledge/contemplation for its own sake (or the betterment of humanity). I know it kind of sounds like I’m describing a university, but I mean with the personal discipline, strong communal bond, and simple lifestyle.

I can’t be sure it’s not a false memory, but I seem to remember sitting all buckled into one of those removable car seats on the floor of the hallway in our first house. The low perspective is very vivid and the place in the hallway is very specific (the threshold of the living room). That house would put me at under 4, but the angle etc would suggest I was much younger and in an infant car seat. I can never be sure if the level of detail supports it being a real memory or a false one. My first memory’s definitely in that house though. I remember in the heat of summer hanging out with my mom in the one room that had an air conditioning unit. But I was definitely ambulatory at that point.