bondarchuk

It's funny that if the LLMs had all given the same result each time (it sounds like) you would have considered it more valid, even though it might just be giving a single wrong answer more consistently.

Participants first abstained from coffee for two weeks before being reintroduced to either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee in a blinded trial.

So it could easily just be cessation of withdrawal symptoms.

That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.

Certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).

Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:

"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"

so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.

(source for quote https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115314954743042414 -> https://www.dr.dk/lyd/special-radio/prompt/prompt-2025/egois...)

He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.

Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.

Yeah it looks more like photocollage creatively photoshopped. Perspective is very weird in picture 3 too, very cubist.

Postmodernism is a bit more "anything goes as long as it's good". Once you move beyond really basic rule-based criticisms like "it's not symmetric" or "there are competing masses" then you can ask "but is it good?" i.e. does it work as a house for the persons it was built for in the context that it was built in? (To be fair from what I recall many entries in the blog actually do that to an extent, only using an air of neoclassical snobbery as a framework (for example that really funny bit about the pre-bathroom space where you can snort coke in the 80s is like this IMO))

Disclaimer: These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after.

Seems like an obvious way out of this conundrum is reclassifying these so-called mcmansions as postmodern. Description instead of prescription.

I know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.

Well yes, because video is a different medium.

Fundamentally it seems like kindergartens showing youtube videos to kids should not be accepted by society.

Likewise, appreciate it.

So basically you're saying businesses have a right to sell peoples' attention. Of course for every seller there's a buyer but I do kinda see that how this framing would make a difference, ethically, for some.

I don't know man. I just think somehow we'll manage. For example if a group of friends all feel a desperate need to find out about new products they could start a non-profit organization that will search out the new products and directories detective style. And public business directories exist in most places because they are required by law.

The deeper point is that pro-advertising people always frame it like advertising is something people want and that benefits them, but this is just a fig-leaf for the underlying ideology that businesses have the fundamental right to buy peoples' attention for money. The directories idea is mostly just a way to call this bluff, essentially saying "if people wanted to be advertised to they'd go out of their way to get it". Then the underlying ideology comes out.

People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category.

I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.

That's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise?

(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)

By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them.

All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.

idk about tobacco but the vast majority of normal people see no great problem with industrially produced food. By my reckoning if you say at a party you work for Unilever or something the most you'll get is an "oh that's cool I guess".

from wiki:

Tsujigiri (辻斬り or 辻斬, literally "crossroads killing") is a Japanese term for a practice when a samurai, after receiving a new katana or developing a new fighting style or weapon, tests its effectiveness by attacking a human opponent, usually a random defenseless passer-by, in many cases during night time.

I know it's tragic but this sounds so absurd it just made me laugh. They were on some good shit.

We could use the "Chinese room" term to denote a system that superficially mimicks human speech, but breaks down at some point and/or uses different mechanisms such that it doesn't result in consciousness. But I don't think that was the intent of the argument and it's not how the argument is generally understood in the literature, so it would just be confusing IMO.

(And you still seem to be implicitly accepting that the basic argument is valid, which would be wrong.)

Ok, I think it's clear where we both stand, a good day to you too :)

That just isn't true, there are no straightforward refutations of the Chinese Room that are widely accepted.

Yes there is, the systems reply is the obvious and correct answer. Philosophers that disagree are simply wrong. In the end what matters is what's true or false, not how many philosophers accept something. You can check for yourself by reading the argument, following its reasoning, and seeing that it is false; and reading the systems reply, following its reasoning, and seeing that it's true (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SystRepl). The case is similar to those mathematical or logical proofs for the existence of god, where obviously fallacious reasoning gets a pass because it confirms deeply held beliefs.

edit: by the way as to your assertion that the argument is controversial and there is no consensus, I just found something funny on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#History):

Most of the discussion consists of attempts to refute it. "The overwhelming majority", notes Behavioral and Brain Sciences editor Stevan Harnad,[f] "still think that the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong".[13] The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to comment that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as "the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false".[14]

It is a helpful pointer for people who might otherwise assume that a well-known argument by a famous philosopher is sound without checking too deeply. Straightforward refutations can be found on wikipedia or by thinking about it.

Searle's Chinese Room argument is wrong.

Everything an LLM "knows" had to be told to it.

Why does that matter for whether or not it is conscious? Many things I "know" I also know because someone told me.

It does not have a process for understanding itself in its environment.

It has a process for understanding, namely outputting tokens by evaluating the neural network iteratively. It can apply this understanding to its environment insofar as the context window and weights include a model of this environment.

It does not have any sensing organ that would allow it to detect conditions and come to a conclusion that it must be in such an environment.

It does have a sensing organ, namely the input into the context window. Possibly it even has closed-loop sensors by doing tool calls. The conclusion could be incorrect or inaccurate but that doesn't in itself prove there is no consciousness (Plato's cave etc..).

It doesn't even "know" when it's done something if you don't tell it about what it just did.

It does know, it's in the context window.

It doesn't have an awareness of the tool calls it can perform; again it has to be told and even then it gets it wrong sometimes.

Same as above, as long as it's in the context window it could have "awareness" of having done it.

And it can't actually execute any of those tools.

It can execute tools by outputting certain tokens in the right environment.

It still relies on you to pattern recognize that its output should be a "tool call" and then perform the execution yourself.

Tool calls are not dependent on the human chat user executing them, right? They can happen automatically through the surrounding software.

The "model" of its environment that an LLM has is 100% a construct of what a human told it and there isn't any way for it to differentiate between that which is real and that which is fantasy.

Again why would the fact that a human told it mean it can't result in consciousness? Why would lack of ability to differentiate between real and fantasy mean it can't be conscious? On my view, it would then be conscious of the fantasy.

Thanks for the clarification, though "you made that up" is pretty strong. I still don't see how "we can't care so much or we'll enter some pretty alarming priority inversions" is anything but an argument from consequences.

And oh by the way you cannot murder a copyable individual anyway.

I think for many people the concern is not so much about violating the desire to live that a conscious software entity might (or might not!) have, but about the subjective experience of suffering it might undergo.

This kind of debate would be improved by not using the word "just". You cannot say AI is "just" X or Y. You can say that it is X or Y, but you still have to prove separately how and why this means it's not something else besides.

You are arguing from consequences, it's not a valid argument. "If we consider AIs to be conscious it would be a alarming, therefore they are not conscious".

Whatsapp is also from Meta.