Ultimately, however, leftism is an intellectual position. It’s typically held by people who are either well-read, or at minimum understanding of the concept of fairness for all people (which requires abstract thinking and a good theory of mind). Very few people believe in leftism due to stupidity. That’s why it’s in Republicans’ best interest to keep people stupid.

Increasing intelligence of the general population would be a basal necessity for changing the economic system.

I don’t disagree with you, but it seems you’ve missed the point that I was trying to make. Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction? To any entity within the universe, the future is completely unknown - the only thing that can be said for sure is that there is going to be a future. That is what I mean when I say that there can exist a practical free will in a deterministic universe

In my eyes, any person who would feel dread over whether or not free will exists in a deterministic universe is splitting hairs over a thought experiment where all outcomes are practically equivalent

Strictly speaking, sure, but for all intents and purposes, you can still have practical free will in a deterministic universe. If a system is chaotic enough (which a human brain is almost certainly going to be), it may be theoretically possible to predict what a person is going to do, but it will always be practically impossible to actually do so.

We never say that the weather is perfectly predictable, yet it’s clearly driven by purely deterministic mechanisms

That’s bullshit, your memory was slightly fuzzy for a moment there. I know an AI-generated memory when I see it

I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. Not even an LLM can hallucinate an analogy this abstract

You described what an MCQ is, but I still don’t see the relation to life.

Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware that there has been newer research countering the tooth wear model

There’s a reason grass is so common - it’s because it’s a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there’s basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica “needles” in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.

Not to say that it’s impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it’s just not worth the effort

That seems the exact opposite of capitalism? I would assume capitalist propaganda encourages you to throw away old things and buy new. Preserving old things is antithetical to that

I notice it when I eat cheese mixed with something acidic or spicy. Quite a discomforting taste but it doesn’t typically stop me from eating it anyways

If you’re in a legal state, then sure. Start with small doses. I will say though, it does feel somewhat underwhelming. At least for me

I’ve got some unexplained phenomena that happen from time to time at my lab (workplace). Valves closing for no reason, oddly specific equipment failures, that kind of thing. I don’t believe it’s ghosts, but also I genuinely can’t think of any reason for why those kinds of things could happen. I just say that it’s ghosts anyways because it’s fun.

In any case, my belief is that out of all supernatural phenomena to possibly believe in, ghosts are the least horrible thing to believe in, so anyone who believes in ghosts gets a pass from me

There’s not much fanservice in Dungeon Meshi. I would say it’s exactly like how you would expect it to turn out if you just played DnD and then hired someone to animate it. Complete with the player stupidity and boss cheesing.

The series does take time to build up - it starts off feeling like a generic gimmick anime, but the story and lore gets deeper the more you watch. And the gimmick (eating monsters) ends up becoming a lot deeper than you would expect. (I’ll talk about it more below.) The storytelling is, in hindsight, extremely efficient, but the writers just never draw attention to the info that you’re supposed to remember. So I think it’s one of those series where you really have to rewatch afterward in order to pick up all the lore tidbits that the characters just toss around.

Speaking of lore, I would say that the worldbuilding is one of the most extremely detailed that I’ve seen in any media, where it touches on really mature topics like implicit (and explicit) racism, tribal tensions, political feuds, cultural differences. And every little thing must have an explanation. And there’s actually different races of humans in this world, each with their own nation and culture. I think it all ties back in to the core theme of the series, which is that eating is so fundamental to life that it influences human culture. And, inversely, that because eating is the one universal constant across all cultures, it is the one thing that can unite people. Over the series, you stop seeing “eating monsters” as a gimmick and it starts becoming more like a thesis. Like, “yeah, of course it would be a show about eating. What else could be so fundamental to discussing the human experience?”

Touching on the typical icks with anime (oversexualization, often with minors, harem, OP main characters, etc.): the series actually avoids all of the typical anime pitfalls. There’s no sexualization. Characters don’t talk or hint about sex at all. No revealing clothing, and all characters dress appropriately for their job/environment. There is one single scene where one character tries teaching another character about sex (giving the “birds and the bees” talk), but it’s not sexual in nature and IMO it is really meant to highlight a common implicit bias in this world (the character receiving the talk is actually a grown adult, but due to his race, gets infantilized frequently). Speaking of grown adults, every character in the show appears, acts, and is a fully grown adult. And as for power scaling, the main characters don’t have any OP skills and never learn any OP skills. They’re just a standard party of adventurers, and it’s made clear that the only reason they’re successful is because of the party’s deep understanding of monster biology and dungeon ecology and their willingness to use creative solutions to difficult problems (aka: cheesing every boss).

As a complete side note, I think it has one of the best and most accurate representations of autism that I’ve seen. I’ll leave it vague, but there are several characters that are strongly autism-coded, and the writers really went above and beyond to show how autism is interpreted differently by others when the person in question is a male or female.

Overall, I’d say I highly recommend the anime. It instantly became one of the best animes that I’ve watched, and it’s an anime that can be enjoyed casually, or analyzed for lore to hell and back, or analyzed for its literary merit. (If it wasn’t clear, I’m part of the 3rd group. I really enjoyed how coherent its thematic messaging is and how skilfully it tells its story)

OnlyOffice. Good compatibility with MS Office, and UI is basically equivalent

As someone who used to be in a (casual) orchestra, I can tell you that the musicians can interpret the conductor because they’ve rehearsed it extensively beforehand. The conductor is really just there is remind the musicians to do the things that they’ve practiced beforehand.

As for the baton’s movements, that’s meant to indicate the speed that the music is played at. Nobody can keep perfect rhythm, and in a large orchestra, the echoes and travel speed of sound becomes especially disorienting. It will start to sound like you are playing off-time from the rest of the orchestra. In those cases, everyone has to ignore the sound of their music and only use the conductor to figure out where in the song they are, and they just have to trust that it’ll sound correct to the audience

Hot cheetos tastes like cardboard to me. I’ve started preferring regular cheetos over hot cheetos because at least it has flavor. That should probably answer your question.

I don’t dump hot sauce on everything, that’s like asking if someone with a sweet tooth dumps sugar onto everything. Also, there are different types of hot sauce that have different levels of spice. You don’t need to drown food in hot sauce, you just need to buy a spicier hot sauce and continue adding the same amount of hot sauce.

Interesting thing to note, your sense of taste and your physiological response to spice are two different things. There are (many) times where I eat something “spicy,” and I’ll sweat. But I don’t taste the spice.

If there’s something you can buy, it’s both less hassle and higher quality to just buy it rather than to try to print it yourself. A 3d printer really shines when there’s something that you want that you can’t buy. Custom parts, repaor parts, things of that nature. Unfortunately, that also means that the things that you print aren’t likely to be something that you can plan for ahead of time

“explore and recombine” isn’t really the words I would use to describe generative AI. Remember that it is a deterministic algorithm, so it can’t really “explore.” I think it would be more accurate to say that it interpolates patterns from its training data.

As for comparison to humans, you bring up an interesting point, but one that I think is somewhat oversimplified. It is true that human brains are physical systems, but just because it is physical does not mean that it is deterministic. No computer is able to come even close to modeling a mouse brain, let alone a human brain.

And sure, you could make the argument that you could strip out all extraneous neurons from a human brain to make it deterministic. Remove all the unpredictable elements: memory neurons, mirror neurons, emotional neurons. In that case, sure - you’d probably get something similar to AI. But I think the vast majority of people would then agree that this clump of neurons is no longer a human.

A human uses their entire lived experience to weigh a response. A human pulls from their childhood experience of being scared of monsters in order to make horror. An AI does not do this. It creates horror by interpolating between existing horror art to estimate what horror could be. You are not seeing an AI’s fear - you are seeing other people’s fears, reflected and filtered through the algorithm.

More importantly, a human brain is plastic, meaning that it can learn and change. If a human is told that they are wrong, they will correct themselves next time. This is not what happens with an AI. The only way that an AI can “learn” is by adding on to its training data and then retraining the algorithm. It’s not really “learning,” it’s more accurate to say that you’re deleting the old model and creating a new one that holds more training data. If this were applied to humans, it would be as if you grew an entirely new brain every single time you learned something new. Sounds inefficient? That’s because it is. Why do you think AI is using up so much electricity and resources? Prompting and generating an AI doesn’t use up much resources; it’s actually the training and retraining that uses so much resources.

To summarize: AI is a tool. It’s a pretty smart tool, but it’s a tool. It has some properties that are analogous to human brains, but lacks some properties that make it truly similar. It is in techbros’ best interests to hype up the similarities and hide the dissimilarities, because hype drives up the stock prices. That’s not to say that AI is completely useless. Just as you have said in your comment, I think it can be used to help make art, in a similar way that cameras have been used to help make art.

But in the end, when you cede the decision-making to the AI (that is, when you rely on AI for too much of your workflow), my belief is that the product is no longer yours. How can you claim that a generated artpiece is yours if you didn’t choose to paint a little easter egg in the background? If you didn’t decide to use the color purple for this object? If you didn’t accidentally paint the lips slightly skewed? Even supposing that an AI is completely human-like, the art is still not yours, because at that point, you’re basically just commissioning an artist, and you definitely don’t own art that you’ve commissioned.

To be clear, this is my stance on other tools as well, not just AI

I think there’s a bit of a misconception about what exactly AI is. Despite what techbros try to make it seem, AI is not thinking in any way. It doesn’t make decisions because it does not exist. It is not an entity. It is an algorithm.

Specifically, it is a statistical algorithm. It is designed to associate an input to an output. When you do it to billions of input-output pairs, you can then use the power of statistics to interpolate and extrapolate, so that you can guess what the output might be, given a new input that you haven’t seen before. In other words, you can perfectly replicate any AI with a big enough sheet of paper and enough time and patience.

That is why AI outputs can’t be considered novel. Inherently, it is just a tool that processes data. As an analogy, you haven’t generated any new data by taking the average of 5 numbers in excel - you have merely processed the existing data

Even if a human learns from AI-generated art, their art is still art, because a human is not a deterministic algorithm.

The problem arises when someone uses generative AI for a significant and notable portion of their workflow. At this point, this is essentially equivalent to applying a filter to someone else’s artwork and calling it new. The debate lies in that there is no clear point for when AI takes up an appropriate vs. inappropriately large portion of a person’s workflow…

Frankly, I think that’s it. When I got shots, my parents would constantly remind me of how much it would hurt and laugh at me over my fear. I’m still scared of needles nowadays, even if by all objective measures they really don’t hurt at all