Tulsi Gabbard is *very obviously* a foreign intelligence asset and I hope we all live long enough to see her tried and convicted for it.
Grumpy old American mathematician and computer scientist, now retired. My Erdös number equals 1.
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Tulsi Gabbard is *very obviously* a foreign intelligence asset and I hope we all live long enough to see her tried and convicted for it.
Reminder: the apparent plan was to spirit these children away in the middle of the night without them ever seeing the inside of a courtroom to challenge their deportation. Children.
That Trump and Trumpism are fascist doesn’t explain the sheer vandalism of unleashing mass murdering mayhem via RFK to replace medical/scientific institutions of immense value and prestige with medieval peasant superstitions. That is a criminal madness facilitated by but above and beyond fascism.
Pure fucking evil. Everyone involved in this shit needs to be held accountable.
New Mexico has issued a public health order that removes federal restrictions to COVID-19 vaccine access so that pharmacies in New Mexico can vaccinate people of all ages and risk profiles. Every state need to do this!
Judge: I got a call at 2:36 a.m. because the govt chose this time on a holiday weekend to execute this plan. I have been up since then. I haven't been able to reach anyone from govt until this morning at 9:30 a.m. So absent this intervention, all children would already have been sent to Guatemala!
Google's AI searches are now largely useless because they use a very dumbed-down version of Gemini. If you're going to complain about AI, at least complain about a decent LLM.
On the other hand, if we ever discover intelligent alien life very different from ours, our communication would likely be largely restricted to text, at least initially. And yet we could learn from it and it from us.
I'm not sure it's the anthropomorphizing that is really the issue. After all, we are accustomed to attributing desire and agency to all sorts of objects in our world: "the car wants gas", "the TV needs to be plugged in", "my computer is complaining that it's running out of storage", and so forth.
I think this can be remedied, at least in part, by explaining clearly what their limitations are, currently. For example, I'm happy to use ChatGPT to help me locate obscure references in the literature provided I can double-check the result. But I would never use it to give me relationship advice.
"She did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it. She was not protecting lives at a gate in Iraq; she was forcing her way through windows in the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power." New from @markhertling.bsky.social:
Not that much different from an academic conference, then.
And you're not actually persuading people, either. You're just controlling your breathing and tongue and lips to cause sounds to emanate from your piehole, which then are interpreted by the brains of others into words and sentences that cause changes in their cerebral cortex.
The Free State of Florida is now trying to ban *sidewalk chalking*
It’s a genuine tragedy for our nation’s health that Marty Makary has 100% embraced RFK Jr’s anti-vaxx activism (as documented here: www.statnews.com/2025/04/29/f...). Makary and Bhattacharya are merely MAHA/MAGA foot soldiers, such as pushing the worst kinds of anti-vaxx & anti-LGBT hatred 🤬
Political affiliation is not transmitted genetically, you silly dolt.
Roughly the same as the entire population of Corvallis, Oregon, or Rome, Georgia.
I’m so grateful that I have tenure and the academic freedom to call it like I see it. “Dr. Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, described Kennedy’s comments as “absolute gibberish” and slammed the HHS secretary as a “dangerous buffoon” who is “threatening us all.”
He rose to power through crying about censorship from the medical establishment. And now Vinay Prasad is spending his time as an FDA official censoring his critics.
And he’s proving to be as horrible, as describe to public health, as unstoppable as a battering ram swung by a medieval army. We don’t get rid of Bobby, we’ll be dealing with the repercussions for years or decades. He must be impeached.
No responsible or knowledgeable person can be allowed to work for the deranged fascists. Positions in the government are for corrupt toadies only now.
Just imagine that people buy and sell riding horses even though - we have no idea how horses think - we can't predict their behavior - we can't completely control them and - they cause dozens of deaths every year. Crazy!
Translation: "I am not good at my job."
Stalin could only have dreamed of having such toadies.
Good gawd, the degree of sucking-up-ness that this deranged orange tyrant requires is really nauseating.
Many people say Graham Hancock inspires interest in archaeology. But his fans hate archaeologists who try to correct the record In fact, it's the opposite. Hancock and his buddies inspire interest in fantasy, a fantasy opposed to actual archaeology and our human past
NEW LAWSUIT: We’re suing the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service for records related to Trump’s politicized use of federal power – from immigration enforcement to the unprecedented federalization of D.C.’s police force. americanoversight.org/american-ove...
Correct. The default Dem position has to be, "I will fire everyone Trump appointed, and everyone hired by anyone Trump appointed, regardless of what any statute or court says." Anything less is a ratification of Trump's actions that leaves the government broken and filled with saboteurs.
Among all the other things, "The President has screwed things up so badly that the world's other rich countries won't deliver mail to us anymore" really should end it immediately.
Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.
www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...
Look out for "delve" and "leverage"!
The article literally says they are filing a lawsuit.
The US Administration is now deleting its internal communications, in brazen violation of the Federal Records Act, in order to conceal its other illegal acts. Those entrusted to enforce our Congress’s laws sit, simply watching this happen, flaccid and impotent.
Translation: "I hate being criticized by people who point out my tedious, crappy writing, and the flaws in my reasoning."
They are vaccine skeptics because they are dumb, selfish people who were eager to believe lies that give them permission to be dumb & selfish, and there is a vast propaganda machine designed to provide those lies. They did it. They are responsible for it. It's on them.
Thanks for writing it, but too bad you chose such a laughably incompetent outfit like The Atlantic to publish it in.
Your comment was "Computers ONLY "spit out" what they are programmed to do. "Garbage in, garbage out."" As I said, this is a common delusion of people untrained in the theory of computation.
It was completely anodyne. There were so many better examples!
Another person that deserves to be completely shunned, but is not, is Dinesh D'Souza. When I taught at Dartmouth he was involved in outing gay students to their parents. Later he moved on to campaign finance fraud and spreading lies for bucks. Despite this record, he still gets interviewed.
In this reply you did not actually address either of your two mistakes.
This is so, so bad. We have reached the point of the president's supporters calling other human beings cockroaches. It is making me lose my mind that evangelical Christians support this.
Classic blunder of people who know nothing about the theory of computation. Two mistakes: computers can rely on sources of truly random numbers (e.g., radioactive decay). And even completely deterministic procedures can have outputs difficult to predict and hence feasibly equivalent to random.
What accounts for this huge rise? Use in a movie or book?
This is fucking terrifying. Genuinely truly terrifying. What’s their scheme? To prosecute parents? Doctors? To take people’s treatments away? Absolutely no way this can end well.
As Frances Crick wrote, "Philosophers have had such a poor record over the last two thousand years that they would do better to show a certain modesty rather than the lofty superiority that they usually display."
I can't think of a worse idea than this. My experience is that philosophers have little understanding of basic knowledge such as the theory of computation, and hence come to wildly wrong conclusions about AI. 1/2
Absolutely disgraceful and despicable. If you are a partner at Paul Weiss or Kirkland & Ellis you should be ashamed of yourself -- that is, if you had any shame left.
For example, consider Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who justified the use of torture under Bush. I would love it if everyone where he went, people booed him or walked out of the room, children pointed and laughed, and old ladies went out of their way to give him a piece of their mind.
This article is one of the first honest assessments of a Trump shitministration policy that I’ve seen so far.
Led by US senator Jon Ossoff, the investigation cites hundreds of reports since January, including accounts of miscarriages, child neglect, and sexual abuse at ICE detention centers in dozens of states. www.wired.com/story/senate...
Not being repeatedly invited to talk on major networks would be a start to banishing a whole bunch of folks.
rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/bhattachar... A chilling deep dive into the stark parallels between Lysenko’s destruction of Soviet science and how the MAGA NIH Director Bhattacharya is razing US biomedical research to the ground. @angierasmussen.bsky.social deserves printing in major newspapers
Which is a feature for them, not a bug: Trump is building a massive paramilitary force guaranteed to be composed pretty much exclusively of amoral MAGA goons.
BOMBSHELL: Former antitrust division #2 Roger Alford trashes the corrupt pay-to-play state of antitrust, says the HPE-Juniper merger should be blocked on those grounds. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
Only the best people
Has he ever clapped for one of our allies the way he claps for murderous dictators?
Probably meant "dumpster fire"
Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine on day one. Instead. He pardoned hundreds of violent felons who brutally beat police officers while attacking the Capitol.
If you actually had something relevant to say about Tarski's theory of truth, you would have said it. Instead you play these games. It's an embarrassment to you.
Stancil was completely correct about the Chinese Room, something that's understood by nearly everyone with a background in theory of computation. You don't appear to have such a background and don't understand why experts who do understand computation laugh at it.
It's a page out of the dictator playbook to declare fake emergencies to enable power grabs. That's exactly what's happening now.
"It's a logical fallacy" is one of the dumbest possible replies here. We are confronted every single day by challenges that require decision-making in the absence of complete information. Paradigm shifts take time because the evidence to overturn has to be substantial & explanatory power better.
Doesn't it depend on how strongly the belief is held? I mean, it's a lot easier to overturn a belief like "I think I'm going to like okra, having never tasted it" than it is to overturn one like "God watches over and protects me every second".
The worst single-day crime spree in modern Washington history, of course, took place on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump issued no order to the National Guard to intervene -- Mike Pence did -- and later pardoned the perpetrators.
You see, that's the difference between a philosopher and a mathematician, or scientist. The latter two are happy to get to the point immediately, and not play games. The philosopher, on the other hand, takes forever to get there and when they finally do, you're amazed at how long it took.
The whole job of a philosopher is to pretend to argue rigorously about terms that are inherently fuzzy. It's a simulacrum of mathematics and mathematical thought, mixed in with a heavy dose of sneering.
Sure you have. Stancil's completely correct and you're wandering all over the place, bringing up unrelated topics like Tarski's theory of truth. Searle's "Chinese Room" is another one of those things that philosophers agonize over, but people with actual training in the subject regard as trivial.
Not by any reasonable person, in the absence of anything else. Interesting for me would be questions like, what physical models are powerful enough to carry out universal computation? Boring for me is whatever you think you are doing here, going way off the track of the original skeet.
They could be a computer, if the rules that governing their opening and closing are appropriate...just like Conway's Game of Life can be considered a universal computer. But it's not sensible to look at a random arrangement of windows and say, "oh it's a computer". This is getting more boring.
I'm just saying, if you insist that a random arrangement of open and closed windows *must* be regarded as a computational state, most will not think you are serious. Not because you are necessarily wrong, but because it is not fruitful at all to think this way.
No, a computational state doesn't *require* the existence of humans doing computing. There's a lot of what can be viewed as various kinds of computation going on in the biological word and even the physical word (e.g., varves, although in that case it's rather primitive).
If you want precision, define for me your meaning of "computation state". Are we talking about abstract computational models, their physical instantiations, or what?
It's reasonable to say that windows represent a computational state if they're being used for computation. But if it's simply that some frames are loose and allow some sashes to move, then calling it a computational state would just be regarded as silly. This is a very boring conversation.
The term "observer-relative", like most philosophical games, is too vague for me to give an answer. If you would like to propose an experiment we could do in principle to decide your question, now that's something we could discuss. My point was more about language than about some property.
As I said, in mathematics we are trained to communicate precisely. I can't help it if your discipline has sloppier rules.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong. It wouldn't "be" that computation state unless it was being used for computation. Otherwise it could just be windows.
Sure, but that has very little resemblance to your prior claim that "Everything can map onto anything if you try hard enough."
Quine and Tarski, sure. Tarski/Mostowski/Robinson's _Undecidable Theories_ is a pretty important book in my area.
Yes, and in principle you could do computation by using windows and moving them up and down according to certain rules. But then it would be the *rules* that are the important thing, not whether the 0's are represented by bits or windows. That's one of the fundamental insights of computation.
I can't give you a course in theory of computation in a skeet but 1. There are different cardinalities, so not every set can be in bijection or {in,sur}ject into every other set. 2. There are hierarchies of computational models, so (for example) a finite automaton doesn't have the power of a TM.
In mathematics we are taught to say what we mean with precision and elegance. I am once again unable to translate this babble into anything comprehensible.
Whether your claim "*obviously* anything can be equivalent to anything else (of at least equal complexity)" is meaningless word salad, or just an attempt to backpedal from a previous claim, I cannot tell. I'll just leave it to others who are obviously smarter than I am to decide.
"Philosophers have had such a poor record over the last two thousand years that they would do better to show a certain modesty rather than the lofty superiority that they usually display." -- Francis Crick.
If they don't pause, it could be because they have some training in neuroscience and/or theory of computation.
Also, I talked about a calculator (thinking of an electronic calculator), not a "slide rule". A "slide rule" is not usually called a "calculator" these days, although it might have been 70 years ago. So you're misrepresenting me.
Maybe you should look at the convo to see how he misrepresented what I said.
Now you're lying. I didn't say that about a "slide rule", but rather about a calculator (meaning a digital calculator), and I qualified it by saying it was reasonable to think it had a very rudimentary intelligence, because intelligence is not a binary quality.
maybe an obelix, too
I'd have just been tempted to reply, "Get f*cked, moron!"
Why does the economist look like somebody is holding his kids hostage?
Lots of ideas about computation seem preposterous at first glance to people who have no training in the subject, just like people find relativity preposterous. Don't understand why you want to mute ideas of experts that challenge your understanding, but you do you.
Why do you keep talking about sentience when I've said explicitly that's a different issue. Yes, I think calculators (and thermostats) can be reasonably said to exhibit a *very* rudimentary kind of intelligence. In my opinion, intelligence is not a binary "you either have it or don't" affair.
I think you can reasonably argue that MapQuest and Google Maps, etc., has intelligence, but of a rather limited sort.
I wasn't aware we were discussing sentience. I'm not claiming that ChatGPT 5 (say) has sensors that enable a continuous understanding of its environment.
The example was meant to counter the claim (which I can no longer see, since the fellow blocked me) that people could not reason in a text-based way on how to get from one place to another. If you ask ChatGPT 5 how to get from San Francisco to New York by car, it does quite a decent job.
And yet it didn't prevent you in the slightest from creating a straw man and then beating it.
No, not everything can map onto anything. That's one of the very first things you learn in a theory of computation course.
More assertions! Do you know any actual people? There is an entire political party in the US now that is governed by neither truth nor coherence.
Perhaps your inability to "know what to do" might be that you don't have a good training in computational models and the ideas of simulation and equivalence. Perhaps a course in the theory of computation might help. I taught such a course for decades.