Recent content by russ_watters

Apropos; he's tabled the Mars thing in favor of the Moon. Details thin at this point though: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/science/elon-musk-spacex-priorities-moon-intl-hnk As I said before I think Mars is fantasy for right now, but the moon is doable if we (Musk) choose to (depending on...

What's the premise? If it's anything like Dr. Strangelove, The Terminator, The Forbin Project, or War Games, they all have the same flaw. Note, my position is almost exactly the inverse of that on all counts. AI doesn't have to be actually "intelligent" or have "agency" or whatever, to be a...

What does that mean? Because I'm pretty sure the sum of my [net (?)] global travel has me around halfway back from the moon. Or do you mean you were born in the US but now live in India? But anyway, I've done exactly one circumnavigation, on a trip to the Philippines where I traveled West on...

It's getting there, yes.

[Sigh] Not sure if this is an exceptionally low effort OP or a crank-yanker, but just to move this along:

Something I didn't learn in school (or maybe just misremembered) is that Magellan did not return to Spain, he was killed in the Philippines. The circumnavigation was completed by Captain Juan Sebastian Elcano. Weird it is still credited to Magellan...

Just draw a polar view of Earth and label the time zones (or find one online) and you'll see it does work. The date line is what makes it work.

They lay out a logical case based on Turing's test as the threshold, but if LLMs are AGI then AGI is pretty disappointing and we'll need a new term/threshold above it to aspire to.

Yes, understood/agreed/a fan of Rush.

I thought we did know why they hallucinate? My understanding: They don't store the training data, they store statistics about the training data. That means that if they have a million references to "July 4th" with "Independence Day" they will return the latter when asked about the former...

A lot of these philosophical terms we are discussing can have broad and narrow (weak and strong) interpretations, which is the source of a lot of this debate. That one sounds to me like a weak interpretation. Thermostats as AI again.

I'm not sure, but I behave as if it's my choice/free-will because surrendering to fate guarantees that I'm not in control. I think I am, therefore I am? But yeah, I do think it's possible that one day we will figure out how brains work and find that they are just complicated but deterministic...

This isn't exactly true, nor do I think it's applicable to LLMs/AI. Typical engineering systems are supposed to be deterministic. We can't test every combination of inputs but we test enough to be confident we have it programmed to behave the way we want it to. When an unexpected behavior...

That's a hard sell to the family of a guy who got decapitated when his self-driving car drove under a truck it thought was a cloud.

It would be silly to believe the field hasn't made progress, and I never said that. Please don't read past what I've said or put words in my mouth I haven't said. The rest of your post is mainly just vamping on the above, with insults, so there's little else to respond to. Except I'll answer...