Recent content by russ_watters

I have a TDS meter too, which is useful, but the kits you get with test strips can test for dozens of different contaminants. Example:

You can buy test kits online or in a hardware store. Testing for anything specific?

No, I don't know the mechanism. But anyway, this is a red herring. The radiation of these molecules is not a major factor here, as surface radiation dominates heat transfer to space if there is limited GHG. You seem to think the atmosphere can only be warmed by the surface, when it is both...

You've been told several times already that that isn't true. I don't understand why you keep saying it. No he didn't. You're trying to get that by reading between the lines while ignoring explicit statements that it isn't true:

Of course. Yes. Yes, of course. Are these self-evident questions really what you want to know?

With the "warmed surface" radiating more heat directly into space it will be cooler and thus will heat the atmosphere less via conduction and convection as well as radiation.

The surface radiates and not all of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere: https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/energy-budget Without greenhouse gasses, the 6% that is directly radiated to space from the surface goes up and the 15% radiated by the surface that is...

That isn't true/isn't what "corporate personhood" means. The rights of a corporation have little to do with the rights/responsibilities AI might get if it is considered sentient.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. People who are developing emotional connections to ChatGPT aren't devising/applying tests to determine if it is sentient, they are just conversing with it.

Ok, my scenarios/what I am discussing is a potential future where they are actually indistinguishable from humans/sentient. I agree that LLMs aren't that.

These aren't the same thing. For those, you are explicitly being promised something you aren't given. It's a lie. There's two basic scenarios I see, neither of which involve deception: 1. You aren't told whether you are dealing with a chat-bot or human. There's no promise violated if/when...

See also: "Upload": a digital afterlife. But you didn't actually say what the problem is/why it matters. Maybe you intended it in that last sentence? Again, if you can't tell, how does it matter? And you can view that from both directions, by the way (believing it's real vs believing it...

I put the word in quotes because it's a word I don't subscribe to/think is irrelevant. In my view, if you are unable to detect/judge the criteria, then the criteria/definition you're using are irrelevant to the choices you have to make. Agreed. I've joked in the past that I think PF is a...

Different from @renormalize, I don't care about the semantics or criteria (there's nothing really to discuss about declared definitions or religious beliefs), but I'd like to know why you and @Esim Can think it matters, if we can't tell the difference. Because in my view most of the moral and...

Sure. A LLM is doing word association, repeating things it has heard based on context and probability. The basic/primary purpose is to converse in a way that sounds human, but beyond that the actual content is irrelevant. They can, however, be overlaid on top of real facts to, for example...