AIPedant

This is where you are confused - in fact just plain wrong:

  A symbol is a discrete sign that has some sort of symbol table (explicit or not) describing the mapping of the sign to the intended interpretation

Symbols do not have to be discrete signs. You are thinking of inscriptions, not symbols. Symbols are impossible for humans to define. For an analog computer, the physical system of gears / etc symbolically represent the physical problem you are trying to solve. X turns of the gear symbolizes Y physical kilometers.

No, analog computers truly are symbolic. The simplest analog computer - the abacus - is obviously symbolic, and thus is also true for WW2 gun fire control computers, ball-and-shaft integrators, etc. They do not use inscriptions which is maybe where you're getting confused. But the turning of a differential gear to perform an addition is a symbolic operation: we are no more interested in the mechanics of the gear than we are the calligraphy of a written computation or the construction of an abacus bead, we are interested in the physical quantity that gear is symbolically representing.

Your comment is only true if you take an excessively reductive view of "symbol."

Articles like this indicate we should lock down the definition of "computation" that meaningfully distinguishes computing machines from other physical phenomena - a computation is a process that maps symbols (or strings of symbols) to other symbols, obeying certain simple rules[1]. A computer is a machine that does computations.

In that sense life is obviously not a computation: it makes some sense to view DNA as symbolic but it is misleading to do the same for the proteins they encode. These proteins are solving physical problems, not expressing symbolic solutions to symbolic problems - a wrench is not a symbolic solution to the problem of a symbolic lug nut. From this POV the analogy of DNA to computer program is just wrong: they are both analogous to blueprints, but not particularly analogous to each other. We should insist that DNA is no more "computational" than the rules that dictate how elements are formed from subatomic particles.

[1] Turing computability, lambda definability, primitive recursion, whatever.

I understand the broader point but it is not actually constitutionally problematic for the executive branch to assert that a suspect committed a crime - of course they believe that, that's why the suspect was arrested! It is better for an elected official to preface things with "allegedly" "we believe" etc, but the governor is ultimately speaking on behalf of the prosecution, not the judge. The first half of this article is based on a bad-faith misreading of the governor's words.

If you look at my comment history you will see that I don't think LLMs are nearly as intelligent as rats or pigeons. Rats and pigeons have an intuitive understanding of quantity and LLMs do not.

I don't know what "the lowest form of intelligence" is, nobody has a clue what cognition means in lampreys and hagfish.

"Making predictions about the world" is a reductive and childish way to describe intelligence in humans. Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a good movie?

The most depressing thing about AI summers is watching tech people cynically try to define intelligence downwards to excuse failures in current AI.

Putin and Xi fantasizing about immortality via 3D-printed organs quite starkly illustrated that many adults do not understand the difference between science and science fiction.

On the simplest end of that spectrum, Taylor series are useful because many real-world dynamics can be approximated as a "primarily linear behavior" + "nonlinear effects."

(And cases where that isn't true can still be instructive - a Taylor series expansion for air resistance gives a linear term representing the viscosity of the air and a quadratic term representing displacement of volumes of air. For ordinary air the linear component will have a small coefficient compared to the quadratic component.)

Caves of Qud is quite good, though a bit less traditional in being a big open world vs a dungeon. There a few quirks and bugs but the game is very fun and creative, and it has excellent music. I also love the graphics but it is an acquired taste.

I played the Dwarf Fortress roguelike mode several years ago, and it was really more of a toy - nifty to play around with the mechanics but too dry and arbitrarily difficult to be a fun game. But almost all the dev focus was on fortress management, maybe they’ve spruced up the roguelike with the Steam release.

The point is that knowing where your hand is in space relative to the rest of your body is a distinct sense which is directly three-dimensional. This information is not inferred, it is measured with receptors in your joints and ligaments.

No, the sensors measure a continuum of force or displacement along a line or rotational axis, 1D is correct.