cjameskeller

They are! But it seems like most of the effort is from the founder, himself. They could use some more hands and cash...

Would you be willing to elaborate? I would be curious to hear more.

Sort of, but it generally goes more like: base/perineum, genitals, navel, heart, throat, forehead, and then one at the top of the head or just above. The Sefer Yetzirah, however, references specifically "Head, Belly, and Chest" as the three loci of the human body. (§ 3.4-5)

American software engineer here, and I have only used LLM tools ~3 dozen times: tried at work a few times, and been unimpressed/actively frustrated; a few times to ask questions I would be normally survey blog posts about (social/lifestyle things); and the rest has been generating images with my kids.

But currently, aside from generating "creative media", I'd say I'm pretty much opposed to LLM tools. They have yet to demonstrate any value to me at work or with respect to the areas of research I am interested in, and given the kind of statistical mechanism that they are, I do not believe they are capable of doing so.

Firefox Android can play audio even when the phone is locked, and I use it regularly.

To be fair, the description of the dragon incident is pretty mundane, and all he does is prove that the large reptile they had previously been feeding (& worshiping) could be killed:

"Then Daniel took pitch, and fat, and hair, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof: this he put in the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder: and Daniel said, Lo, these are the gods ye worship."

We are told:

>"It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own."

I think one very simple explanation would be that this comes down to a matter of exploration vs exploitation. Since it is only giving "better" advice, and not even 'locally optimal', there is reason to favor exploring vs merely following the advice unquestioningly.

A more complex, but ultimately comprehensive answer, is that free will consists, at least in one aspect, in the ability not only to choose one's goals or means, but also what _aspect_ of those various options to consider "good" or "better".

And if one were to say that all such considerations ultimately resolve back to a fundamental desire to be "happy", to me, this seems to be hand-waving, rather than addressing the argument, because different people have different definitions of the "happy" end-state. If these differences were attributed fully to biology & environment, the story loses its impact, because there was never free will in the first place. If, while reading the story, we adopt a view that genuine free will exists, and hold some kind of agnosticism about the possible means by which that can be so, then it seems reasonable to attribute at least some of the differences in what the "happy" end-state looks like to the choices made by the people, themselves.

Given that kind of freedom, unless one has truly perfect knowledge (beyond the partial knowledge contained in the advice of the earring), the pursuit of one's goals seems to unavoidably entail some regrets. And with perfect knowledge, well... The kind of 'freedom' attributed, for example, to God by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly only analogous to our own, and is understood to be an unchanging condition, rather than a sequential act.

(As a final note: One might wonder what this 'freedom to choose aspects' approaches as an 'asymptotic state' -- that is, for an immortal person. And this leads to metaphysical concerns -- of course, with some things 'smuggled in' by the presumption of genuine freedom, already. Provided one agrees that human nature undeniably provides some structure to ultimate desires/"happiness", the idea of virtue ethics follows naturally, and from there many philosophers have arrived at similar notions of some kind of apotheosis as a stable end-state, as well as the contrary state of some kind of scattering or decay of the mind...)

I struggled on a few days' puzzles under the assumption that there _was_ a perfect solution possible -- It may be worth noting in the "help" that not all lettersets can be solved perfectly.

Most people, past or present, have had to do whatever labor they can to (hopefully) simply survive at the contextual standard of living. Some kids may love a parent who lets them go hungry so they can do work they don't dislike as much -- but the other adults around them probably won't have such a generous view, and I think rightly so.

>Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure?

I am a religious person, but for someone in such a situation, a naturalistic explanation may be that, if what will increase their chance of survival from "effectively zero" to "slightly more" is the attention & care of others around them, such "narrative" hallucinations may make it more likely that they receive that care.

Who do you mean by "his successor"? Surely not the new, 'acting' FBI director, as they have comparatively little power?