eointierney

Yep, when it's humans nerding it's awesome

Yes to your first paragraph. Library to your second.

And no, Internet access is not the same as reading in a library. Academia is the quiet place we learn to ask questions.

And meet people who are really good at asking questions.

yunohost?

We can't, without first granting it to whales, chimps, corvids, and the rest. But we have come very close. The Law is unutterably fucking broken.

In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined:

"4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex."

It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex.

Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok.

We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity.

What a time to be alive.

Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.

Max Tegmark is chatting elsewhere

Timeless

Math good, strangely effective, much science, reality deeply weird, needs more stochastic approximation of real valued functions.

Edit: em dashes available on request

You US citizens don't seem to realise just how legal/lucky you are.

I'm Irish. We're way more legal than you.

Listen to anyone from China.

In times past having one's photograph taken was a soul-stealing for some.

Some notions:

- finding counter-examples is one of the most exploratory uses of calculation

- there is no evidence, not even in the hands of the inimitable Terence Tao, that Approximate Intelligence (AI) is insightful rather than inferential*

- people who enjoy Mathematics, even amateurs, do so for the beauty

- AI is only good in the hands of those who can provide corrective context

- AI unchecked is a remarkably inefficient noise engine

- Mathematics will provide joy to the curious 'til the heat death of the Universe

- AI is contributing to the heat death of planet Earth

- anthropomorphism, of which I am otherwise not a fan, may yet be a saving grace as without proprioception we may not morph

- we may need to redefine the Turing Tarpit of Perlis

If any of this nonsense really troubles you return again to thermodynamics and revel in the joy of being the local universe's pinnacle of meaty evolution. And go outside and smell the flowers.

* Caveats abound

Exactly

And yet the phrase "be kind" appears nowhere on that page

Be kind as in be like thyself as in see thyself in others as in don't be unkind as in be kind

The rest is noise in an expanding universe

Happy as in Halmos Tombstone