Shame that’s not true

Napster was audio only.

It was file type specific and had a soft file side limit, but that’s easy enough to work around.

Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?

They all had it as well, yes

I don’t think we’re so far from having machines that pass the Turing test 100%.

The Turing test isn’t solved with technology, its solved with participants who are easier to fool or more sympathetic to computer output as humanly legible. In the end, it can boil down to social conventions far more than actual computing capacity.

Per the old Inglorious Bastards gag

You can fail the Turing Test not because you’re a computer but because you’re a British computer.

Because all the development has been focused on fakery rather than understanding and replicating consciousness, we’re close to the point where we can have a fake consciousness that would fool anyone.

We’ve ingested a bunch of early 21st century digital markers for English language Western oriented human speech and replicated those patterns. But human behavior isn’t limited to Americans shitposting on Reddit. Neither is American culture a static construct. As the spread between the median user and the median simulated user in the computer dataset diverges, the differences become more obvious.

Do we think the designers at OpenAI did a good enough job to keep catching up to the current zeitgeist?

If you can’t find ample evidence of human sentience then you either aren’t looking or are deliberately misreading the definition of the term.

If you can’t find ample evidence that computers aren’t sentient, same goes.

You can definitely put blinders on and set yourself up to be fooled, one way or another. But there’s a huge difference between “unassailable proof” and “ample convincing data”.

I dont think we can currently prove that anyone other than ourselves are even conscious.

You have to define consciousness before you can prove it. I might argue that our definition of consciousness is fuzzy. But not so fuzzy that “a human is conscious and a rock is not” is up for serious debate.

The people around me look and act and appear conscious, but I’ll never know.

You’re describing Philosophical Zombies. And the broad answer to the question of “How do I know I’m not just talking to a zombie?” boils down to “You have to treat others as you would expect to be treated and give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Mere ignorance is not evidence of a thing. And when you have an abundance of evidence to the contrary (these other individuals who behave and interact with me as I do, thus signaling all the indications of the consciousness I know I possess) defaulting to the negative assertion because you don’t feel convinced isn’t skeptical inquiry, its cynical denialism.

The catch with AI is that we have ample evidence to refute the claims of consciousness. So a teletype machine that replicates human interactions can be refuted as “conscious” on the grounds that its a big box full of wires and digital instructions which you know in advance was designed to create the illusion of humanity.

You could tell me my consciousness was uploaded and show me a version of me that was indistinguishable from myself in every way

I just don’t think this is a problem in the current stage of technological development. Modern AI is a cute little magic act, but humans (collectively) are very good at piercing the veil and then spreading around the discrepancies they’ve discovered.

You might be fooled for a little while, but eventually your curious monkey brain would start poking around the edges and exposing the flaws. At this point, it would not be a question of whether you can continue to be fooled, but whether you strategically ignore the flaws to preserve the illusion or tear the machine apart in disgust.

I still wouldn’t believe it experiences or feels anything as I do, even though it claims to do so

People have submitted to less. They’ve worshipped statues and paintings and trees and even big rocks, attributing consciousness to all of them.

But Animism is a real escoteric faith. You believe it despite the evidence in front of you, not because of it.

I’m putting my money down on a future where large groups of people believe AIs are more than just human, they’re magical angels and demons.

digital neural networks seem like decent enough approximations of their biological counterparts to warrant caution

No they don’t. Digital networks don’t act in any way like a electro-chemical meat wad programmed by DNA.

Might as well call a helicopter a hummingbird and insist they could both lay eggs.

We cannot know who or what possesses consciousness.

That’s sophism. You’re functionally asserting that we can’t tell the difference between someone who is alive and someone who is dead

I don’t know why they can’t single-handedly win a war against a country 10x their size using only our obsolete overpriced leftovers

I mean, ask Afghanistan, Vietnam, or Korea.

But also ask why these wars popped off to begin with and why they dragged on long after any foreign country had a material interest in continuing the fight.

Also maybe look into the UON and question why the Canadian Parliament was applauding an elderly SS Officer who described WW2 as the best years of his life.

Tons of profit in war mongering.

Well if we’re not going to bother helping them win

We’ve been happy to lard them up with debt and sell them overpriced military surplus. Idk if that counts as “helping them win” but we’ve made a handsome profit off it.

Fuck Ukraine, not our problem

Hey now. Don’t look at Ukraine as a problem. Look at Ukraine as a big play for recently vacated real estate. Jared Kushner is going to make so much fucking money leasing Ukraine’s land back to its residents.

Now Ukrainians? They’re going to get fucked.

Oh boy, strap in. Can’t wait to hear how many keyboard commandos think Ukrainians should get shoved into the meat grinder for another year.

Who keeps giving Grok a gun?

There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state

Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.

Is California no longer liberal?

Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)

Looks like they’re retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the “Supporters and Opponents” what you’re going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.

They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.

The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don’t see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they’re toothless if you’ve got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.

Setting aside the fact that there’s no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.

FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.

soon we’ll have no states to vpn to

I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you’re really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just… not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.

then all the websites will be in French

Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.

States are also considering banning VPNs now as well.

Well, some legislators have proposed taking wack-a-mole to the next level and demanding all VPNs be certified and regulated. But good luck getting that passed through the Silicon Valley Presidency or the Ancap Courts.

I mean, a VPN is way cheaper than whatever hoops Idaho wants you to jump through to watch some 10/10 goth hottie get their ass eaten.

Please read the article you yourself

Buddy, you can try reading past the first paragraph. There’s an extended back and forth in the interview discussing the violence around these bases and their broad unpopularity.

There are people in literally every country that wants foreign influence or bases out, that proves nothing

You don’t think an enormous population of foreign military resulting in high rates of unprosecuted sexual violence and organized crime demonstrates anything about the state of politics in the host country?

So you believe people in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines at the highest levels of power just… want this for their people? Or do you think they’re so beaten down they don’t believe in their own capacity for self-defense?

Random, but did you know an alternate name for Russians where I live is “occupiers”?

I mean, you keep coming back to Russians, as though you think they’re a different species.

I guess you’d call them, what? Orks?

Is the violent occupation of conquered territory only a problem for you when the occupying army is Slavic?

Germany, definitely. We’ve had that country inundated with bases for nearly a century

Brother, this isn’t Pravda