if she comes out and says that the president was… not involved in any criminal activity.

Which, lets not forget, may very well be true. Wishing it to not be true is wishing that a child got raped only because the consequences of that would further one’s political agenda.

Way to move the goalposts.

If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.

Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.

So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.

Well let’s hear some suggestions then.

Artificial intelligence isn’t designed to maximize human fulfillment. It’s built to minimize human suffering.

What it cannot do is answer the fundamental questions that have always defined human existence: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do with my finite time on Earth?

Expecting machines to resolve existential questions is like expecting a calculator to write poetry. We’re demanding the wrong function from the right tool.

Pretty weird statements. There’s no such thing as just “AI” - they should be more specific. LLMs aren’t designed to maximize human fulfillment or minimize suffering. They’re designed to generate natural-sounding language. If they’re talking about AGI, then that’s not designed for any one thing - it’s designed for everything.

Comparing AGI to a calculator makes no sense. A calculator is built for a single, narrow task. AGI, by definition, can adapt to any task. If a question has an answer, an AGI has a far better chance of figuring it out than a human - and I’d argue that’s true even if the AGI itself isn’t conscious.

It won’t solve anything

Go tell that to AlphaFold which solved a decades‑old problem in biology by predicting protein structures with near lab‑level accuracy.

I mean - it’s certainly possible, but you’d still be risking that 500k prize if you got caught.

And most people seem to tap out because of loneliness or starvation, so if you were going to cheat, you’d pretty much have to smuggle in either food or a better way of getting it - like a decent fishing rod and proper lures.

I’ve put things in my ass for no points. 1000 points sure sounds worth it.

They do regular health check-ins with the contestants, and if you’re not losing weight but there’s no footage of you catching food, they’re going to figure out pretty quickly that something’s up.

On top of that, the locations are chosen so that just hiking out to you with food would be a survival challenge in itself - and coming in by boat would almost certainly be noticed.

Interestingly, I’ve just been binge watching the show for the first time. I’m on season 5 currently.

Two
spaces
before
you
press
enter.

What are you suggesting exactly? You have an actual solution here to offer or you just want to be a smart ass?

When people have sex, they usually do it in private, without any witnesses. Whatever happens during that time is often difficult to prove afterward, since it typically comes down to one person’s word against the other’s. Unless there’s clear physical evidence of assault, it can be extremely hard to establish that something was done against someone’s will. Most reasonable people would agree that “she said so” alone doesn’t amount to proof - and isn’t, by itself, a valid basis for sending someone to prison.

“If we just trusted women”

We don’t trust people based on their gender. We trust them based on credibility and evidence. If there’s even the tiniest amount of doubt then it better to let the guilty walk free rather than put an innocent person in jail. And I’m speaking broadly here - not about Trump specifically.

Apparently I’m old enough to be a Lemmy user’s dad.

Find an ETF index fund that’s highly diversified across both sectors and regions, with total expenses under 0.5%, and set up an automatic monthly investment into it. It’s the boring way to invest - but unless you’ve got a crystal ball and can predict the future, I wouldn’t start gambling on individual stocks. This is basically the same advice Warren Buffett would give you.

The few things I’m not buying out of principle are such that I wouldn’t even know if someone else bought it or not. But no, I don’t care. There’s nothing I’m not buying because I think the company that produces it is literally Hitler.

I haven’t claimed that it is. The point is, the only two plausible scenarios I can think of where we don’t eventually reach AGI are: either we destroy ourselves before we get there, or there’s something fundamentally mysterious about the biological computer that is the human brain - something that allows it to process information in a way we simply can’t replicate any other way.

I don’t think that’s the case, since both the brain and computers are made of matter, and matter obeys the laws of physics. But it’s at least conceivable that there could be more to it.

Did you genuinely not understand the point I was making, or are you just being pedantic? “Silicon” obviously refers to current computing substrates, not a literal constraint on all future hardware. If you’d prefer I rewrite it as “in non-biological substrates,” I’m happy to oblige - but I have a feeling you already knew that.

The fact that you have to completely rewrite my argument into a strawman before you can attack it tells me all I need to know about who I’m dealing with here. Have a great day.

We’re not even remotely close.

That’s just the other side of the same coin whose flip side claims AGI is right around the corner. The truth is, you couldn’t possibly know either way.

Don’t confuse AGI with LLMs. Both being AI systems is the only thing they have in common. They couldn’t be further apart when it comes to cognitive capabilities.