SpiderShoeCult @ SpiderShoeCult @sopuli.xyz

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And human beings are more like a fungus (eukaryotes, saprophites) than an LLM is, that doesn't mean we're mushrooms.

However, the human brain is more like an LLM than a database, because the LLM was modelled after the human brain. It's also very similar in the way that nobody actually can tell precisely how it works, for some reason it just does.

Now I wouldn't worry about philosophical implications about the nature of consciousness and such, we're a long way and we'll find a way of screwing it up.

I do question why people are so vehement to always point out what we 'have' and how special we are. Nobody sane is saying LLMs are human consciousness 2.0. So why act threatened?

Leaving aside LLMs, the brain is not a database. there is no specific place that you can point to and say 'there resides the word for orange'. Assuming that would be the case, it would be highly inefficient to assign a spot somewhere for each bit of information (again, not talking about software here, still the brain). And if you would, then you would be able to isolate that place, cut it out, and actually induce somebody to forget the word and the notion (since we link words with meaning - say orange and you think of the fruit, colour or perhaps a carrot). If we hade a database organized into tables and say orange was a member of colours and another table, 'orange things', deleting the member 'orange' would make you not recognize that carrots nowadays are orange.

Instead, what happens - for example in those who have a stroke or those who suffer from epilepsy (a misfiring of meurons) - is that there appears a tip-of-the tongue phenomenon where they know what they want to say and can recognize notions, it's just the pathway to that specific word is interrupted and causes a miss, presumably when the brain tries to go on the path it knows it should take because it's the path taken many times for that specific notion and is prevented. But they don't lose the ability to say their phone number, they might lose the ability to say 'four' and some just resort to describing the notion - say the fruit that makes breakfast juice instead. Of course, if the damage done is high enough to wipe out a large amout of neurons, you lose larger amounts of words.

Downsides - you cannot learn stuff instantly, as you could if the brain was a database. That's why practice makes perfect. You remember your childhood phone number because you repeated it so many times that there is a strong enough link between some neurons.

Upsides - there is more learning capacity if you just relate notions and words versus, for lack of a better term, hardcoding them. Again, not talking about software here.

Also leads to some funky things like a pencil sharpener being called literally a pencil eater in Danish.

I never implied they "remembered", I asked you how you interpret humans remembering since you likened it to a database, which science says it is not. Nor did I make any claims about AI knowing stuff, you inferred that by yourself. I also did not claim they possess any sort of human like traits. I honestly do not care to speculate.

The modelling statement speaks to how it came to be and the intention of programmers and serves to illustrate my point regarding the functioning of the brain.

My question remains unanswered.

Genuinely curious how you would describe humans remembering stuff, because if I remember correctly my biology classes, it's about reinforced neural pathways that become more likely to be taken by an electrical impulse than those that are less 'travelled'. The whole notion of neural networks is right there in the name, based on how neurons work.

with the risk of feeding the troll, maybe this will sway some fence sitters from adopting this argument

because we allow people to shave (some even do it with straight razors, too - dangerous shite) themselves and others with little to no oversight but we don't let them perform surgery without proper training that takes a decade or so to master. should that make surgery illegal?

also, if you want to talk safety for home implements just look at the number of people that die due to carbon monoxide poisoning (or sometimes explosions) because of improperly set up heating at home. did you know it's illegal to operate on your own gas pipes without proper permits? yup, you need to be qualified for that so you don't rig your house into an IED

or if you want to have some fun, play around with some improperly discharged fridge capacitors, and see what that gets you. yet, you still have a fridge, I'd wager. by your logic, if it's allowed in a home, it's safe, right?

It's a fair view that something forcefully introduced by us would be more of an appendix than a fully integrated digestion-feeding system, I'll agree to that. I guess I'm being overly optimistic in my assessment regarding the integration of such a mutation in stable populations and the link from digestion to feeding.

I mean sure, if you're talking just manipulating some cell mechanisms to produce the enzymes required for digestion like we manipulate yeasts and e. coli to make drugs - the bugs don't actually use those for anything and they'd lose the trait out in the wild or just keep it as a vestigial mechanism in limited populations.

But I was thinking more in a sense of what happened to lignin digestion. In the end, it's still a source of carbon that can be used as a building block and the chemical bonds can be broken up for energy, so there's no reason to think there would be no pressure to evolve to eat the monomers once they're there and to adapt the gene for the enzymes from 'professional use' to 'personal use' by the bugs.

Case in point - mushrooms eating fallen logs and strains of S. cerevisiae producing amylase. At some point it made 'sense' to just keep those and that gave them an evolutionary edge, so the trait remained. And now we have another pest on our hands - S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus, a pox on non-belgian breweries everywhere. And critters that eat improperly treated wood beams and cause unpleasantness in wood framed houses.

I'd elaborate a bit on my interpretation of what the fella said.

The religion in point - catholicism, and maybe we can generalize to all abrahamic religions, I'm not very familiar with other religions to speak of them, instill a way of thinking that doing wrong is all fine and well as long as you repent and ask for forgiveness. Sound sensible, right? Except we're dealing with people here so they take it to mean that you can do all sorts of crap as long as you say you're sorry. It got so bad at some point that the pope was selling indulgences. 'Give me money and I'll let you sin'.

They also instill a sort of moral superiority on the adherents to said religions versus the pagans.

So yeah, slavery is worse (and I'm counting human trafficking here as well - it's the modern version), but is it not facilitated by the mindset instilled by religion? First - you see them as savages needing to be civilized - that's the moral superiority talking - you enslave them, BUT you bring them to god as well, so there's a load off your moral issues. Add to that the fact that even if you were wrong and did bad stuff, you didn't 'know' any better, and it's ok cause hellfire won't get you because you repent, there's your free ticket.

On the other hand, if you kidnap and force good christians into sexual slavery, you can be pretty sure that you most likely won't get murdered / maimed while you're raping because their moral teachings say to turn the other cheek instead of fighting back. And one of the 10 comandments is thou shalt not kill. Also a belief in sky-papa dishing out punishment in the afterlife makes people less inclined to seek vengeance (compounded with the previous point - thou shalt submit to being dehumanized by a fellow human without recourse).

This is an oversimplification to make a point, but sure, religion is seemingly not worse than other crap people are capable of but it sure sets the groundwork nicely. Sort of like you need to know a language before you can swear in it. A tool, but less like a hammer and more like a scythe. One good use, but so many other bad ones.

It (the infailibility of the pope) is also the reason of the great schism of 1054, when orthodoxy split from catholicism, officialy naming themselves 'the orthodox catholic church' (meaning basically the catholic church that has the right dogma; people mostly drop the 'catholic' from conversation nowadays though).

In the grand scheme of things, it didn't do much good, eastern orthodoxy is just as corrupt and power-hungry as catholicism.

Or they just have become so desensitized to suffering and conditions that they became sociopaths in the process. Point being that it's either that or getting burned out, but I don't think the profession attracts that many sociopaths, it just makes them.

This sounds like a wish on a monkey's paw type situation.

I'm curious, if you care to share, how's the rest of your digestive system holding up? I'd imagine nothing solid for this amount of time would wreak havoc on the gut flora. Any worries on constipation or diarrhea once you start back eating?

Regardless, vent acknowledged!

sounds like a... water-boarding school.

ba-dum-tsssst!

Honestly, my mind went first to the transport industry. Cars, busses, trucks, hell even trains and bikes (ebikes would have more plastic than the classic sort though). There's plastic in everything. For things like wiring insulation, seats, circuit boards. Maintanance on big transport rigs is sometimes spotty as it is, would love to see what happens when there's more things that can degrade them.

I honestly like the idea, but I wonder how many things that we take for granted because of plastic would go away?

I really dislike the fact that every single thing from the food isle comes packaged in at least one layer of plastic.

But I like that I can take a vinyl pressed 40 years ago and play it.

I agree with wood, it's a very nice material, but indoors where you have a nice controlled environment or outdoors if treated. Coming to a hardware store near you - treated plastic?

I'd just point out that these microorganisms will definitely escape into the wild at some point and then durabilty for plastics will be similar (maybe?) to that for wood (there was also a period in time when trees evolved when microorganisms had to catch up to degrade it, presumably it was full of wood everywhere that just wasn't rotting).

Imagine a future where your PC screen or mobile phone has an expiry date and it's not due to planned obsolescence. Maybe that's not so bad after all, now that I think about it.

Fun fact, when romans introduced lead pipes through aqueducts across the empire, the lead didn't affect all populations equally because of this. Hard water regions were mostly spared. Turns out the layer of limescale that forms on pipes is also good at stopping the lead leaching.

I share your concerns regarding the domain name (alleviated by linked study) and methods.

I'd just like to add that, at least for me, the alarming part is regarding the distribution of these, they seem to be not only lipophillic (which would be expected, considering the nature of them), but also able to cross the blood-brain barrier, something evolved in order to keep bad stuff out (sure, the lipophillic nature explains that part as well, but presumably the fact that they are undissolved but basically very small particles, there was probably some hope towards them not being able to cross).

To me, this raises some questions regarding what else travels with them, and are they inadvertently becoming a vector for stuff that would normally be more easily disposed of? Thinking of things like the first pass effect here, in the liver where things like 'naked' pollutants would be processed/eliminated 'on sight'; then, if something comes along adsorbed/absorbed into a 3D structure that hides it from the body long enough and then reaches the brain, that something could be potentially leached in a highly unfortunate place. Think targetted drug delivery - only random and with whatever happened to be around while the microplastic was forming.

Add to this the fact that any and all studies lack a control group since the things are in everything and everyone. Would it even be possible to grow plastic-free lab animals to test them? How would you even isolate the area without using any sort of plastic?

I predict that behavioral studies are more likely than not to show erratic results due to having different baselines of comparison for each subject because of the heterogeneity of contamination, so even spiking with the same agent in the same manner, you'd be either compounding an effect, potentially countering another or perhaps just eliciting a totally different response. How would one control for that? Maybe get as uniform a starting group as possible but how would you prove that uniformity?

Begone, Satan!

This hits so hard on so many levels. I started with a freshwater shrimp cube. Then it snowballed from there.

I had a small 160L tank, cost about 1000 dollars. Kept spending money buying more zoas and palys before I realized the filefish was eating them - he never did it while I was watching and started about 3 months after having him. Cute little gobshite though. Isolated him in a temporary tank, but then aiptasia started growing. Filefish back, zoas got munched. Left the hobby now but I fear I might do it all again.

Coca cola? probably because they are Coca Cola. Also it's like 10% sugar. Maybe energy drinks are higher in sugar?

Solid things? That involves some effort - chewing - and you are less likely to eat that much sugar as opposed to chugging it down from energy drinks.

"Some examples here will surprise you"

Do companies that do this much more common practice than you'd think that is also illegal also hate this one simple trick?