I doubt it… You know how there’s companies to boost your SEO? There’s companies that do literally the opposite - you pay them to bury things on the Internet. It’s a service basically exclusively for the rich… There’s no money to be made doing this, if a company does it after an exposure they get a brush with the Streisand effect. But if you’re rich…want the wrong face to come up on Google images? Don’t want pictures of your house? Want people to find the wrong address for you? You can pay to make it happen

I knew a guy who used to do that. This sounds like their techniques - they start by using legal threats to hopefully get the host to take stuff down, and if that doesn’t work they then generally use SEO techniques to fill the first 2 pages with misinfo

Sounds to me like a nervous billionaire offered “their guy” to help with the situation

The Germans, circa '40 FTFY

I’m pretty sure that isn’t an AI pic, it looks like a quick and dirty cut and paste composition. Which is probably why the grass looks so weird, they just grabbed some random picture of grass and used the magic select tool to put it in the foreground

Sure, but go to a city and you’re just another import. Go to another country, and you’re just “the foreigner”. Through almost all of human history, you could just kinda leave your past behind if you just ran away

If you want to make a video game I’d be willing to help, I’ve started a few and have learned a lot of the ins and outs. I’m partial to godot myself

Consciousness is the AI assistant in meat mecha suit.

It seems like we make decisions, but we don’t. Think of a decision you’ve made - you think over it, you sleep on it, you imagine outcomes and might decide intellectually - but you don’t lock it in. That just happens - sometimes it even flips at the last second, and you don’t know why you did it - for better or worse

Our brain does a lot of preprocessing - vision, hearing, balance, walking, language…

Our conscious minds preprocess time. It turns our senses and our experiences into stories, abstract predictions, laterally pattern matching, and ultimately - analysis and recommendations

But that’s kind of my point - we do have evidence. As much as we have for humans, at least

Koko the gorilla is what made me start to question all of this back in grade school. This gorilla learns sign language, and is shown picture books with cats. She asks for a cat for Christmas, despite never having actually seen one. They give her a toy one and she gets angry.

Months later, they bring in kittens. She picks the tailless tabby and names it “all ball”. It was her pet all its life, she would take care of it and even told the keepers it had ear mites

On a foggy December morning, one of the assistants told me that Ball had been hit by a car. He had died instantly. I was shocked and unprepared. I didn’t realize how attached I had grown to Ball, and I had no idea how the news would affect Koko. The kitten meant so much to her. He was Koko’sbaby. I went to Koko at once. I told her that Ball had been hit by a car; she would not see him again. Koko did not respond. I thought she didn’t understand, so I left the trailer.

Ten minutes later, I heard Koko cry. It washer distress call—a loud, long series of high-pitched hoots. I cried, too.

Three days later, Koko and I had a conversation about Ball. “Do you want to talk about your kitty?” Iasked. “Cry,” Koko signed.“ Can you tell me more about it?” I asked. “Blind,” she signed. “We don’t see him anymore, do we? What happened to your kitty?” I asked. “Sleep cat,” Koko signed. A few weeks later, Koko saw a picture of a gray tabby who looked very much like Ball. She pointed to the picture and signed, “Cry, sad, frown.”

Koko described herself as “fine gorilla person”, she painted and joked and understood mortality.

Why is Koko special? Because she was interested in communicating, and so was her keeper. That was decades ago… Back when we rarely accepted animals were even sentient, let alone sapient

I’ve watched a video where a dog described it’s dreams, and one where a cat lied and negotiated for a treat before being convinced over the course of minutes to willingly take it’s medicine to make the “hurt go bye”.

My childhood dog was well behaved, so we’d let him in or out when he scratched on the door. We stopped paying attention… We only caught him exploring the suburbs when a neighbor called us. One day we were driving and saw him miles from home, so we followed… He kept to the sidewalks, avoided people, and looked before crossing the street. So we let him have his secret life, and he never got into any trouble… We wouldn’t have known otherwise, because he timed his adventures well

My mom’s dog used to watch dog shows, and smiled wide when I put a medal around her neck jokingly… Not when I put my keys around her neck, just the medal - I did ABACAB testing, just the medal got that reaction.

You can explain away all these things, or you can entertain the idea. Maybe Koko was the exception or my mom’s dog just thought the medal was pretty, or maybe she dreamed of winning a dog show.

We can’t even philosophically nail down sapience, and yet we don’t have a second Koko… Because we barely try to meet them where they are, and dismiss every success as an anomaly

The evidence is everywhere, we just seem to ignore it

How can we truly know this though - we don’t even really understand sapience on a philosophical level, let alone on a scientific one. The word itself is based on homo-sapien, and ultimately it means “why are we the most special”. It’s been a constant game of moving goalposts

Here’s a paper on animal metacognition. The intro is worth a read

Moving on to more common examples of metacognition, think of the many videos of dogs feigning injury when their human has an injured leg. That’s the same as your example with eating slower

There’s also a recent study I read where they trapped a rat in a tight cage, and another rat would learn to let them out. Then they added chocolate chips - the other rat would usually eat most of them before letting the other one out - but would save at least one

There’s even videos of a dog having a conversation with those word-pads, where they had to be convinced that their owner was human and not a dog, but was adamant that the small dog was a cat

We hold ourselves back, because we’re always starting from the perspective of humans being more, or that animals would act like us if only they were smarter… But ultimately, they have different priorities

Only recently have we started to look for things like language, culture, meta cognition, and every other “human” trait with an open mind. And we find it, everywhere

Whose to say dogs don’t wonder where we go all day, why they get left behind, and ponder their life as a dog?

Ah, I was very confused where that was coming from

It’s crazy to me how much this holds us back, and the amount of cognitive dissonance involved

Take pets. We look at them acting shifty around the sock they know they aren’t allowed to play with, and say “she’s thinking about it”. We avoid words like “walk” because they’ve understood one of the meanings of it. And usually not just the meaning, but the difference between tone and context - most won’t react the same to “should we take her for a walk” and “is he able to walk”. My mom’s dog knew all of our names, and the difference between “soon”, “tomorrow”, and “the day after tomorrow” - she would watch the door all day on the right day

And yet, most people will share all of these observations and turn around to dismiss it as “she’s just a dog”. For them it’s just association and behavioral conditioning, but the same things are different for humans because we’re extra special. Clearly her acting shifty before stealing the sock isn’t planning or considering, it’s instincts fighting against training

But only humans can ever understand, only we make choices. Because we’re extra special

Heh. It was unintentional, next time it won’t be

Ultimately, insurance is a bucket of money we all pay into to help the few who go through an emergency

Obviously you need administration to handle the bureaucracy and make sure no one is stealing from the emergency pot fraudulently

That being said, what I take exception to is the profit. Why, the ever loving fuck, is it ok to take more than your costs for this? Why is money intended for the public good funneled up to the ownership class?

Pay your people, pay out the coverage. The rest of the money has no business leaving the pot… Not to run ads, or to lobby lawmakers. Definitely not to end up in an unrelated person’s pocket.

It’s a case for a government run entity if I’ve ever seen one

I never understood this weird hangup, it’s like people struggling to reconcile free will with deterministic actions to a being outside normal time. Of course you’ll make the same choices if you rewound time and changed nothing… You’re the same, the universe is the same down to the last particle - how does that conflict with the idea of agency?

Consciousness is an emergent property. One neuron is complex, but 1000 can do things one could never do alone. Why is it so surprising that billions, arranged in complex self organizing structures, would give rise to something more than the sum of its parts?

Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not… It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us

This just feels like someone gearing up for more drone regulation to me. We’ve had them for years, they’re not expensive or hard to use, and suddenly there’s a whole bunch of them near an airport and the media loses their mind?

It feels contrived

What are you talking about? This is about CO² to produce the hydrogen from methanol and H² as a greenhouse gas through extending the life of methane in the atmosphere

Probably because the more aggressive the timeline, the more willingness to fight rather than just adapt

Personally, I’d like to see more of a transition - maybe a tax that starts small and quickly scales into something crazy over the course of the decade or something else to heavily motivate early compliance

This isn’t nothing though, it’s mostly just late. Paris did something similar and is already reaping the rewards

Unironically, yes. Daddy’s approval, respect from their peers, relationships based on you and not your money, even basic self respect- they’re raised chasing money to fill the hole, to see it as the value of a person, of themselves

The ones that aren’t cursed with this artificial scarcity? They quietly live their lives however they like, they’re not trying to nickel and dime their way for more. You don’t hear about them much, because why would a mentally healthy person put themselves through that for no reward? Any of them could buy a nice house (or a dozen), pretend to be upper middle class, and live whatever kind of life they want. They could live out of 5 Star hotels and be waited on hand and foot. They could buy their way into fame as an actor or a musician

It always strikes me as absurd - we’re destroying the planet, and none of us are happy - not even the billionaires benefiting from it. Their family lives are a mess, they’re hated (or idolized for things they’re not), and especially now, they probably live in fear of being targeted walking down the street

It makes a difference - corporations move and adapt slowly. They now know in 10 years, the ICE market will probably be completely dead in big chunks of the US market, and if they aren’t competitive by then they’ll lose a lot of market share

It’s not enough to sell electric models by 2035 - they need to be established as good electric manufacturers by then. It’ll push them to move the electric transition forward, either giving up on hydrogen or speeding up their plans

It’s not the greatest timeframe, but it’s not nothing

I’m more concerned that people believe it’s rare, in both humans and the animal kingdom

Predators will share territory if there’s enough to go around, even forming close relationships across species, sometimes even raising their young together

Empathy is the natural state, unless there’s enough scarcity. Humans are naturally generous, unless we’re raised in an environment of eternal artificial scarcity…

Finding the right words to get apathetic people to care