I wanted to be a mechanical engineer growing up, I was always playing with Lego and building little mechanisms. Then I had a physics teacher who got into the subject of physics vs engineering. He told the class about his brother who was an engineer for some electric motor company, and how his team would spend 18 months fiddling with the parameters of a motor, and they’d throw a party if they increased efficiency by 0.5%. I couldn’t disagree with his assessment that that sounded boring and soul-draining.

It sounds like the perfect job for a certain kind of person, and I am not that kind of person.

Your life up until now is meaningless. You can be born again.

He not only nailed it so hard no one else can play the role, he nailed it so hard he became synonymous with the role.

Only when the administration is blatantly corrupt. I take pride in funding my share of society, but not when nutjobs are spending it.

That’s not really what complexity is. Complexity has nothing to do with purpose, it’s just about how many “moving parts” a system has. Those elaborate do-nothing machines that don’t have any real “purpose” are nonetheless complex.

A random distribution of matter, subject to physical laws, is unquestionably a complex interconnected system. The laws of physics generate planets, stars, nebulae, blank holes, galaxies, superclusters, etc.

And I’ll tell you a secret: every single “purposeful” pattern you’ve ever encountered was generated by that distribution of physically reactive matter. The complex interconnected universe, by definition, includes every other system, including the ones that you normally think of when you think of as “complex”.

I’m really not sure how you’re defining “randomness” then, or how that randomness precludes complexity and interconnectedness.

We expect some points of higher and lower density, not pure uniformity

Which is precisely what we see. I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression that it’s totally random noise, every scientific and mathematical field is based on the universe having consistent, ordered rules of operation.

It seems to be nearly perfectly random

How so?

Consciousness exists. This implies that either consciousness is some emergent property of sufficiently complex interconnected systems, or it’s some universal force that complex interconnected systems “channel”.

If it’s emergent, it seems less presumptuous to assume that the most complex interconnected system of all, the universe itself, would develop consciousness. That universal consciousness might as well be called “God”. If it’s a universal force, it might as well be called “God”. Anyway you slice it, a universal consciousness seems inevitable from a sober metaphysical analysis.

Lots of people have ascribed lots of culturally specific attributes to the universal consciousness which are obviously quite silly. The core statement that “I am that ‘I am’” is really the only meaningful attribute we can identify.

Not from Cali, not a programmer (though honestly I could be).

Fuck French toast because it is decadent but usually entirely to much.

Marry waffles because they are perfect and precious.

Kill pancakes.

Well, Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet doesn’t really have anything to do with the scientific method. “Planet” is a manmade concept, we just changed the definition for that classification to avoid having to add the dozens of bodies we discovered since Pluto that would have also met the old definition.

The piece of garlic bread I didn’t put away last night. Delightfully crunchy.

I like the way “myth” looks

If I could see any practice from my time working food service make it into the general population, it would be “Behind” and “Heard”.

Oh, she must hear the train coming

I dunno. Obviously individual LLMs are basically sophisticated parrots and are unlikely to develop to AGI on their own. However, a lot of work is being done in combining multiple specialized LLMs. As unlikely as it is for direct LLM improvement to lead to true AI, I think it’s not terribly unlikely that some particular assemblage of many specialized LLMs could achieve the complexity necessary for AGI.

I’ve heard that it means pints and quarts, referring to beers. I feel like I’ve also heard it was a typesetter thing.

The same basic encounter can have different effects in different contexts.

Maybe clearing the bandits is how you find a stolen artifact that helps you clear the forbidden temple. Fighting the same enemy in a back alley has different consequences from doing it in the busy street. The ogre down path A might be mechanically identical to the one down path B, but they’re from rival tribes.

It can definitely be used incorrectly, but there are lots of ways for that non-choice to really be a meaningful choice.

I believe most religions started as good faith (no pun intended) attempts at roughly the same thing: contextualization of the metaphysical order of the universe.

Like the parable of the unseen elephant, God is a concept beyond true human perception, and every religion is like a man groping in darkness at one aspect of the bigger picture. When we approach the subject with a perspective informed by each of these outlooks, we develop a more diverse and comprehensive conceptualization of Order. Even better when we compare these outlooks to find overlap where most tend to agree.