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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • From the viewpoint of an observing human, what’s the difference between the robot saying something which is believes to be true but isn’t (very common with current software, and unlikely to change even in the distant future, see “humans, purportedly intelligent”) and lying on purpose? If it lies on purpose, does the intent to lie come from the robot itself, or its programmers? Ultimately, it seems like the presence and source of intent is the only difference. Regardless, a robot will never be right about everything it says, so its statements have to be weighed in a way similar to how one would weigh statements coming from a human.

    TL;DR: I expect robots to tell me untruths from time to time regardless of how I feel about it.




  • It suggests that the best the chatbot can do, after being carefully tailored for its job, is no better than the old methods (because the goal is for the students to be able to handle the subject matter without having to check every common operation with a third party, regardless of whether that’s a chatbot or a textbook, and the test is the best indicator of that). Therefore, spending the electricity to run an educational chatbot for highschoolers isn’t justified at this time, but it’s probably worth rechecking in a few years to see if its results have improved. It may also be worth doing extended testing to determine whether there are specific subsets of the student body that benefit more from the chatbot than others. And allowing the students to seek out an untailored chatbot on their own is strongly counterindicated.


  • Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That’s (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).

    I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They’ll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.

    Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We’d be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn’t have that specific issue.


  • Except the-service-formerly-known-as-Twitter isn’t being “shut down”, it’s being stopped at the Brazilian border. This actually happens all the time with print publications in many countries that don’t take Free Speech to toxic extremes—they get confiscated at the border by Customs officials. It’s less common these days than it used to be, but I’d bet that there are still instances of fringe porn and unapologetic Nazi propaganda being seized.

    X-Twitter is free to go about its business in the country in which it’s based and in any other country where it hasn’t been banned, just not in Brazil, until and unless it decides to comply with the courts there. Which it is free to do at any time.