I would make a suggestion but I wouldn’t insist on it being followed, because arguments about style are tedious and rarely productive.

I can appreciate a sunset or a flower without needing these things to have “a human behind it all”.

With that said, art is far from the most important potential application of AI. I am merely amused that right now I can ask a computer to draw a cow in the style of Monet and get a pretty good result. The amazing thing is not present-day capability (which is remarkable but not world-changing) but rather what the rate of progress implies about the near future. I think that a computer better than any human at everything (or at least at every intellectual task) is likely within my lifetime.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

I don’t think you’re right about heat. Two cables in series have double the resistance and therefore double the total heat generation, but that heat energy is split between the two cables so each one does not get hotter than if it was the only cable.

Oh, also this movie was Orson Welles’ last acting role before he, ahem, proceeded on his way to oblivion. As he put it,

You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.

When I watched the movie, I thought Unicron sounded amazing. I suppose this is why.

People being shot with bullets -> inappropriate.

Robots being shot with lasers  -> appropriate.

There are no other relevant factors.

That movie has many more disturbing scenes than I expected from a toy commercial. Even this one includes talk of ripping out “optics”.

I was going to say something about “uncreative” being in the eye of the beholder, but actually I agree with you. De-aging Tom Hanks isn’t a case of creating art under constraints (which can bring out more creativity in humans). There’s a “correct” way to de-age him: the way he actually looked when he was younger. Even without that as a guide, the range of acceptable de-aged appearances is quite narrow. Too narrow to contain the space needed for creativity.

I think even some present-day AIs display creativity in a meaningful way even though they are still far from matching the full range of human creative abilities, but de-aging Tom Hanks, although amazing in its own way, is not an example of creativity.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you - I think it might be a while before an AI can just make a whole movie. With that said, the idea to de-age old actors isn’t creative, but the process of de-aging them before the advent of AI would have been done by an artist and called creative work (although actually having a human artist do it was not feasible in practice).

There’s a tendency to consider something uncreative because it is done by AI and according to that logic AI cannot possibly be creative, but I try to judge AI creations by the same standards I would have used if they were human creations before AI existed.

“Set that completely aside, what work will there be for human beings? Then what?” the “Friends” star continued. “There’ll be some kind of living stipend for people, you won’t have to work? How can it possibly be enough?”

How can it possibly be enough? Well, it’s the best-case scenario so I hope it will be…

The funny thing about the ongoing AI revolution is that we expected machines to take over menial labor and leave humans free to do creative work, but it looks like machines are going to be pretty good at creative work. The future might be a place where movies are created by AI but humans are still useful for the sorts of physical labor that robots have trouble with.

My point is that if you give your dog some of your human food and there turns out to be a little bit of garlic in it, your dog is in no danger. Many people don’t know that. I’m not challenging basic principles of toxicology or claiming that a dog can’t possibly eat enough of these foods to be poisoned. If your small dog eats a chocolate bar or a whole bag of onion rings, you should probably do something about that.

Also, the following isn’t a reply to what you said but I just remembered it and I thought it might be useful information for some dog owners. Swallowing even a little bit of dilute hydrogen peroxide from the pharmacy will quickly make a dog vomit. It took less than a teaspoon for my 30-pound dog. I would start with a teaspoon and then he spilled a lot while I was trying to make him swallow it. I had to resort to this several times when he ate something dangerous.

IMO this is generally safe (but do your own reading and take your own dog’s specific issues into account) and even if it’s not ideal, it’s something useful for those dog owners who would have difficulty spending hundreds of dollars on surprise vet bills. Some vets will tell you not to do it, but in my experience, many vets will recommend way too much medical treatment for dogs, often to the point that it is a waste of money and sometimes even to the point that it harms the dog.

I think “an entire large onion” or “one chocolate bar” are surprisingly large amounts, because my default assumption when something is called poisonous is that any amount is dangerous.

Note that a dog would need to eat a surprisingly large amount of onions, garlic, or chocolate in order to get sick. According to the AKC:

Onion powder is in a surprisingly wide range of foods, from soups to baby food. It only takes 100 grams of onion (about the size of a medium onion) per 20 kilograms of a dog’s weight to cause toxic effects, which means that a 45-pound dog would only have to eat one medium-to-large onion to experience dangerous toxicity levels. Since most dogs would happily devour a bag of unattended onion rings or an onion casserole given the opportunity, this is a serious concern.

Scientific studies have found it takes approximately 15 to 30 grams of garlic per kilogram of body weight to produce harmful changes in a dog’s blood. To put that into perspective, the average clove of supermarket garlic weighs between 3 and 7 grams, so your dog would have to eat a lot to get really sick. However, some dogs are more sensitive to garlic toxicity than others, and consumption of a toxic dose spread out over a few days could also cause problems.

In simpler terms, that means a very concerning dose of chocolate is approximately one ounce of milk chocolate per pound of body weight. Since an average milk chocolate bar may be around 1.55 ounces, consuming even one chocolate bar can have serious consequences, especially for small dogs. Eating a crumb of chocolate cake or a very small piece of a chocolate bar, on the other hand, probably won’t kill your dog, especially if it is a larger breed.

One time my dog ate some chocolate and I was worried until I calculated that a dog his size (and he wasn’t a big dog) would have to eat an entire full-sized bar of dark chocolate before experiencing any symptoms at all. It’s probably best not to give dogs food containing small amounts of onions, garlic, or chocolate just in case, but there’s no need to worry if a dog eats human food containing small amounts of these ingredients.

Insurance company profits are already capped by law. I don’t think your ideal insurance company can possibly be that much better for the customer than the already-available options are.

The companies must spend at least 80 cents of every dollar they collect in premiums from small businesses and individuals on health care, and 85 cents per dollar for large employers. The remaining 15 to 20 percent is all they are allowed under the Affordable Care Act to spend on administrative costs like overhead and marketing and to keep as profit. Any additional revenues are to be returned to consumers in the form of rebates.

Note that the remaining 15 to 20 percent has to cover all the costs of actually running the company. It isn’t just profit.

Furthermore, insurance companies do have to compete with each other on price. Denying a lot of claims helps them offer cheaper policies. Employers who provide insurance want the cheapest policy that their employees will tolerate and healthy people want the cheapest policy that they expect to protect them from sudden, catastrophic expenses. (I’m relatively young and healthy and I have never even seriously considered picking a policy other than the cheapest one whenever I had a choice.)

In this context, if your business plan is to spend more money per customer than the existing insurance companies do, and your target market is people unhappy with their current insurance companies (these people probably have expensive problems) then you’re not going to do too well…

The current era of excess is unprecedented in the history of the world. For most of human history, starvation was a serious threat and hungry people would go anywhere where there was food that wasn’t already claimed by someone stronger than them.

(The people in very cold climates would fight to defend their resources too! Ultimately there was no unclaimed land that people could survive in, except shortly after major catastrophes.)

I don’t see why I would be in any more danger than a native-born American citizen.

1. I don’t expect anything catastrophic to happen so suddenly that I won’t have time to flee.

2. Everyone I know is here, including people who depend on me.

3. I don’t want to learn another language.

4. I feel a lot less connected to the USA than I did before, but I don’t feel more connected to any other country than I do to the USA. The one my family and I came from is a huge mess and I certainly don’t want to return to it.

I’m taking the idea of leaving the country much more seriously than I had before, but it still seems unlikely.

There are two components to this question. Did many in the working class feel that Democrats had abandoned them? And is Trump’s economic policy actually better for the working class than Harris’s? I think the answers are “yes” and “probably no”. However, voters don’t listen to economists. If they’re not happy with the status quo, they vote for disrupting the status quo even if experts tell them that that’s a bad idea.

I suppose Sanders thinks that the working class would have supported a Democratic candidate who proposed a leftward (as opposed to Trump’s rightward) disruption. My guess is that that isn’t true and socialism is still a dirty word in America, but who knows?

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

(I’m not picking a side in the “Are fetuses people?” debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

Heh, I walk around naked with the blinds open because where I live, people would need binoculars to see me and if they choose to, their resulting suffering is their own fault. One advantage of being unattractive…