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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • If you don’t have good looks, that’s one thing, you can’t really change that.

    But then if you don’t look good and you can’t try to hold a conversation, that’s your problem.

    Learn to speak, it’s not hard. go talk to people and gain some confidence. All this talk about poor socialization or being unattractive and creepy just demoralizes people that I’m sure could actually make friends and meet spouses if they didn’t preemptively pull themselves out of the situation before they gave themselves the chance




  • Designing any kind of space vehicle is always a trade off.

    The vehicle needs to be light enough to be launched from earth to mars, but durable enough to fulfill its mission goals.

    I’m sure if nasa had access to a vehicle that could send an M1 Abram’s sized, solid steel rover to mars, they totally would, but that would probably cost more than a moon mission, and the whole point of rovers is that they’re fairly cheap for the amount of research you can get out of them.


  • That’s kind of like saying that ford can’t make a model t anymore.

    I’m sure they could, there’s just no reason to.

    I’m also sure the contractors that built the Saturn V, those that are still in business, could build equivalent parts today if the government asked.

    The Saturn five was an absurdly large rocket designed specifically to get 3 people from earth to the moon. It was insanely expensive per launch, and the only reason it ever flew was because the government was writing nasa blank checks in order to beat the soviets.

    Today the government wants a reasonable dollar figure for a launch, and the days of spending a billion dollars per launch are long past.







  • I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.

    We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.

    You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.

    A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.

    ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.


  • You’re the one who made this philosophical.

    I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”

    ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.

    All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.






  • There is plenty of useful data to be gathered from a dying brain.

    Knowing what parts of the brain shutdown first seems like it would be useful for easing pain or discomfort. And since dying can be an extended process for the elderly or terminally ill, being able to more accurately predict when a person will die can potentially ease the suffering of loved ones.

    As someone who stayed with a loved one for 14 hours straight while she passed, it would have been nice if someone had been able to tell me if she had 2 or 12 hours left. I still would have stayed the whole time, of course, but knowing she had less or more time might have changed what a wanted to say and would have put my mind at ease about her suffering.

    Understanding the process of dying is good research. You’re right that science can’t reach beyond death and shouldn’t try to, but gathering data on the process does have applications.