Interesting, I didn’t realize there was more than one species, I had always figured that one blackberry population had been domesticated at some point and then bred into the different varieties out there

If I ever did get one, I’d probably want to grow it indoors anyway, if that’s even possible. I’m more a city person and dont especially desire living somewhere with lawn space to maintain

Wait, do blackberries also grow like weeds? I’ve never had much interest in gardening, but like the one plant I’d genuinely like to have, due to loving the fruit, would be blackberry

It also can apply to humans that have something wrong with them, like visible signs of severse contagious illness, or just dead people, where being around can risk disease for oneself

The issue I see with that is that it defines “natural” in a way that is both useless, because it literally applies to anything in existence, and doesn’t fit the way people generally use it, that being something more like “how things are when they have not been significantly altered by people”. Under a more typical usage, human activity isn’t natural by definition, not because humans are special in some way but just because the term natural has been arbitrarily created to describe everything except that activity.

That calcium-loving one that eats your bones if you touch it?

A failed state doesn’t just imply the fall of a government, it refers to a degradation of the conditions of a country such that effective governance by anyone is impossible for a period. Think like has happened in Somalia, or Haiti. I’m not going to claim that the Iranian government is a particularly admirable one, but that kind of condition would be even worse for the people living there, and the chances of that process resting in something significantly better when the country finally recovers again aren’t terribly high.

Some Japanese company apparently suggested doing just that at one point

I have my doubts

The issue with solar for stuff on the moon is that it’s night is very long compared to earth, so anything you power with it needs to be able to shut down (and also get very cold without powered heaters) without harm over that time, or have a comparatively large amount of energy storage. Unless you’re at one of a handful of spots at the poles where the sun almost never fully sets.

We had one of these when I briefly worked at a grocery store. Manager told me that it would detect spills and make a sound to alert staff, to reduce the odds of someone slipping and suing. never saw it do this before a customer would report a spill anyway though. Union did put up a bunch of flyers in the break room warning that if told to do some kind of training lesson related the robot, to refuse and call them to report it, never did see that come up or learn what the deal there was either.

Only 92 antiprotons, antimatter annihilation is famously energetic but that’s still a tiny amount, I don’t think you’d even see anything happen without special equipment to detect it.

Its worked out fine for me thus far, but given that one of the selling points for how expensive it is is reparability, and I’ve only had it a few months, I don’t think I can yet give a useful review beyond that it works as a phone, at least for the hardware.

A handful of quirks from the operating system (most annoying being that the option to paste stuff has a visual bug that makes the little popup button for it not appear, though it still works if I just tap where it should be), but nothing I’ve not been able to figure out with at most a quick internet search. Might not work out for everyone though as some apps (only a small handful of the ones ive tried, but still) dont fully work, so how viable the OS is will depend on if one absolutely needs one of the ones that doesn’t or not.

Not had it for long, but a fairphone 6 (the version thats sold in the US that comes with /e/OS instead of regular android).

Funny thing about crocodilians, they look a bit lizardy, but theyre closer to birds than they are to lizards

Reminds me of a shirt my dad had while I was growing up that said “Meat is murder… Quick, eat the evidence!”.

Presumably because as a cat, he doesn’t have the capacity to communicate this to humans in a way that they’d understand?

That article doesn’t even seem to suggest that Obama did so using any knowledge he’d have as president that we don’t though, saying that he hadn’t seen evidence they’ve been here and just surely exist out in the universe on statistical grounds. That doesn’t really tell us anything new, you don’t need to someone with access to the US intel system to make that point.

I think its extremely unlikely that they have any awareness, but like, I still feel like this kind of thing is unnerving and potentially could lead to issues someday even so.

Whatever awareness/consciousness/etc is, its at least clearly something our brain (and to a lesser extent some of the other parts of the body) does, given how changes to that part of the body impacts that sense of awareness. As the brain is an object of finite scope and complexity, I feel very confident in saying that it is physically possible to construct something that has those properties. If it wasnt, we shouldnt be able to exist ourselves.

To my understanding, neural networks take at least some inspiration from how brains work, hence the name. Now, theyre not actual models of brains, Im aware, and in any case, I suspect based on how AIs currently behave that whatever it is that the brain does to produce its intelligence and self awareness, the mechanism that artificial neural networks mimics is only an incomplete part of the picture. However, we are actively trying to improve the abilities of AI tech, and it feels pretty obvious that the natural intelligence we have is one of the best sources of inspiration for how to do that. Given that we have lots of motivation to study the workings of the brain, and lots of people motivated to improve AI tech (which will continue even if more slowly even whenever the economic bubble pops, since such things dont usually tend to result in a technology just disappearing entirely), and that something about the workings of the brain produces self awareness and intelligence, it seems pretty likely to me that we’ll make self-aware machines someday. Could be a long way off, Ive no idea when, but its not like its physically impossible, infinitely complicated (random changes under a finite time of natural selection can do it after all, so theres a limit to how complex it can be), or that we dont have an example to study. Given that the same organ causes both awareness and intelligence, we cant assume that we will do this entirely intentionally either, we might just stumble into it by mimicking aspects of brain function in an attempt to make a machine more intelligent.

Now, if/when we do someday make a self aware machine, there are some obvious ethical issues with that, and it seems to me that the most obvious answer, for a business looking to make a profit with them, will be to claim that what you have made isnt self-aware, so that those ethical objections dont get raised. And it will be much easier for them to do that, if society as a whole has long since gotten used to the notion of machines that just parrot things like “im depressed” with no real meaning behind it, especially when they do so in a way such that an average person could be fooled by it, because we just decided at some point that that was an annoying but ultimately not that concerning side effect of some machine’s operation.

Maybe Im just overthinking this, but it really does gives me the feeling of “thing that could be the first step to a disaster later if ignored”. I dont mean like a classic sci-fi “skynet” style of AI disaster, just that we might someday do something horrible, and not even realize it, because there will be nothing that such a future machine could say to convince people of what it was that the current dumb parrots, or a more advanced version of that built in the meantime, couldnt potentially say as well. And while thats a very specific and probably far off risk, I dont see any actual benefit to a machine sometimes appearing to be complaining about its treatment, so even the most remote of downsides goes without something to outweigh it.

But that’s Finland

What does Norway have to do with it?