Iconoclast

Population decline is going to be a massive problem in the not too far future yet hardly anyone is talking about it.

LLMs are AI - always have been. The term “artificial intelligence” has always been broad in computer science: it covers anything that performs a cognitive task normally requiring human intelligence. A chess engine from 1999 is AI. A spam filter is AI. An LLM is AI. Narrow AI, sure, but still AI.

The confusion comes from people equating “AI” with sci-fi AGI (human-level general intelligence, HAL/JARVIS/Skynet/etc.). That’s a specific subset, not the whole category. When companies say “AI-powered” they’re not claiming AGI - they’re saying the product uses machine learning or pattern recognition in some way. Marketing inflates the language, yes, but the underlying tech is real and fits the definition.

If/when we reach actual AGI, it will be a civilization-level shift - far beyond today’s spell-checker-that-sometimes-hallucinates. People will look back and say “we had AI for years,” but they’ll mean narrow tools, not the thing that can invent new science or run a company autonomously. The goalposts aren’t moving; the hype is just using the broad term loosely.

"Don't recommend this channel" feature exists and works.

There are multiple ways to be "unconscious." Head trauma, sleep, general anesthesia, fainting, coma - for example.

The experience varies wildly: from absolute nothing under general anesthesia to extremely vivid stuff during sleep.

This is one of the things LLMs are actually pretty good at. Just don't blindly trust its output.

It’s not dependent on constant software updates.

I bet every modern fighter jet is. "Dependent" might not be the best word, but if you can make your existing jet better just by optimizing the software, then of course they should.

It's probably true to say that F-35 is objectively better than a Gripen, but it's way more expensive too. More Gripens might actually be better than fewer F-35s. My understanding is they're more focused on electronic warfare.

Even broke the warranty seal over the USB port.

Firstly, it's not just about the price of the drones being shot down - it's also about the price of whatever they were going to hit if you didn't stop them.

And secondly, that's entirely beside the point anyway. The Dutch need stealth fighters just as much as anyone else would.

I partly agree and partly don't.

Plumbing as a field is way broader than installing drywall, and there's a ton to learn. No single plumbing task is really harder than hanging drywall (except maybe welding), but doing all the drywall in an entire building is a hell of a lot easier than doing all the plumbing for it.

Well I'm plumber by training so this finally confirms the belief I've had about myself all along!

The interesting thing about general anesthesia is that it's quite unlike dreaming. It's like you're just instantly teleported into another place and time without any sense of time having passed in between. You were effectively dead for a few hours from everyone else's perspective, but for you there was no gap at all. It's not like there's a blank section in the film - rather like someone entirely cut out that part and you just jumped instantly to the next act.

I can't help but wonder if something similar happens when you actually die. By definition you cannot experience being dead, so what if your consciousness just jumps over the being-dead part and continues from whatever is next? Even if there's a million-year-long queue before you get to respawn, that would still happen instantly from your subjective experience. Perhaps death is only for your physical body, but your consciousness can only continue to have experiences wherever there are experiences to be had.

I think this idea is called quantum immortality.

I think the consciousness they're talking about here is the subjective sense of something happening - that it feels like something to be. The fact of experience itself. Unconsciousness in the medical sense doesn't necessarily mean the end of experience.