jsomae

My support for abortion is grounded in my belief that zygotes don't have souls. I don't know if I would support abortion in general without believing this. Here are some things you can try, assuming that you're talking with a rational person:

• Zygotes don't have a nervous system, the house of the soul, at all; so they can't have a soul. Even longer until they have brain activity.
• Even their brain activity and complexity is nothing compared to that of, say, a chicken. So if you're fine with eating chicken, you should be fine with abortions.
• If you were in a burning building, and only had time to save one, which would you save? (a) a crying 5-year old, or (b) a thousand fertilized embryos on a tray.

that would be debating these "chuclefucks"

criminalizes abortions only after a fetus can survive outside the womb

Out of curiosity, when is this? Like 7 months? I'd say this is pretty decent, hardly anyone gets an abortion past 7 months anyway.

fair enough, my habit is to go for relatively neutral words such as "dislike" to encapsulate a broader spectrum of people.

Fun fact: everyone who didn't vote for Hitler made it through the war with a 100% clean conscience, and did not regret any other inactions. /s

It's not brute-force to a better algorithm per se. It's the same algorithm, exactly as "stupid," just with more force (more numerous and powerful GPUs) running it.

Three are benchmarks to check if the model is "good" -- for instance, how well the model does on standardized tests similar to SATs (researchers are very careful to ensure that the questions do not appear on the internet anywhere, so that the model can't just memorize the answers.)

I think a different way to look at what you've brought up in the second paragraph is that people are angry and talking about the power usage because the dislike AI, not the other way around. It doesn't really make sense for people to be angry about the power usage of AI if the power usage had no environmental impact.

I think you're just being an ignorant fool. People are closeted and hate themselves because there is no choice to not be LGBT. Do you disagree with this? Do you think it's a choice? Newsflash: it's not.

Something can be both not a choice and not genetic.

No. I'm not aware of any evidence that one is born with the propensity to be LGBT. It's well-known that it's not a choice, but that is not the same as saying that you're genetically predetermined to be LGBT. Twin studies disprove that.

My understanding is that the current prevailing belief among psychologists is that sexual orientation develops during adolescence, and is either random or influenced in some way by one's sexual exposure, but not necessarily in any obviously deterministic way.

Any direct, unqualified statement of, "you are born different" is directly and completely wrong.

The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency.

This is what AI researchers/pundits believed until roughly 2020, when it was discovered you could brute force your way to have more advanced AIs (so-called "scaling laws") just by massively scaling up existing algorithms. That's essentially what tech companies have been doing ever since. Nobody knows what the limit on this is going to be, but as far as I know nobody has any good evidence to suggest that we're near the limit of what's going to be possible with scaling.

We’re also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.

Quantum computing is not faster than regular computers. Quantum computing has efficiency advantages for some particular algorithms, such as breaking certain types of encryption. As far as I'm aware, nobody is really looking to replace computers with quantum computers in general. Even if they did, I don't think anyone has thought of a way to accelerate AI using quantum computing. Even if there were a way to, it would presumably require quantum computers like, 15 orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we have today.

We have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing.

Yeah. I don't think AI is really at the highest level of concern for environmental impact, especially since it is looking plausible it will lead to investing in nuclear power, which would be a net positive IMO. (Coolant could still be an issue though.)

Did you not notice I said "otherwise"?

Regardless, terrorist is a subjective term, and typically one excludes agencies with jurisdiction or organized militia; so the police, ICE, U.S. military, IDF, etc. don't qualify regardless of your disposition toward them. This is why newspapers are usually quite hesitant to use the word "terrorist." There's a good case for calling the CIA (and other foreign-intelligence TLAs) terrorists though, since they operate outside of places where they have the authority to do so. Obviously, it's semantics at the end of the day.

I agree with every part of this except for the word "most likely," since the incidence of ICE arrests are extremely high right now but terrorism is otherwise not.