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Almost all mammals have some form of secondary sex characteristic used to attract a mate, caused by hormone differences between the sexes.

Breasts are an example of secondary sex characteristics in humans, much like visible muscles are a secondary sex characteristic in human males, caused by testosterone. You may not find breasts particularly interesting, which is totally cool, but it’s also understandable why many humans do, as secondary sex characteristics are often evolved specifically for that purpose.

Very fitting and fun read, thanks for sharing it!

Alphafold was definitely a better era for intentional AI use, assuming that’s the kind of thing you mean.

After the U.S. has continued intentionally delaying and “misplacing” materiel that EU countries have paid for, this just doesn’t seem like a good idea. I get the impression the U.S. will run away with the money.

One of the many reasons that using centralized exchanges and custodians defeats the purpose of using cryptocurrencies at all.

Provincially the Conservatives are campaigning on privatizing healthcare. They also do not whip votes on abortion rights, and routinely put forward bills to ban it. Some Conservative party members literally met with the U.S admin to ask for support in seceding from Canada.

It may have once been true that a Canadian Conservative would be closer to the Democratic party, but the landscape is changing.

The Liberals are hardly a labour party, I’d say by this metric both of them are backwards.

We already knew many great apes preferred cooked food. That study is specifically about chimps.

I just found it mildly funny that the study was essentially titled “Humans prefer cooked food.”

I had the exact same realization recently when our internet went down for a few days. I have a local LLM on my PC, and used it as a fake Google search, and to help me troubleshoot a couple programs. Not always accurate, but it did feel cool to have basically an internet search on my disconnected computer.

Just finishing up Stranger in a Strange Land, and it’s a slog. Heinlen’s views have gotten harder and harder to ignore, in particular the homophobia gets pretty bad near the end. I have like 80 pages left and am not sure if it’s worth it…

There’s an open question here about best practice, because ultimately shifting labour capacity from humans to machines should be inherently good, if its labour we did not want to be doing. I’d rather have machines capable of doing everything from my laundry to large data analysis, among many other things that don’t interest me.

The problem tends to arise in how the transition happens. If capitalists continue to separate labour from surplus value, it’s entirely possible that the benefits of automation are only experienced by capitalists, and the humans who were producing the labour are left destitute.

Really I would like to see a better regulatory environment mixed with stronger social support systems, so the benefits of automation are felt by everybody. Sometimes it feels like the focus shifts to stopping automation, when in my mind best practice should be to mitigate externalities and spread out the benefits.

Do you mean Substack?

Out of curiosity, could you link to/share your research for us? The open source stuff in particular?

Calling this terrorism is ridiculous. They were trying to get in to a military base which stationed bombers actively used in the ongoing war. Reminds me of the ploughshares movement if it wasn’t sponsored by Iran.

I’m not going to argue against your conclusion, I strongly believe we do not have anything resembling human consciousness in software yet.

But Penrose was definitely not proven right (unless you’re talking about black holes), nor was the Orch OR theory about microtubules proven, nor was consciousness proven to be a quantum phenomenon. Here’s an easy, accessible article that goes over the state of the research: https://www.breezyscroll.com/science/new-quantum-evidence-is-reopening-the-debate-over-penroses-theory-of-consciousness/

Pretty much, yep!

Elo comes from chess, it was used to rank player skill against each other. You basically generate a score by comparing two at a time in head to head matchups.

It’s honestly not the best way to rank books (especially of different genres), but it was fun to goof around with for a bit!

It also creates fewer philosophical problems if you distinguish between countable and uncountable adjectives. Though, I suppose that’s a less philosophical point than you made.

I hung out with my wife, watched some t.v., played some video games, did some gardening, and surfed the internet.

After a long, busy week, it was exactly how I wanted to spend my weekend. I feel rested and recovered.

Fun question!