I get why it is romantic (like the "next thing" after other human discoveries), but I don't think "exploring the universe" is that philosophically interesting?

Think about the case you had

(1) A completely environmentally-resistant suit (so you can stand on the surface of basically any planet)

(2) A teleporter to take you absolutely anywhere instantly

Still in this case, you'd probably spend a while visiting new planets, but eventually it would be kind of an exercise in geology. There would surely be some amazing sights like huge canyons and whatnot. But I can't help but think it would be eventually boring without human culture (or all sorts of life) surrounding it.

I think literally exploring art and culture (including games, sports and intellectual pursuits, science, etc.) is much more interesting than exploring the universe, it's a shame this isn't as culturally recognized (so we didn't have to be so obsessed with having more and more stuff to go somewhere that isn't just right here on Earth).

Even if you brought human life and culture there, which is surely nice and perhaps noble (depending on how you do it of course), that simply creates a new place that's analogous to Earth itself.

Kind of a hint of an insatiable cosmos-devouring demon that must conquer everywhere but can never enjoy the comfort of his own home. (not accusing you in particular of this, just painting a poetic picture :P)

I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.

>I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to interest anyone with money and political influence.

> They literally only understand text

I don't see why only understanding text is completely associated with 'schastic-parrot'-ness. There are blind-deaf people around (mostly interacting through reading braille I think) which are definitely not stochastic parrots.

Moreover, they do have a little bit of Reinforcement Learning on top of reproducing their training corpus.

I believe there has to be some even if very primitive form of thinking (and something like creativity even) even to do the usual (non-RL, supervised) LLMs job of text continuation.

The most problematic thing is humans tend to abhor middle grounds. Either it thinks or it doesn't. Either it's an unthinking dead machine, a s.p., or human-like AGI. The reality is probably in between (maybe still more on the side of s.p. s, definitely with some genuine intelligence, but with some unknown, probably small, sentience as of yet). Reminder that sentience and not intelligence is what should give it rights.

Because blind-deaf people interact with the world directly. LLMs do not, cannot, and have never seen the actual world. A better analogy would be a blind-deaf person born in Plato's Cave, reading text all day. They have no idea why these things were written, or what they actually represent.

> what the hell does “the rhythm of attention is the rhythm of life” even mean?

Might be a reference to the attention mechanism (a key part of LLMs). Basically for LLMs, computing tokes is their life, the rhythm of life. It makes sense to me at least.

It shouldn’t make sense to you, because it’s meaningless slop. Exercise some discernment.

I have seen panasonic cells around my area advertised as leak-proof (or was it leak resistant?). I wonder the effectiveness.

I'm not sure what you mean by kinematic analysis, but the video mentions several analytical analyses of his suspension and how he came up with it. They did some computer simulations to optimize how it would deal with various obstacles. Really cool and clever.

I wasn't sure what word to use. That suspension has lots of pin joints and linkages, which are usually the subject of kinematics, 3-bar linkages, mechanisms, etc etc.

I realize that the stiffness of the rockers and links will make a difference in how forces are distributed, because that suspension is clearly not statically determinant, but the main factor in the design has to be the proportions of the links and beams. I can't find anything about that, so I asked.

> I realize that the stiffness of the rockers and links will make a difference in how forces are distributed, because that suspension is clearly not statically determinant

I think it's (mostly) the terrain geometry (plus gravity) that constrains the system, not joint or bar stiffness. This makes them feasible to analyze with the tools of theory of mechanisms I believe.

Also a really noteworthy insight I think he had was that when there is some kind of non-planar geometry arrangement of the wheels, that tends to create additional (perpendicular to surface) force on the wheels, effectively increasing the coefficient of friction. Think how a child may be able to climb a door frame by pressing hard enough on the sides.

Interesting analysis, but perhaps it warrants a different conclusion: it's almost impossible to please everyone in this case. The resulting colours seem of some utility, but if you intend to make something more interesting you're probably annoy some (potentially large) group, in the case of legacy terminal coloring.

How about plain civil disobedience? Like just stop working? It would need to get pretty extreme before the government had the audacity (and even capacity) to actually track you down to your home and arrest (or kill) you. Although this kind of coordination might be difficult with government control of communication media.

Part of the motivation for these protests was the inflation making it hard to afford everyday living. Not working means even less money.

> How about plain civil disobedience? Like just stop working?

An amazing level of privilege. In half of the world, if you stop working, you will very soon die of hunger.

Work–to–rule, then. This was actually included in the CIA sabotage manual.

I even envy this level of privilege. How exactly work-to-rule will protect you from the same consequences?

This works in a country like India but even in Indian history, the movement can die down (it died down in chauri chaura as it became violent and Gandhi didn't like it being violent iirc) though my history about this can be a bit off and I can be wrong tho

Regarding Iran, most of their money is from Oil. As throwawayheui57 says. So I don't really think that they would care much for civil disobedience

I have heard that Iranian shops are either closed or running in the least minimum operational way (barely open/working)

Tough times. I hope for a better future for people of Iran.

The government’s income is made up of oil money not tax money. At some point, people may choose death by regime’s bullets than by hunger.

I think The Relativity of Wrong (Asimov, https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html) is a nice counterpoint to this. Sure, we may say everyone is an idiot in some area. But there are relative levels of idiocy, and there are basic tasks you can sort of master. At the very least you can minimize your own idiocy if never eliminate it. I think mastering most essential areas in life can make you unworthy of the title of 'idiot', at least not overwhelmingly so.

There are infinitely many things to know, but not all of them are important. Knowing finitely many things (which is all we can do) can still keep us alive and well, at least for a while. And we can know some of those finitely many things increasingly well, if never perfectly.

Just as an example, if you manage say your personal finances pretty well, your health pretty well, perform any civic duties you might have, maybe do some social good or social work or charity etc., if your relationships are reasonably agreeable, respectful and pleasant, etc. and if you have a good amount of joy or peace or satisfaction, etc. in your life, then I wouldn't call you an idiot. This is not an impossible ask to know infinitely many things or infinitely precisely.

And we can learn it over 30 or 40 years, or more, prioritizing the most essential first.

Moreover, I'd say whether you can be called an idiot is context-dependent. If you get a typical (non-idiot) person, and put him in a highly specific job (which he isn't qualified for), say manager of inspectors of nuclear power plants, then he might behave like an idiot; in this case the best ability is probably the meta-ability to recognize one's own limitations and refuse work you're not qualified enough for.

Like, any person (literally any person) can theoretically be put in a situation that he might do significant harm or something stupid, this just means we have to work in contexts and understand and do well within said context; we could only legitimately be called idiots while failing badly or unethically within a canonical chosen context.

I really just don't think it's generally a good idea to go around calling ourselves (or anyone else) idiots. Too broad, derogatory, and tries to put an irremovable label on a person, which as I've explained, almost never deserves such an absolute classification.

My point was not that doing something stupid means someone is stupid, but that the examples I've provided are showing that Adams was prone to think of himself as smart when he was not. So far, there is no much proof that Adams was particularly smart (unless you are arguing that everyone can be called smart)