Yeah, I tried disabling my ad blocker to support them, but the page does not show ads even then and complains as if it were still active, and I think it is because I left Privacy Badger on. There is no way I am turning that off, so too bad for them!

Heck, I would even consider subscribing, but it looks like one first needs to create a forum account before one can even see the subscription price‽ What a very weird site…

Link to the original, including the first four panels that were left out.

Huh. Could you explain?

Choosing not to give money to someone you do not know is not quite the same thing as murdering them.

A couple of decades ago I got really confused because I found a lot of papers referring to “comer” cubes, but could not find an actual definition. Eventually I figured out that these were actually “corner” cubes, but somewhere a transcription error occurred that merged the r and n into an m, and this error kept getting propagated because people were just copying and pasting.

This seems like more time and trouble than just writing the code yourself.

(And while the same could often be said of assigning tasks to junior programmers, in that case it is an investment in the person rather than strictly a waste.)

I think that you may have mistaken this community for [email protected].

What he does not mention is that the three types of courses will all follow the same template, with the specifics not being instantiated until the course is actually being taught.

I’d say Sarah doesn’t know much about cats or is just lazy.

Or maybe it is just a dumb joke?

You can tell that this image did not actually come from God because it is not 640x480x16.

Smugglers would disagree.

“That’s odd, for some reason it keeps showing us pictures of police officers!”

Not really; being as derisive of the authors as that comment was contributed absolutely nothing positive to the conversation.

That entire comment is specifically being derisive of the article authors, so it is calling them “intellectual supremacists”, rather than agreeing with them.

I am fine with someone arguing that maybe the traits we consider to be a sign of intelligence are defined too narrowly–though in this case it is a really weird take because the article authors would clearly completely agree with this sentiment! I am not so fine with them calling the people they disagree with things like “intellectual supremacists”.

That is a really dumb response to an article whose whole point was to argue that we have been thinking too narrowly about intelligence.

Yeah, that guy’s arm must have gotten really tired holding that pose long enough for the artist to finish!

The article does not use the term.

I’ll be honest and say that I did not read the article that closely because it was kind of dumb.

I’ll need a source for that.

Quantum coherence is a real thing; “quantum activity” is not, except insofar as it is a very sloppy sort of shorthand for referring to quantum coherence existing at a macroscopic scale. (Put another way: my explanation of what was meant by this term was being incredibly charitable by presuming this was a good term to be using at all.)

If you look closely enough, everything is “quantum”. Something being “quantum” is simply a matter of not being able to get away with using a simplification. I don’t really see why that would matter.

Because macroscopic systems where you cannot get away with making this simplification exhibit really cool behaviors that can be exploited; superconductors are one such example, and quantum computers are (potentially) another.

That this question has nothing to do with consciousness is obvious.

I agree completely that it is not likely to be either necessary or sufficient for the brain to be a quantum computer to explain consciousness.

I agree that the article exhibits unmerited grandiosity, but, having said that, “quantum activity” is a real thing insofar as it is a shorthand for quantum coherence extending to a (relatively) macroscopic scale. However, it is really difficult for quantum coherence to exist at such a scale, especially at room temperature, so there is a high burden of evidence that I do not see as having been met to be considered “confirmed”.

Additionally, although there are efficiencies that life may be able to take advantage of if it can exploit quantum effects, I am not convinced at all that these efficiencies need to be used for life or consciousness to be able to exist. This actually goes along with your underlying point, which is that it is not clear that we need fancy mechanisms as a sort of magic touch to explain all of these things.

No, XML is already a punishment.