That remaining 1% are then actually the most advanced species, since they can continue their billion year existence through a blip of a couple thousand years when the environment became a bit more radioactive. We're so fragile that we're effectively biologically unstable, they're so advanced that they don't even need to know what happened.
It's not our capacity that matters but our actual behavior. Sure, we could cause even greater mass extinction. But will we choose preservation over suicide? That matters in evaluating our role in the hierarchy of life
So you rail against "advanced" as a meaningless concept and then start talking about the "hierarchy of life". How does one rank life on this hierarchy?
I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)
Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.
I got prompted to try it out on the web. It gave me this after 5 minutes:
"I wasn’t able to finish creating the new base homepage module template and updating every module to inherit from it within the available time. I did not make any changes or commits."
Told it to get back to work. Let's see how that goes.
Millions of years of evolution have clearly equipped our brain with some kind of structure (or "inductive bias") that makes it possible for us to actively build a deep understanding for our world... In the context of AI I think this translates more to representations and architecture than it does with training data.
Because genes don't encode the millions of years of experience from ancestors, despite how interesting that is in say the Dune Universe (with help of the spice melange). My understanding is genes don't even specifically encode for the exact structure of the brain. It's more of a recipe that gets generated than a blue print, with young brains doing a lot of pruning as they start experiencing the world. It's a malleable architecture that self-adjusts as needed.
Not sure about this specific theory, but I imagine it's similar to Wolfram's Digital Physics project, where you have "ticks" that apply the rules to eems, and then out of the maze of rule applications we somehow get time as we perceive it.
I am willing to grant that time is indeed an illusion b/c we do not have perfect perception of reality but it seems like all these new developments are squirreling time away into another part of the theory by calling it something else like "dynamics", "rule application", "evolution", etc. The physically relevant relations happen one way or another & whatever they're calling the deltas between the new primitive states & their evolution is still referring to some coordinate (whether implicit or not) that is essentially the same thing as time.
Moreover, it's pretty obvious that when they're describing the theory they can not avoid evoking temporal language & metaphors so it's difficult to take them seriously when even they can't avoid describing what's going on w/o referring to time.
My naive way to think about a reality without time is that all the possibile states of reality are already there, all together. The rules are about how to move from one state to another one, like water flowing on the side of a mountain.
Those rules might be be deterministic or there may be a roll of a dice. Then what we perceive as time is the sequence of states, the memory of previous states. No ticks are needed: there might be no central clock like in CPUs, each part of reality might apply those rules continously and move the global state from one state to another one.
But this is not physics as we are doing it now, it's presocratic philosophy. They got the idea of atoms right among a number of ones that turned on wrong.
There's no motion in what you've described. You're describing a crystal or maybe a hologram. David Bohm is the main physicist I know about who has written on this topic but I'm sure there are a few others by now as well who are taking holographic principles seriously.
at a macroscopic level obviously what they describe must look like "time" to match what we see
but time ticking because of some dynamic interaction mechanism between some things (like a mechanical clock) is very different than some fundamental/abstract/irreducible "time" which just is (like in einstein)
I'm not a physicist either but this stuff isn't magic. Most of the mathematics used by physicists isn't complicated if you've managed to get past calculus.
Algebraic geometry isn't any more complicated than multi-variable calculus. It's certainly more abstract but you get used to it after a while. Schemes¹ are not difficult to learn if you know basic commutative algebra & topology. If you don't know basic commutative algebra then you'll have a tougher time but it's again something that can be learned w/ enough practice & patience.
If you read a lot of analytical philosophy & meta-mathematics literature you'll notice it's not unique at all. That's how I learned the short-hand conventions.
There's some research that shows that LLMs finetuned to write malicious code (with security vulnerabilities) also becomes more malicious (including claiming that Hitler is a role model).
So it's entirely possible that training in one area (eg: Reddit discourse) might influence other areas (such as PRs)
Did you ever go and eat a bag of pure sugar? Or rather a bag of sweets, which usually contain other stuff, not just sugar.
We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.
Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).
Thats my philosophy too. If you're full, you have no cravings at all. I have zero sugar cravings unless im really hungry, at which point real food is still the better option. Focusing on what you Should eat (nuts, berries, greens, etc) is much more rewarding than obsessing over what not to eat.
> We're not addicted to sugar, (...) Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings".
Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.
I think this might be an issue that’s independent of sugar. Something something dopamine and serotonin. I also do not have issues with sugary foods, but I did in the past when my life was more stressful.
Look down the cart of your fellow shoppers the next time you go to the super market. Odds are some of them will have only huge bottles of sugar drink, sugar cereals and cookies.
> You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.
Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.
It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.
Now take pure sugar, add a dash of mint essence and a little oil, dissolve in hot water then dry in a warm oven. Kendal mint cake.
Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.
Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.
You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.
The difference you’re tasting is primarily flavoring, not sugar density, so that’s not a great test. People can’t really tell the difference by taste between hard candy made of pure sugar and hard candy made of sugar plus cornstarch, especially when other flavors are added. But anyway, candy generally tastes insanely sweet and sugary to me. What is the point here? The fact that candy is mostly sugar and people say so predates TikTok by a bit… centuries? Isn’t candy defined as anything sweet where sugar is the primary ingredient?
By the time you're saying that most of what everyone eats is nothing but sugar, you've taken things too far. Grain isn't sugar.
(I'm really curious what the rest of the bread is. The nutrition facts note 4g of protein, but that leaves 12 grams, or 32% of the bread (!) unaccounted for.)
Ah yes I you're right, I was reading too quickly and read the carbs as sugar. That said having candies that are like 60-70% sugar is basically sugar in my book, especially since the rest is corn syrup.
(Serving size: 15g, of which sugar: 14g. These numbers are rounded pretty badly. Compare https://crdms.images.consumerreports.org/f_auto,w_600/prod/p... , in which 2.5g of "total fat" break down into 0.5g of polyunsaturated fat, 1g of monounsaturated fat, 0g of saturated fat, and 0g of trans fat.)
A sister product, Runts, reports 13g of sugar in a 15g serving size. Spree appears to be the same thing as Runts, but in a disc shape instead of a stylized fruit shape.
Skittles are 75% sugar at 21g per 28g serving size. They have to be soft and chewy, which I assume explains the difference.
Some other chewy candies:
Sour Patch Kids report 80% sugar (24g / 30g).
Swedish Fish report 77% sugar.
Going back to the "it's just sugar" candies, Necco wafers report that one 57g roll contains 56g of carbohydrates, of which 53g are sugar.
> especially since the rest is corn syrup.
Huh, you might be on to something. Karo corn syrup doesn't appear to report its amount by weight. But its nutrition facts report that every 30 mL of syrup contain 30g of carbohydrates, of which 10g are sugar. So corn syrup will drive a wedge between reported "carbohydrates" and reported "sugar".
Hence my tiredness of that soundbite, because it's almost never actually true. But I guess it depends on if you see "60% of contents is sugar" as "pure sugar with food coloring" or not, at least for me it's a difference but I understand for others it's basically the same.
There is a difference between 60% sugar and 100% sugar. Why is the difference between pure sugar and Jolly Ranchers meaningful to you? Is there a different outcome or recommendation? It’d certainly help to explain what difference you see and how that difference impacts your choices, rather than state that once exists without elaborating.
So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...
@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?
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