RickRussell_CA

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Well, the real YSK is that memory and expansion cards have distinctive positions they should take within each slot, with a detente that holds them in place. Your system will only work reliably if the devices are fully seated.

When you first assemble the system, plug and unplug each item several times so you get the feel of it. There will always be a distinct detente when the device is fully seated. It's a lot easier to do this exercise with everything out on the bench, rather than mounted in the case when it will be a stone cold bee-atch to reach in and reseat the parts.

As more and more of our physical world looks the same

The Tyranny of the Algorithm: Why Every Coffee Shop Looks the Same

Nominally, you'd need to go through some request process to request federation with other large instances. Then they'd vet your configuration before adding you.

A

California, actually. Although that's probably worse.

I would proudly stink of back-bacon and maple syrup, if given the opportunity.

What would "discrimination" look like in a reddit-like link sharing service?

I'm not even sure what that word would imply in a discussion forum. It usually applies to things like wages, job opportnities, access, etc.

Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).

How do you prove the results are directly derived

Mathematically? It's a computer algorithm. Its output is deterministic, and both reproducible and traceable.

Give the AI two copies of its training dataset, one with the copyrighted work, one without it. Now give it the same prompt and compare the outputs.

The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

You mention Harry Potter. In Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. v. RDR Books, Warner Brothers lawyers argued that a reference encyclopedia for the Harry Potter literary universe was a derivative work. The court disagreed, on the argument that the human authors of the reference book had to perform significant creative work in extracting, summarizing, indexing and organizing the information from JK Rowling's original works.

I wonder if the court would use the same reasoning to defend the work of an AI?

understanding where consciousness comes from

Again, to be clear, I don't think this is a fundamentally scientific question.

If you show a philosopher how a rose activates the retina and sends signals to the brain, you'll get a response like, "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

If you show a philosopher the retinal signals activate the optical processing capabilities of the brain, you'll get "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

If you show a philosopher how the appearance of a rose consistently activates certain clusters of neurons and glial cells that are always activated when someone sees a rose, you'll get a response "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

Show the philosopher that the same region of the brain is excited when the person smells a rose or reads the word "rose", and they'll say, "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

To the philosopher, they have posed a question about "what it's like to experience a rose", and I suggest that NO answer will satisfy them, because they're not really asking a scientific question. They're looking for, as the SEP puts it, an "intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or 'what it's like' consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain". But, science isn't under any obligation to provide an inituitive, easy-to-understand answer. The assemblage of brain & nerve functions that are fired when a living being experiences a phenomenon are the answer.

But there are absolutely rules on whether Google -- or anything else -- can use that search index to create a product that competes with the original content creators.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

Google indexing of copyrighted works was considered "fair use" only because they only offered a few preview pages associated with each work. Google's web page excerpts and image thumbnails are widely believed to pass fair use under the same concept.

Now, let's say Google wants to integrate the content of multiple copyrighted works into an AI, and then give away or sell access to that AI which can spit out the content (paraphrased, in some capacity) of any copyrighted work it's ever seen. You'll even be able to ask it questions, like "What did Jeff Guin say about David Koresh's religious beliefs in his 2023 book, Waco?" and in all likelihood it will cough up a summary of Mr. Guinn's uniquely discovered research and journalism.

I don't think the legal questions there are settled at all.

Well, it's a "problem" for philosophers. I don't think it's a "problem" for neurology or hard science, that's the only point I was trying to make.