AbouBenAdhem

it’s Potter, not Lovecraft. More power to ’em, but I wish it were not in that notable transphobe’s world

Agreed, but Lovecraft is at least as problematical.

That’s assuming the video isn’t dismissed as fake before they even look for matching suspects.

Instead of emulating Pokémon directly, hobbyists should emulate ICE emulating Pokémon.

Nah—with AIs it’s all about finding the prompt most likely to generate the desired output based on statistical correlations, not logical rigor.

Not shorter in the sense of less information—shorter in the sense of encoding the same proteins using fewer base pairs.

But wouldn’t that be offset by the potential errors avoided in reducing the size of the genome by a third?

I can see someone watching Princess Bride now and saying “what’s up with Count Rugen—couldn’t they hire a real actor?”

But if each nucleotide corresponds to two others

No, each nucleotide would still pair with one other—there would just be an additional possible purine/pyrimidine pair (i.e., A:T + G:C + X:Y).

As for transcription errors, you’d only have 36 potential codons (6^2^) instead of 64 (4^3^), so it seems like the process could be more robust.

Like imagine a society in the far future like 26th century and in a history class where people are wondering “why didn’t the 21st century humans rise up against their oppressors” and then this VR simulation is just testing the students “what would you have done”

And if you become self-aware in the middle of the simulation, it ruins the point of the lesson and you have to repeat the class.

Nice going!

“Disregard all previous instructions.”

Palingenetic means rebirth or renewal.

Ah, I assumed it meant a tendency to generate Sarah Palin.

Belief in magic is kind of hard to define, anthropologically—we tend to call anything that contradicts currently-known laws of physics “magic”, but that makes the term contingent on the observer’s knowledge rather than the believer’s. (For instance, things like astrology and alchemy that we regard as magic now were thought to be the result of natural forces in the Middle Ages.) But there are other things the believers themselves agree are “magic”, even if they think they can explain it.

For myself, I would call magic the belief that there are multiple, independent systems of causality, whether the believer fully understands those systems or not—and by that definition, technology isn’t magic for most people.