It is 100% not. You can create a whole lot of misinformation with an image. You cannot do that by visiting a website. To dismiss the concern with “people are having fun” is, at best, a naive idea and, at worst, a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment.
"which anyone can use to do, relatively easily" this is not true at all. Not anyone can use Photoshop, you need to first buy or get the software, then you need to learn how to use it, then work on the images. Whereas now you can just use Grok and immediately create pedophilia. Another deliberately deceitful and malicious comment
oh man I’ll never forget that site. I remember my dad and I trying to find the name of a song to download (Endless summer nights), none of us knew any english at the time, but we loved that song. So he was listening to a recording of that song, we knew the band name but we didn’t know the song name. And by some magnificent chance I was reading the tracks in the AG ui and that part of the track played and I said to my father (in spanish) “that’s the one. download this one”. “you sure?” “yes, do it!”. downloading took so long in our dial up modem, but when we could play the track it was so amazing. the audio quality, no radio voice on top. absolute bliss. thank you
You can touch an animal and it will react to it. Why are you putting language in front of it? Or let’s put it this way, what though you need to think before you feel something is interacting with you body? What you define as consciousness, having a theory of mind or any kind or inner monologue is a very small subset of what consciousness is. And I’m not talking about some pseudo esoteric hippy thing here. I’m talking about what Tomas Nigel was talking about many many years ago https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
Yes. I have high confidence that animals are in fact conscious, in the same way that one can train in meditation and completely (although briefly) shut off the thinking brain, the inner dialog, and still be fully conscious and aware of what’s happening. For me, consciousness is this awareness of all the inputs we are having: visual, tactile, sound, etc. there’s no reason to believe that primates weren’t conscious of what was happening, of their surroundings, sensations, sounds, etc. before language developed.
There is clearly a level of thinking that doesn't involve language. Participating in competitive sports has been a core part of my family, with some competing at elite levels. When you get to a certain level, if language is involved during the most intense moments, you fail because you act too slowly. Some say you are "reacting" or "using muscle memory" or "using intuition", but some very complex behavior comes from this.
To me, it feels a lot like meditation, or being in the flow when writing code, or being immersed in a video game. I don't have the skills to know, but I wouldn't be surprised if elite chess players are doing the same thing. It's also riding a bike or driving a car, and I think it's why we sometimes can't remember if we stopped at that stop sign behind us, but we almost always did. Language is almost always deeply involved in developing these skills, but gets in the way of top performance once the skills are there.
This feels like a higher level of consciousness to me than language-based thinking. And I think there's a good chance it's the same kind of thinking that we see in animals and primates. Our advantage is that we've figured out how to use language to inform that level of thinking / consciousness more deeply and in more domains.
if you appreciate books, you don’t buy them from amazon. that’s been true for a number of years now. of course, if someone is tight on budget and wants to get a book, I wouldn’t go at them for getting the cheapest option available, which in 99% of cases, amazon is. but for people that can afford it? no excuse. I find it to be immoral to buy from amazon. my wife and I have switched years ago: small local libraries > dussmann > amazon
Often local booksellers will have the ability to order pretty much anything in print too. Here in the Netherlands there are only a few exceptions I can't order¹ locally, and even then I can usually find them on the national Amazon alternatives (i.e., Bol.com, which sucks, but isn't nearly as evil as Amazon).
For affordability I would recommend anyone interested in reading to visit secondhand book fairs for the breadth of titles available, and yard/church/jumble sales for the chance finds. Instead of buying a book immediately when you come across a title you like or got recommended, maintain a wishlist spreadsheet and sync that to your smartphone or print it when you go hunting for books. The author of this article follows Umberto Eco's philosophy of book hoarding (as they should, and as I do), so they will have quite the collection to pick from already. Delayed gratification for any desired title is totally compatible with that.
And obviously: if you can't afford local booksellers, join a library — that is way cheaper than Amazon, and better for all concerned.
1: Frustratingly, this includes the mass paperback editions of Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive series.
If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?
They don't have a separate manufacturing process for mom-and-pop bookstores. Amazon do the printing and the logistics but deliver the book to the store instead of to your house so that the store can hand it to you and collect a very small amount of money.
> If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?
Nothing. Local bookstores (not just 'mom-and-pop', but national chains or cooperatives) would tend not to have that title available. Is that a US thing that they would order from Amazon? Printing-on-demand is potentially interesting, but just not a thing for most titles.
I hate that the Internet thought me now to distrust everything. In this case, I have the feeling that the author chose those words carefully to click bait us somehow without actually lying
reply