But as for the pure question of technological achievement, no doubt, it's wildly impressive.

I do think the philosophy of mind questions are important, because the belief that AI can become conscious is in my view crazy mysticism. If that belief becomes widespread, people will be even more inclined to treat AI as a quasi-divine authority, and waste resources protecting its supposed rights.

AI is kind of the ultimate case where nuance is called for. My position has always been that its effects will probably be good on the whole economically, but bad culturally. And I've been skeptical about the magnitude of its macroeconomic impact, but I'm open to revising that position.

It kinda reminds me of the Flagellants who did penance to try to be saved from the Black Death... people going ascetic as a way of coping with the world going to hell. I'm with you, I'll take all the little moments of happiness that I can get.

Nice, lol. Yeah, the reduction in dementia risk is legit. I'm slightly surprised that decaf didn't work though, chlorogenic acid and the other polyphenols in coffee are also good stuff

constrict cerebral blood flow, and some studies have found that it's causally associated with reduced gray matter volume.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

or the early universe, we do know pretty much everything about the physical laws underlying life on earth.

One thing that I do think future generations will probably look back on as superstitious nonsense is the notion of free will.

I think natural science in general and physics in particular is on pretty solid ground. Effective quantum field theory is demonstrably complete with regard to the physical laws that underlie everyday life. So while we don't know everything that there is to know about, say, black holes

3. Star Wars: Visions - Black. Ohira the goat. My favorite works of his are the ones that balance expressionism with realism, but this expressionistic free play of imagination is also clearly in his wheelhouse. Amusingly enough, it turned out like this because he got out-Ohira'd by his own team:

I like that they portrayed the town not just as backwards, but also as beautiful in its own way. The beauty of the choir performance in episode 7 that Yoshiki and Hikaru bail on gives an edge to the pain that Yoshiki feels at not belonging and at having this terrible task to carry out instead.

I assume they're highlighting the remarks now at least in part for geopolitical rather than economic reasons, i.e., as part of their longstanding effort to portray China as the true defender of a more stable international order.

Compare to their stated goal of rebalancing their domestic economy towards consumption. They've made limited progress because they're constrained by deep structural features of their political-economic system.

Mussolini's Italy is one of the few regimes I can think of where (b) was satisfied, but (a) was not satisfied in that case.

Those criteria would classify Nazi Germany as not fascist, because both (a) and (b) were not satisfied at the time. And it's not even clear that they would classify *any* regime as fascist.

Takopi's perspective initially comes off as gratingly naive, but it turns out that recognizing that you're not the only one who's suffering may not solve your problems, but it can be the key to making things less bad.

Also amazed that the show actually managed to sell the thesis that talking things out is the answer to these problems (being vague to avoid spoilers).

Loved the immersive layouts, the beautiful draftsmanship, the rough line art conveying the ragged and worn-down state of the characters, the POV shots emphasizing the partiality of individual characters' perspectives, and the perfect choice of symbols, like Naoki's pancakes.

I have found that discussions on blogs tend towards a different atmosphere than on microblogging websites. Back in the early years of Twitter, the standard critique was that the character limit impoverished people's quality of thought. That critique kinda faded over time, but maybe it was right.

So, as an empirical matter, a rise in atheism would likely make the US at least more liberal.