> I frequently see people underestimate the danger of LLMs to humanity in the long term

My experience with people making claims about the inherent danger has been along the lines of this later quote:

> this is presented self-evidently, no one ever feels the need to back this up

Your comment reminded me of an old short story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

”Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.” This article is more than 1 month old ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets; Guardian, 2 Apr 2024

> Practically, I don't think Jews really had another place to go - remember, most of the Jews of Israel were either fleeing Europe before the Holocaust, or were the survivors of the Holocaust, or were ethnically cleansed from surrounding Arab countries. It's not like they had anywhere else to go.

Not true. One proposal was the Kimberly plan, which received strong push back from proponents of Zionism that simply refused to settle for anything less than Palestine. Theresa very real case to be made that had there been stronger support from Jewish community as a whole that this may well have actually ended up being the outcome.

> This is very wrong. For one thing, you're ignoring the 20% of Israelis that are Arabs/Palestinians, but I'll assume you meant the Jewish ones. There has been continuous Jewish habitation of Palestine for literally 2,000, since the Jews were forced out

Not the person you're responding to, but personally I'd say that's largely irrelevant. Any perceived connection to a land that anyone has is something learnt from cultural context. There's nothing that empirically literary connects people to an arbitrarily divided portion of land. Countries are an abstractional fiction. Religions and cultures build stories upon these abstractions with varying levels of historic accuracy. Through exposure to these stories people develop a perceived connection with essentially no direct physical basis in reality. More succinctly - a person's perceived connection to the land depends almost entirely upon their exposure to certain cultural stories.

A small portion of the perceived connection to an area is obviously related to literal experience and exposure to said area. The fact that the is often mentally tied to back to an abstraction like a "country" implies that these experiences are secondary to the broader cultural stories.

In terms of immediate (non-cultural) connection, it seems pretty accurate to say that immigration and conflict is going to be a significant factor for everyone currently in Israel. Be they the descendants of immigrants, direct immigrants, or the descendants of people historically living in that area (having ancestors that lived there doesn't historically doesn't preclude them or their parents from being impacted by the creation of modern day Israel)

> Theresa very real case to be made that had there been stronger support from Jewish community as a whole that this may well have actually ended up being the outcome.

Maybe. I honestly don't know enough to say one way or the other, though I do know enough to say that most countries closed their doors to Jews during the Holocaust specifically, and I'd be rather astounded to discover a country that was willing to absorb millions of new people. E.g. I don't know anything about the Kimberly plan except reading Wikipedia just now, but it seems like it was vetoed by the Australian government? Ironically, there are signs from European countries in the 1930s telling the Jews to "go back to Palestine".

> Through exposure to these stories people develop a perceived connection with essentially no direct physical basis in reality. More succinctly - a person's perceived connection to the land depends almost entirely upon their exposure to certain cultural stories.

Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask, but I couldn't care less about this specific land itself. I wouldn't have minded Israel being located somewhere else.

I do live here though, that's my connection to the land, as well as the connection that 9m other Israelis have to the land. We're not going anywhere.

(And neither are the Palestinians! If both sides just accepted the obvious reality that neither side is going to disappear, we could just divide up the land and sign a peace treaty already.)

> Be they the descendants of immigrants, direct immigrants, or the descendants of people historically living in that area

But, if I'm understanding you correctly... that's true of literally everyone everywhere. Everyone is a descendent of someone who at some point came to that land, and in many cases that's even fairly recent. Including many (though not all) Palestinians.

I vaguely recall hearing something similar, with the reasoning being that there was a fear of future hostility enabled by Emperor driven fanaticism. That said, I've also heard that there wasn't really enough time given for a response after the first bomb, and that it was largely a political move to claim they'd offered an initial surrender - and that the goal was always to drop two bombs, partly because they wanted to test out different aspects of their designs.

Asbestos has been completely banned in Australia since 2003.

Australia also probably has some of the worst deployments of asbestos in the developed world. Drive around even nice neighborhoods in Sydney and you’ll see plenty of cracking and breaking “fibro”, a cement asbestos sheet. Canberra is full of asbestos. They had to completely remove an asbestos mining town (Wittenoom) from the map because it was so contaminated.

There is a ton of asbestos currently in Australian households. Plenty of aussies drink water collected in tanks off of asbestos cement roofs.

Yes - unfortunately we have a lot of leftover usages of asbestos.

Historically, it was used a lot. My father even remembers playing around in the bush as a kid, and using asbestos for chalk a bunch of time to mark stuff on trees. My friends dad also remembers coming home covered in asbestos after work a bunch of times too.

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment about seeing asbestos in nice neighbourhoods. It depends how you define nice.

Asbestos was banned in 2003,but hasn't been used in housing since the 80s, so it's only going to be in older developments that you'll really encounter it.

Your wording regarding "plenty of Aussies" is also unclear to me. The numbers as a percentage are going to be very low, but it undoubtedly is a thing.

I was visiting a relative in their $3M+ house in Bronte and saw plenty of it. Not in the front facades of the homes, but drive through the back alleys, and you can spot some in < 1 min. I remember an uncle there who's neighbor had a fibro cement mail box which was built into some stone work.

I agree my usage of "plenty" was more in absolute terms. It is probably thousands to tens of thousands, which is small in percentage terms. I also spent a lot of time on Australian farms, and they have lots of asbestos sheets buried in places. Most farmers would rather pile it up or bury it then pay the costs of having it removed properly.

Not the person you asked, but the initial point was taking that idea to the extreme. The concept of "one thing" in the NAND case is more extreme (in terms of granularity). No need to be sorry, it's ok.

Right, the person I asked is claiming that NAND is two things. You appear to have responded as if you disagree with my comment while not actually disagreeing with any part of it.

What did you think I meant by this question?

>> In what conceivable sense is "doing a logical and" one thing while "doing a logical nand" isn't?

Sorry, I will try to make it more clear.

NAND is more complex than AND, in the sense that it is more expressive than AND (having functional completeness which AND does not).

Similarly, it can be built from other less complex operators (AND and NAND).

If you're taking "One thing" to the extreme, in terms of the granularity or complexity of that "one thing", NAND is not as granular or simple as AND - and therefore isn't taking it to as far "to the extreme".

What's the argument that AND is less complex than NAND? It's true that NAND has completeness and AND doesn't, but so what? What you can build from something is not a measure of how complex it is. You measure complexity in terms of what it takes to describe something.

You have to justify why you've chosen the particular starting point. NAND isn't defined as being "first you do AND, and then you negate it". It's defined like this:

    +---+---+-------+
    | a | b | a ↑ b |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 0 | 0 |   1   |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 0 | 1 |   1   |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 1 | 0 |   1   |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 1 | 1 |   0   |
    +---+---+-------+

AND is defined like this:

    +---+---+-------+
    | a | b | a & b |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 0 | 0 |   0   |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 0 | 1 |   0   |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 1 | 0 |   0   |
    +---+---+-------+
    | 1 | 1 |   1   |
    +---+---+-------+

You may notice that they are almost exactly the same.

> It seems naively obvious to me that a(b(x)) is more complex than b(x).

This is just obvious gibberish; if you define b(x, y) = x & y and a(x) = ~x, then you can say "I think a(b(x, y)) looks more complex than b(x, y)", but how do you respond to "when c(x, y) = x ↑ y, I think c(c(x,y), c(x,y)) looks more complex than c(x,y)"? The two claims can't both be true!

Everything, no matter how simple, can be described as the end of an arbitrarily long chain of functions. So what?

I think the background noise the old guy has to listen to (I can kind of see it relating to brown noise)