frog 🐸

I think it’s very much an artefact of religious attitudes at the time science started advancing during the Industrial Revolution, which held up humans as being superior to animals (and also that people before the Industrial Revolution were ignorant and unenlightened). Given that we have legal records from the centuries before that, where animals were held to have legal/moral equivalency to humans (this includes incidences of animals being punished for crimes, of course, but there’s also a case of a court ruling in favour of weevils having rights over a particular field, so the farmer had to let them have it - the record of whether the weevils abided by this agreement was… eaten by weevils), I suspect that back then people were a lot more open to the idea that animals had many of the same capabilities as us. Christianity, especially the “humans have dominion over everything else” strains of it that we’ve had for the last 150 years or so, likely does not reflect the attitude of all humans for the entirety of history - although of course in the past, people didn’t have the scientific knowledge needed to prove it conclusively.

There’s also the risk that the AI might decide that the best way of testing the company’s new product is to unleash it on the general public without any safety testing or thought of the consequences. That would be an absolute disaster.

When AI can sit in a large chair and make money off the backs of others all day

Arguably this is the only thing AI can do. Would AI even exist if not for the huge datasets derived from other people’s hard work? All the money AI will generate is based exclusively off the backs of others.

“Dragon of Ash and Stars” by H. Leighton Dickson is definitely worth a read.

Please learn elementary anatomy and physiology. You don’t have to get a medical degree. High school level knowledge will do.

Or failing that, learn enough critical thinking skills to be able to tell the difference between a reputable source and a wannabe celebrity influencer who will say anything for attention.

I don’t have a huge level of knowledge of anatomy or physiology, but I can tell the NHS website is going to have more accurate and trustworthy information than an attention-seeking influencer.

I would play this campaign.

It’s definitely my dream to one day find a campaign where I can play a character like this.

I read the article. Apparently it only really works with hard water - that’s water with a high concentration of calcium carbonate. At high temperatures, the calcium carbonate becomes a solid, trapping the microplastics inside it, which is then removed from the water with a regular filter.

What about a WYSIWYG editor app like Dreamweaver? I don’t know if there’s any good free ones any more though, now that FrontPage Express is gone.

So weirdly enough, I posted about this earlier today in a different community. My use-case is different to OP’s, so I don’t think any of the options I’m investigating now would suit them, but the long and short of it is free, standalone WYSIWYG editors are really few and far between now.

“Humans have been looking at fingerprints since we existed, but nobody ever noticed this similarity until we had our AI analyze it.”

“Their argument that these shapes are somewhat correlated between fingers has been known from the early start of fingerprinting, when it was done manually, and it has been documented for years. I think they have oversold their paper, by lack of knowledge, in my view. I’m happy that they have rediscovered something known”

Just two quotes, one from the author of the study, the other from a forensics expert. I have to admit, taking these quotes together genuinely makes this kind of funny. Excited student thinks he’s discovered something new and world-changing. Expert goes “yeah, we’ve known about that for years, but I’m happy you’re excited.” It feels telling that the authors of the paper are noted as having no knowledge of forensics. I think such a tool would have more use if forensics experts had some input about what they actually need from an AI tool.

I feel like the level of mass education about the lack of free will required to make sure all judges and juries understand that murderers have no free will, would probably end up educating a lot of people with violent tendencies that they have no free will too - and if free will does exist, they now have an excuse not to even try to control themselves. Which the article did note has been observed in other studies.

If someone kills a bunch of people no amount of philosophical quibbling and defining is going to make me think that person should be allowed to continue living in society, justice simply couldn’t be a concept at all in the absence of some form of free will

Wouldn’t it require an act of free will to decide that the murderer had no free will and therefore shouldn’t be jailed? If we have no free will and are always acting in response to that complex array of dominos, then the judge and jury sending the murderer to prison have the same amount of choice as the murderer.

Yeah, I would agree that they probably didn’t even think about it. I’d probably interpret the spell as removing the “blinded” condition, whether it’s caused by magic or just someone throwing sand in the character’s eyes or other “normal” causes of the blinded condition.

The Pathfinder version also specifies “The spell does not restore ears or eyes that have been lost, but it repairs them if they are damaged.” Someone with congenital blindness or deafness may not have “damage” that can be repaired, and with the ears/eyes being naturally non-functional, the spell giving them a new ability (sight/hearing) that they previously didn’t possess could be interpreted as being beyond the spell’s scope.

Maybe the spell only removes acquired forms of blindness, say through the magic spell Blindness, curses, etc, and has no ability to generate new, functioning tissue for someone that never had any.

Another possibility is that maybe magic can only heal injuries and illnesses, but can’t do anything with congenital disabilities, because the magic restores the person to their natural state, and being blind/etc is what’s natural for that character. So even if magic could heal those who are disabled due to circumstances, there would still be plenty of disabled people who were born with their disabilities.

Given that people do largely trust the NHS on other matters, I don’t think it’s a general distrust of the NHS. They’re not refusing other medical care. They’re just easily led by the loudest voices.

I recently got vaccinated for measles (along with mumps and rubella). I probably was vaccinated for them as a child, but the medical records have gotten lost over the last 40 years, so my doctors office weren’t sure if I had or not. The vaccines can’t harm me as an adult, so I figured why not just make sure?

Vaccination rates are dropping in the UK too, and that isn’t accounted for by a distrust of big pharma or the government - because people trust the NHS.

I think stupid people were always stupid. This isn’t that wise people are becoming stupid. They were always stupid - unable to form opinions of their own, in the past they did what authoritative voices locally told them to do (ie, doctors). Now they do what the loud people on the internet tell them to do.

Haha, I’m loving the idea of an inbred orca cult.

I feel like there’s actually an interesting xenofiction concept there…

They are remarkably inspiring for such tiny little critters.