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Cake day: February 27th, 2026

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  • We don’t have a mathematical definition for intelligence or artificial like we do for a Turing machine, but most useful concepts don’t have precise definitions, like human, air, porn, drugs, medicine. I don’t see how there is anything disingenuous about calling computer programs artificially intelligent because that same term describes sci-fi computer programs which display intelligence. A lot of robots in sci-fi aren’t superintelligent and they usually have robotic voices and vocabulary choices and sometimes difficulty understanding words that aren’t in the dictionary or answering slightly vague questions, things which LLMs have no trouble with.

    Saying the mount Rushmore carvings was formed by erosion is a simple explanation with few assumptions that is possible if you assume erosion happens sufficiently randomly, but it’s an absurd explanation nonetheless. Occam’s razor is just a rule of thumb to apply to competing explanations which are similarly reasonable and even then it’s not telling you which is more likely to be true but which is the simplest model to work with.


  • Normal computer programs only look intelligent in very narrow areas, like number crunching, which is why we don’t tend to call them intelligent. Their general intelligence is next to zero. Even if we were delusional enough to think life came from non-life and developed intelligence by random chance and natural selection, you have the same thing there where you get much more non-intelligent output than intelligent output. Monkeys on typewriters could also look intelligent some of the time, but looking at the totality of output they wouldn’t.

    It’s just an expression of plain old human intelligence

    All artificial things are expressions of human behaviors. That’s kind of the definition of artificial.


  • Intelligence is a description of capability, not the means by which the capability is achieved. So if the output looks intelligent then the process is intelligent regardless of how it works. The difference between natural and artificial intelligence is how the intelligence is achieved - what you’re describing doesn’t match any intelligence found in nature so if it produces intelligent output then it’s artificially intelligent.









  • You misunderstood. Because human nature is as it is, any way you try to manage it many technologies will be used for bad far more than they are used for good. And even people attempting to use technology for good usually end up causing more bad than good because those technologies have unintended consequences. Usually because they are unnatural and take us away from our natural environment and behaviors that we are finely tuned for.

    Things were a lot better 100 or 200 years ago. People were happier even if they had less by materialistic measures. I really don’t care about modern materials, medicine or climate investigation. I just want to be left alone and live the way I was designed to live, not in some sterilized padded room where all my material needs are met and I never get sick. Diseases, injuries and hunger are part of life and I’d much rather get sick and die living freely in the forest than live as a comfy pet.