I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.

We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.

You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.

A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.

ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.

You’re the one who made this philosophical.

I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”

ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.

All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.

There is plenty of useful data to be gathered from a dying brain.

Knowing what parts of the brain shutdown first seems like it would be useful for easing pain or discomfort. And since dying can be an extended process for the elderly or terminally ill, being able to more accurately predict when a person will die can potentially ease the suffering of loved ones.

As someone who stayed with a loved one for 14 hours straight while she passed, it would have been nice if someone had been able to tell me if she had 2 or 12 hours left. I still would have stayed the whole time, of course, but knowing she had less or more time might have changed what a wanted to say and would have put my mind at ease about her suffering.

Understanding the process of dying is good research. You’re right that science can’t reach beyond death and shouldn’t try to, but gathering data on the process does have applications.

Bring the leader of a country during WW2 happens to be a great excuse for alcoholism

The A10 has a track record of friendly fire.

I don’t think it’s a wise use of resources to give the Ukrainians a bunch of tanks, only to send a tank killer aircraft that’s known for killing friendly vehicles because of old ass targeting systems.

I think you forgot the active war part.

In the US, groceries are expensive and we may never be able to buy a home.

In Ukraine, your house for the next year or two is going to be either a cheap barracks or a literal hole in the ground. You’re expected to fire live rounds at Russian conscripts. You have to see the dead bodies of your friends and enemies alike, and you’ll have to deal with either killing someone, or not having killed someone who went on to kill a friend.

I’ll take the expensive food, thank you. War is hell

Steam Boilers are incredibly dangerous, especially large industrial ones that could be used to heat an entire town.

It’s not uncommon for a poorly run boiler system to be down for a time due to a broken makeup water pump or faulty pressure reliefs. Many industrial plants will have multiple smaller boilers for that reason, as a properly running plant will be able to bring a damaged boiler offline and bring the spare online rather quickly with little to know loss to production or heating.

If that thing ever got low on water for any reason, it would do more damage to the area than a bombing run by the enemy.

It can also be argued that the continued trend of having an increasing human population is only going to keep accelerating the decline of earth’s biosphere.

We’re already seeing an apocalypse in the insects, and that’s going to lead to a decline in plant life.

Our carbon emissions are rapidly increasing ocean acidity and temperature, which will kill off huge swaths of the planktons that produce much of the oxygen we breathe. Biodiversity is approaching mass extinction level lows, and we’re barely figuring out how to slow it down.

I’m sure life on earth will survive it, it survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that was an incredibly rapid change. But human civilization as we know it may not be able to adapt quickly enough to the damage we’ve done.

Humanity may end up as mole people living in carefully life support controlled bunkers if we continue. If earth is nearly as inhospitable to large terrestrial life as mars, what’s the benefit to one over the other? Might as well just leave the earth to the million year process of fixing itself and expand outwards if we can.

I often wonder where we’ll be in 2000 years.

Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.

Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.

Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.

Oi, yeh got a loicense fer that there loighter?

What are they gonna revolt with, butter knives?

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Imagine regularly losing naval assets to a country that does not possess a navy.

And I’m sure in a hundred years there will be an article about some vital resource that is being wasted by mass farming crickets.

It’s almost like the ecosystem is not capable of sustaining 8 billion people over any serious time spans.

Our plant based foods are less nutritious than before because we’re leeching nutrients out of the soil we grow them in. Our meat products are also going to be less nutritious because the meat is grown on animals that eat plants we farm. And the meat requires vast amounts of fresh water.

The earth never had the resources to sustain our society. We just never stopped to think about it.

It’s really not though.

We’ve been doing it pretty much since the dawn of civilization.

With modern pumps and a modern understanding of physics and fluid dynamics, it’s not a huge problem to design a system for pumping water up a slope.

So many kilowatts of motor power gives you so many meters of head. Check valves and appropriately sized pumps can allow for the movement of huge amounts of water. And with hydro storage, you’re not really running the system at full bore the whole time anyway.

Water also happens to be fairly dense stuff while being a fluid, so it can store a lot of kinetic energy in pretty much any container you put it in.

Brick of concrete also store a lot of energy, but require a huge building whose sole purpose is to move bricks around. Whereas hydro also allows governments to store valuable drinking water and get electricity when they need it.

Because exit might be a variable you use to determine if you should exit. exit() is a function that actually does the exiting.

It’s the difference between pointing at a jogger and saying “run” and actually running after them.

If you owe the bank $10,000, you’re in trouble. If you owe the bank 10,000,000,000 dollars, the bank is in trouble.

The carrington event knocked out telegraphs all over the world in the 1800s.

That’s the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. It induced so much current in the telegraph wires that they literally melted.

In the 1800s that wasn’t a huge deal. But if it happened today, billions of dollars of electrical infrastructure could be rendered useless, and stockpiles of replacements are already non existent. It would take years to recover.

But this is not that strong of a storm, so I doubt it’ll do anything but cause some pretty lights and maybe ground a few flights due to communications issues.

Since you seem to have issues understanding things like basics thermodynamics and physics, I’ll break it down in short sentences.

Candle make little heat that go away into air, take long time to raise temperature of room. Long time means candle likely left alone for long time.

Blanket keep your little heat close to body, keep you warmer than candle will.

Candle balanced on tower of pots and bricks. Candle not likely to fall, pots and bricks very likely to get bumped by idiot trying to use candle to heat entire room during emergency. Idiot might be asleep when they bump candle. Or idiot human might have idiot cat that want to play with shiny glowy candle. Now idiot die in fire cause big fire use all the air and make a lot of smoke.

Until all 3 of you die because you accidentally started an uncontrolled fire while you’re already in an emergency.

2 people and 2 space blankets have just as good odds as surviving the cold than 2 people and some candles. Without needing to worry about fire.

A candle is going to heat up the area around it and dissipate that heat. The blanket will simply keep that 350 btu that you produce every hour much closer to your body, and stop you from freezing to death.