🚨 do you understand what just happened in the last 3 hours..
> jd vance made an UNPLANNED return to washington.. motorcade racing to the white house.. no advance notice..
> trump summoned the full national security team.. hegseth, gen. caine, the whole NSC.. not a briefing.. a decision meeting..
> trump scheduled a 1pm call with leaders of several arab nations.. the same leaders who talked him out of strikes five days ago by asking for more time..
> the rome round of u.s.-iran talks ended this morning without a breakthrough.. iran still refusing to give up uranium enrichment.. demanding war-damage compensation and strait of hormuz control as preconditions..
> trump had already called off a planned attack on iran around may 18 after direct requests from qatar's emir, saudi crown prince mbs, and the uae president..
> vance has logged 20+ hours in back-channel sessions.. described the ceasefire as "fragile".. described trump's red line as: iran never obtains a nuclear weapon.. full stop..
> iran rejected every u.s. proposal as "totally unacceptable".. the clock they were given to negotiate just ran out this morning in rome..
> the arab call isn't courtesy.. the last time trump convened gulf partners after a failed round, it paused military action.. this time he's calling them AFTER the talks collapsed..
every government on this list told their citizens "diplomacy is ongoing" within the last 48 hours..
all of this.. a single afternoon..
if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..
it's only getting crazier from here..
Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, explains how LLMs are quietly dismantling our deepest assumptions about consciousness:
He argues that large language models have done something philosophy and neuroscience couldn't:
"In terms of consciousness, I have to say, the idea that there's sort of something magic that goes beyond physics that leads to sort of conscious behavior, I kind of think that LLMs kind of put the final nail in that coffin."
His reasoning is that LLMs keep doing things people assumed they couldn't:
"There were all these things where it's like, oh, maybe it can't do this, but actually it does. And it's just an artificial neural net."
Wolfram then challenges a core assumption about conscious experience: the feeling that we are a single, continuous self moving through time.
"I think our notion of consciousness is a lot related to the fact that we believe in the single thread of experience that we have. It's not obvious that we should have a persistent thread of experience."
He points out that physics doesn't actually support this intuition:
"In our models of physics, we're made of different atoms of space at every successive moment of time. So the fact that we have this belief that we are somehow persistent, we have this thread of experience that extends through time, is not obvious."
Then Wolfram offers a striking origin story for consciousness itself.
@stephen_wolfram suggests it traces back to a simple evolutionary pressure: the moment animals first needed to move.
"I kind of realized that probably when animals first existed in the history of life on Earth, that's when we started needing brains. If you're a thing that doesn't have to move around, the different parts of you can be doing different kinds of things. If you're an animal, then one thing you have to do is decide, are you going to go left or are you going to go right?"
That single binary choice, he argues, may be the seed of everything we now call awareness:
"I kind of think it's a little disappointing to feel that this whole wanted thing that ends up being what we think of as consciousness might have originated in just that very simple need to decide if you are an animal that can move. You have to take all that sensory input and you have to make a definitive decision about do you go this way or that way."
The takeaway is unsettling but clarifying.
If LLMs can produce complex behavior from simple rules, then consciousness may not be a mystical add-on to physics.
It may just be what happens when a layered enough system has to make a decision.
Watch from the 40 second to 1 minute mark. You'll clearly see the parachute. It isnt always visible because the cross section is to small or it's out of frame. But when the wind starts kicking it around it's very clear, and the light source is obviously attached to it and moves with it.
@Grand_Ole_Evan This chart feels fake.
According to it LESS THAN 0 women were liberal between2000 and 2005.
And there was a point between 2015 and 2020 where literally no one was conservative.
Pretty sure this chart was spit-shined together by someone trying to get their article noticed.
Interesting hypothesis but the blanket generalization about how women think is offputting. I stopped watching shortly after I heard her say "all women think like this."
I, for one, do not think like this. I am facts and rules driven. I do not make decisions based upon relationships and I thought wokeness was absolute craziness. I suspect there are many other women out there like me.
Perhaps she meant to say that wokeness resonated with **those** women who think like this.
I'm on a Mac, and I thought I was looking at my "Downloads" folder, so I hit CMD+A, and moved all the files to a dated folder on my desktop.
Only to realize that I was actually on "Recent Files."
So I accidentally grabbed files from all over my computer and put them in a single folder. Now I have to go through and reorganize every file back to its proper place.
CMD+Z did not work for some reason.
I don't think there is a quick fix, i am not soliciting advice. I am just miserable and I want you to know it.
The real estate market is broken with mortgage rates above 6%.
I was looking at houses and moving ... but when you do the math, it is crazy to give up my 3.9% mortgage and move to another area and do a 6.3% mortgage.
But then if I wait until rates are back near 4%, house prices will likely skyrocket with cheaper money. Tough decision ...
The use of Tylenol by women during pregnancy was not associated with autism in their children, according to results of a nationwide study in Denmark and CNN