Reductionistic fallacy, among other errors. "understanding" is best defined operationally. (Note that teachers and educational institutions test understanding operationally.)
Like today. I asked Gemini for the longest state names with an even number of letters and it gave me North Carolina and South Carolina. When I complained that they are odd, it gave me North Dakota and South Dakota, which are both odd and not the longest. When I noted that, it went back to the Carolinas. Finally it appeared to switch to a different model that actually did counting and found Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
You are mixing some things up. Yes the `sizeof(char)` is defined to always be 1 by the standard... but the size of char is not 1, it's defined by CHAR_BIT which can in principle vary from platform to platform.
Right? The charge that "he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically" is a blatant lie, and then the GP moves the goalposts. As we all know, including the blatant liar, Russia was not Snowden's destination and he was trapped in the airport because the U.S. cancelled his visas. The claim that choosing to accept Russian citizenship months later as an alternative to spending a lifetime in a U.S. prison is hypocritical is vile.
What Makes Enceladus so Attractive in the Search for Life in Space?
Enceladus is considered to be one of the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Researchers suspect that under the moon’s icy crust there is a global ocean of liquid water and a rocky core further below. Due to cryovolcanic activity, gigantic plumes break through cracks in the crust at the moon’s south pole, ejecting ice particles hundreds of kilometers into space.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed through these plumes multiple times to analyze its composition. Enceladus’s ocean is the only extraterrestrial “body of water” from which scientists have been able to directly analyze samples. The samples revealed traces of various salts and organic compounds. Furthermore, previous analyses conducted by Cassini gave indications of hydrothermal processes on the seafloor and other conditions that are significant in supporting life.
So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
Oh, but there is. One reason is that life on Earth seems to have appeared almost immediately after the crust cooled enough and the primordial ocean formed.
Why not? Friction from tidal forces keeps the moon got enough to contain liquid water under its ice cover. This makes it similar to Europa in some ways.
None of the responses actually provides a reason to think that life exists there.
> So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
"reason to think it might" is not at all the same as "reason to think it does". Basically it says that they don't think it's impossible. (The heading is "Could Life Really Exist on Enceladus?", and the experiment showed that the simulated environment didn't kill an existing microorganism. They acknowledge "that doesn’t mean that there is life on Saturn’s moon" and reiterate that if there is, they've shown that future space missions "might have a good chance of finding traces".)
And people are making whacked out inferences, like the first utterly insane comment:
> If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe.
That was absolutely terrifying.
Er, no, what implies that life is "everywhere" in the universe is the plain mechanics that make microorganic life on Enceladus plausible and the vast numbers ... it's not like the solar system is super special and rare; in the ~ 10^26 planets and moons in the observable universe (and why limit it to that? The actual number might be unbounded), there is certain to be a vast number that are similar, and a sizeable number of them will have some sort of microorganisms. Are such microorganisms terrifying? No remotely rational person would think so. Do they imply higher lifeforms that might be dangerous to us? Not at all ... surely such lifeforms do exist, again by the vastness of the numbers, but physics prevents any interaction with them.
Detecting microorganisms on Enceladus won't change any of the probabilities ... it would effectively be neutral in a Bayesian calculation, swamped by the knowledge we already have. It would produce a cultural change, but many factors will mute even that. Even the increased motivation to explore will be swallowed up by the impending end of human civilization due to global warming.
That’s just a link to full Wikipedia page for the company. I must admit that I would be personally interested in seeing a vaguely scientific analysis of the effect they had. For all the talk on the subject I have yet to see any real analysis backed by data on the subject.
Well please share. CA sold a service to anyone who would pay. The world of advertising is full of expensive solutions that don’t really do anything. In many ways politics is harder than selling an actual product since everyone already knows their options and the choice costs them nothing. For all the hype I have yet to see anyone contest the null hypothesis that it was yet another waste of marketing spend.
The GP writes "me and many others think ...". I find that many of the complaints about the way LLMs write come from people who are illiterate and haven't been exposed to much literate writing before.
In statically typed languages, variables and expressions have a compile-time type and values have a run-time type.
> Mutability is a property of variable, not of a value.
In which languages?
In D, mutability is a property of a type. And variables and expressions have a compile-time type and values have a run-time type, so mutability is also a property of variables, expressions, and values.
(Immutability is also transitive in D, so an immutable value cannot have mutable parts, including mutable references, and a variable with an immutable type cannot contain a value or reference with any mutable parts.)
"your first 2 extensions (5 and 6 bytes) were clearly envisioned.
the standard (up to 4 bytes) was created to cover the size of
unicode. i thought any more description would be a waste of
paper. i think your extension from 7 to 8 bytes is a little hoaky.
i requires reading the whole string rather than "knowing" the
number of follow on bytes. so, i think the only thing new is the
7 byte version.
i appreciate the mail, but i really dont think it is useful. it is
like replacing ipv6 with ipv50."
"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
That obviously doesn't mean that we're not different--we obviously are, and it's not intellectually honest to deny it. There are SO many examples of things that have some common trait but are obviously different--skyscrapers and huts are both buildings, but they are different. Cheetahs and Usain Bolt both run fast, but they are different. Bacteria and oak trees are both alive, but they are different. "alike" and "different" are both words, but they are different. And so on ad infinitum.
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
Lots of evidence that whales, dolphins (plenty of other animals), are collectively doing a better job at collective satisfaction within their society and culture.
Your “explosive” culture argument is…uncompelling.
