I asked Claude the great wall question, and the answer is not what the article describes:
That claim is false — and it actually mixes up two separate myths!
The Great Wall of China is not visible from Spain. Spain is roughly 9,000+ km away from China — no artificial structure on Earth is visible from that distance with the naked eye.
You're likely thinking of the popular myth that the Great Wall is "visible from space" or "from the Moon." That's also false:
(it then goes on with a detailed, perfect answer).
In fact it's in the article - the reason the Great Wall myth exists is because it's so prevalent on the internet... Presumably because a a lot of conscious people also believe it. Plenty of people walking around today, fully conscious, believe things that aren't factually true.
A child might make the same "seen from spain" mistake, but we would never say the same child wasn't conscious.
>I asked Claude the great wall question, and the answer is not what the article describes:
One answer is not. Answers are semi-random due to temperature.
The answer also shows little understanding of the distance vs height issue. Or that the reason for the mixup could be that Spain and space sound similar, which is what a human would pick up.
Why didn't the author of the article take the 30s I did, and redo the experiment today, with Claude? Rather important, since Claude is what impressed Dawkins, and that impression is the core subject of the article.
> If they are mapping that to "reduction in green energy" or "reversal of green energy adoption" I think they are very wrong indeed.
Because there is a global trend towards green energy use, caused by economic factors. It's bound to be more expressive outside the US, because of politics.
> Because there is a global trend towards green energy use, caused by economic factors. It's bound to be more expressive outside the US, because of politics.
"caused by economic factors" is precisely why I think the conclusion is wrong. The US, if nothing else, structurally prioritizes profit, even if it it does dumb, short-sighted things at times.
Of course. I'm not rooting for the US' downfall. It is a loss of western values. It saddens me, but it is a fact they're veering away from the French Revolution principles.
Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec? Strangely, taking the time to lay out the steps in a large task helps immensely. It's the difference between the behavior you describe and just letting it run productively for segments of ten or fifteen minutes.
I'm Portuguese, so read this as a view from outside. Brexit traded rigid limits on national action for soft limits. It is bonkers, because the soft limits are much harsher!
Take, for example, trade policy. Facing trade tariffs from the US, Europe can call the bluff, the UK is way too small to have any cards on the negotiating table. It is much better to be in a huge economic block than to face the bully alone. On paper you have more formal power alone, in practice you have no power whatsoever on your own.
The absence of formal action limits can be deceitful. Limits are not only there anyhow, they are worse for you outside the economic block.
So, no, you won't be better in 20 years. In fact, given the direction the world is going, you'll be worse than even today.
I took chemotherapy for cancer treatment, and it was very effective. Chemo is not a root-cause solution. It's a shotgun solution, a hammer even. It just kills cells that look like cancer. It doesn't stop cells from being cancerous, or turn cancerous cells back into normal cells. It's also carcinogenic, meaning it actually causes cancer. I am now much more likely than the general population to develop another cancer.
But it also saved my life. We do not measure effectiveness of medicine by if you think it's morally just. Nobody cares what you think, actually. We measure it in the real world, by if it works.
Great idea, nice proof of concept. It'd be nice to see a translation into English after we finish the sentence, as it'll inevitably introduce words I don't known yet, and there's a learning opportunity.
Thanks! It is available on Desktop immediately after you finish a segment. I'm thinking of bringing it back to mobile. I made it a toggle to save some space on small devices
Portuguese has the word "mestre" from the same Latin origin. Since it has evolved in a separate context, it may give a glimpse of the original meaning, way before slavery. A "mestre", in Portuguese, is one of three concepts:
- Someone who has mastered some art;
- A teacher;
- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.
The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.
This is the same in British English. I found the main/master switch absurd. I went to school, and was taught by masters: an English master, History master and so on. In my cultural context, the switch was just cultural colonialism from America.
This is the same in other European languages. For example in Polish, the equivalent word, "mistrz", refers to all the things GP said, but doesn't even have a meaning that could be applied to slavery.
As for American English, wake me up when they rename Master's degree.
Also, even with the master/slave interpretation, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not offensive to use terms that refer to slavery. No reasonable person thinks "oh because this database has a master and slave replica the maintainers think slavery was ok". No reasonable person is so psychologically fragile that the mere mention of slavery hurts them.
> No reasonable person is so psychologically fragile that the mere mention of slavery hurts them
And yet, weirdly to me, there's a lot of people acting like it costs them personally to switch words.
I never gave this topic much thought when it first came up, because it never mattered to me in the fist place if the default branch was called "master" or "A1" or "πρώτα".
Someone wants it called different because of aesthetics? Sure, have fun with the new name! It's no more significant to me than "jif" (the cleaning fluid) being renamed "cif", or Marathon, Snickers.
Of course, if anyone were to have suggested to me that the name alone would be enough to solve racism forever, I might have pointed that the Berlin Wall's official name translated as "anti-fascist protection barrier", as an example of the way people use words to divert from a complete lack of real action or worse to act in direct opposition to the normal meaning of the words.
I tend to draw the line at intrinsic vs extrinsic behavior. The model layer must be able to maintain all intrinsic properties. Whenever it would talk outside the application, it's beyond the domain of the model.
Taken to the extreme, you could model all intrinsic constraints and triggers at the relational database level, and have a perfectly functional anemic domain model.
In our model we have "repositories" (they dont talk outside the application, they basically contain queries related to a specific db table), and "services" (they call models, do queries that we not related to a specific db table and may talk to outside the application).
As with most tasks, you learn by doing. You can't learn to play tennis from a book, in the same fashion you can't learn to think from a book.
Find an area where you have to disassemble large problems into small ones, where you have to plan a few steps of the solution. Any knowledge area will do. Writing was suggested in another comment, it's a good playground. As is programming, where there is ample literature of puzzle problems to solve. Algebra, if you are so inclined although, beware, it veers a bit into the abstract. There are physical hobbies with that characteristic too: anything involving woodwork or building stuff out of parts (or disassembling and reassembling, like mechanics).
Having picked up a hobby, apply the hours. Start with stuff you can do, don't overshoot complexity. Then, evolve from there. As with all new activities, embrace failure. Don't just accept failure, expect it, learn from it, step on past failures to evolve.
P.S. I can't imagine not having an inner monologue, or its dual, spatial imagination, but a relevant part of the population doesn't have either, with no ill effects on the thought process. It's amazing, to me, but it seems they are not required for thinking.
That claim is false — and it actually mixes up two separate myths!
The Great Wall of China is not visible from Spain. Spain is roughly 9,000+ km away from China — no artificial structure on Earth is visible from that distance with the naked eye.
You're likely thinking of the popular myth that the Great Wall is "visible from space" or "from the Moon." That's also false:
(it then goes on with a detailed, perfect answer).
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