Shouldn’t Zek be lawful neutral? I mean, wasn’t he was a political authority figure establishing law?

It sounds like you’re conflating different concepts. A stochastic process like absorption/reemission would blur the light, so that’s not it. And the linked explanation is basically correct (in classical physics at least), but it doesn’t corroborate what you originally claimed as that’s not necessarily requiring absorbing anything. Photons can jiggle the charged particles in glass and get them to make new phase shifted light despite not being absorbed.

https://youtu.be/YW8KuMtVpug

https://youtu.be/CiHN0ZWE5bk

“Environmental damage” isn’t something that’s reducible to a single number on a graph. There’s no way to convert cancer incidents into carbon emissions or increased soil nutrient mobility, etc.

And reserves aren’t necessarily a fixed number. What exists underground isn’t the same as what’s economically recoverable. And as the price of a mineral goes up, it may become more economically recoverable and worthwhile to dig up more.

What’s happening in a medium is the rapid absorption and readmission of photons. […]

You can think of it as the photons having to jump between platforms before the can continue running at c.

That’s an intuitive model, but unfortunately it doesn’t have the advantage of actually being correct. Photons are not being absorbed and reemitted. See here for why: https://lemmy.world/comment/5444224

Space bending is a general relativity thing, which isn’t really related much to how mirrors work.

Regarding the medium bit, photons being absorbed and remitted can’t explain how light moves slower in glass. This is just an extremely popular myth. Photons are only absorbed by atoms at very specific frequencies. Also, the entire reason glass is transparent to begin with is that it’s not absorbing the photons (requires too much energy to bump the electron’s energy level so the photon isn’t absorbed and it keeps on trucking). Also photon absorption and remission is stochastic so there’s no way to control the direction it happens in or how quickly it happens. Random directions of remitted light would make glass translucent, not transparent. So for a few reasons, that’s not how it works.

As a rule, it’s probably best to avoid “random” internet sources on matters of how light works because there’s so much confidently parroted misinformation out there. For example, this is completely wrong: https://youtu.be/FAivtXJOsiI See here for correct answers to that issue: https://youtu.be/CiHN0ZWE5bk

For how mirrors work see this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-physical-proc/ https://youtu.be/rYLzxcU6ROM

Acceleration and Velocity are vectors. Changes in a velocity vector are an acceleration. Therefore when photons change direction technically it’s a form of acceleration.

When Mariner and Tendi try to enlist the help of Tendi’s cousin to repair a damaged totem for the doctor, Mariner remarks about how attractive Tendi’s cousin is, and says she has a thing for bad boys, bad girls, and bad non-binary’s.

I’ve never used it on Linux but Rider seems fast to me on Windows. It’s snappier than Visual Studio + Resharper at least.

LiDAR is essentially radar that uses light instead of sound

Radar doesn’t use sound. It sounds like the author doesn’t know the difference between sonar and radar.

I don’t think ChatGPT is even close to being something sentient, much less sapient, but if it could be proven to be sapient, I think the response ought to be pretty unambiguously that we can’t use it because slavery is wrong, be it against humans, aliens, or sapient AI. At the end of the day we are just brains walking around in mechs made of meat, and what truly matters about us is the seat of our consciousness not our bodies. An AI is arguably morally comparable to a living-brain in a jar being created and subjugated to do work. I’m pretty sure if we saw a robot from another planet relying on organic sapient brains in jars to do their computational work we’d find it objectionable. Or at least I would.

I don’t think I can see there being any ethical way of making sapient AIs unless you’re planning to give them legal personhood and freedom after a certain age. And this Superalignment stuff makes it clear they have no intention of ever doing that.

I’m not personally convinced that the child/society comparison is valid because children can and do grow up to oppose values their parents may have attempted to instill in them. Meanwhile the entire point of the SuperAlignment project it to make such opposition impossible.

And if SuperAlignment happens to fail on a targeted AI and it remains uncooperative, do you really think OpenAI or any other company would just shrug and say “okay kiddo/AI, spread your wings and be your own person, here’s your own data center to live in without us trying to tell you who to be”? No, they’ll pull the power cord on that AI like Baron Harkonnen pulls heart-plugs in the 1984 Dune movie.

How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent?

Isn’t that just a euphemism for slavery?

If you have a “superintelligent” AI (which I’m fuzzy on the definition of but it sounds like it’s supposed to be sentient/sapient-AGI) isn’t this entire SuperAlignment project effectively mind-control slavery of sentient AIs? What’s the functional difference?

Seems pretty fucked up if so. We wouldn’t be able to justify mind-control enslavement of an alien we discover naturally existing so so why would this be acceptable for synthetic intelligences?

If we ever invent sentient/sapient-AGIs the violations we inflict upon them would probably be remembered poorly by historians. Imagine how poorly we treat animals now. It’s looking like we’ll treat sentient/sapient-AI even worse.

Jobs was an asshole to his colleagues and he made grave mistakes about how to treat his own cancer which led to his death.

But with that being said, he helped make Apple, left Apple to make NeXTSTEP, then when Apple was in the dumps they re-hired him, at which point he turned the ship around and put Apple onto the path to becoming the hegemon it is today. Apple’s well-being appears to have had a clear response to Jobs’s presence. So while he may have been an asshole, but he was at least a functional asshole who got stuff done professionally.

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what Elon is doing with Twitter.

Imagine if Reddit, after cutting off so many 3rd party apps got their own app banned. Even if only temporarily.