Home » Open thread 4/12/2025

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Open thread 4/12/2025 — 23 Comments

  1. Astonishing as her musical skills are, it is also amazing to see the affect (or is it “effect” ?) she has on those watching and listening to her play.
    I was certainly moved by watching this video.

  2. Lovely, amazing.
    But the video could have done without the two watching the screen

  3. JohnTyler, effect, yes. Those two words are interesting, as they’re extremely similar in spelling and pronunciation and they both have noun as well as verb forms (affect and effect). I can’t think of any other similar Siamese-twin type of pairing in English off the top of my head.

  4. RE: Origin of COVID/COVID as a deliberate Chinese bioweapon attack

    It turns out that 7 U.S. service members contracted a COVID like illness, apparently at the Fall 2019 World Military Games in Wuhan, and this article raises the possibility that this was the deliberate insertion, by the Chinese, of a bioweapon.*

    Funny, how we’ve never heard about this illness being contracted by our servicemen way back in the fall of 2019, this information–what could be a key piece of evidence of a deliberate Chinese bioweapon attack–until just now.

    * See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/must-read-2019-world-military-games-perfect-opportunity/

  5. I’m seeing reports of waves of serious viral respiratory illnesses sweeping through China, over and over again, reportedly with high death tolls, ironic, if it turns out that COVID paved the way.

    P.S. In China, during WWII, the infamous and murderous Japanese chemical and biological weapon experimentation organization, “Unit 731,” was reportedly successful in introducing and establishing several diseases in areas of China where they had not formerly been known to be.

    According to some Chinese claims, asking for reparations to China from Japan, some/all? of these diseases are now endemic to these areas.

  6. Snow on Pine, I knew about this US military infection in the fall of 2019 from the usual COVID honesty sources — Berenson and others.

  7. –“An AI Model Has Officially Passed the Turing Test:
    More human than humans?”

    In a new preprint study awaiting peer review, researchers report that in a three-party version of a Turing test, in which participants chat with a human and an AI at the same time and then evaluate which is which, OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 model was deemed to be the human 73 percent of the time when it was instructed to adopt a persona. That’s significantly higher than a random chance of 50 percent, suggesting that the Turing test has resoundingly been beaten….

    “People were no better than chance at distinguishing humans from GPT-4.5…” wrote lead author Cameron Jones, a researcher at UC San Diego’s Language and Cognition Lab, in an X thread about the work. “And 4.5 was even judged to be human significantly more often than actual humans!”

    https://futurism.com/ai-model-turing-test
    _____________________________________________

    AI keeps getting stronger.
    _____________________________________________

    Don’t look back.
    Something might be gaining on you.

    –Satchel Paige

  8. Re: Passing the Turing Test

    It’s a big AI deal.

    Alan Turing was the math whiz who led the successful effort to crack the German Enigma code in WW II using a computer-like machine, which played no small part in winning the war.

    Turing was first to envision a universal computing machine (now called the Turing machine) in 1936. He is a god in the foundations of computer science.

    In 1950 he published a famous paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which began:
    _______________________________

    I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?”
    _______________________________

    He offered what became known as the Turing Test as a means to test that proposition. Can a machine interact in text with a human and the human not be able to tell it was a machine?

    I’ve read and dreamed about the Turing Test since my 20s. Of course, I doubted I would ever see it happen. But now it has.

    This is Moon Landing stuff.

    Though Turing didn’t specify the date, he pointed his finger at a moon. He had no better idea about how to reach the AI moon than JFK had in 1962 for the real moon.

    And here we are.

    We are living in history, friends.

  9. huxley, well, if the Turing test is no longer reliable, looks like we’ll have to have a word with Messrs. Voight and Kampff. They might have something we can use.

  10. Turing died in 1953, thereabouts, that wasn’t really his wheelhouse, that was more Von Braun and a certain Soviet scientists name escapes me now, who calculated orbital trajectories, as for the Voight Kampf, well we know a whole host of persons who would fail it,

  11. Open Thread Sunday – Russian war on Ukraine:

    The Ukraine War After Kursk – Retreat, Lessons, Negotiations & The Coming Russian Offensive – Perun

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id7qG26NQis

    Timestamps:
    00:00:00 — Opening Words
    00:01:37 — What Am I Talking About?
    00:02:05 — Kursk Closes Out
    00:11:37 — Tactical Observations
    00:28:16 — Evaluating Kursk
    00:35:24 — Signs of More to Come
    00:45:51 — a Russian Offensive?
    00:45:59 — Motive
    00:47:58 — Urgency
    00:50:51 — Means
    00:58:25 — Will It Be Enough?
    01:00:59 — Channel Update

  12. huxley, well, if the Turing test is no longer reliable, looks like we’ll have to have a word with Messrs. Voight and Kampff. They might have something we can use.

    Philip Sells:

    Always a pleasure to hear from you. Love the PKD (Philip K. Dick) reference.

    I’m currently considering a future in which we are not hunting AI and AI is not hunting us. That’s something of a gap in our creative speculations about AI.

    There’s Data, the clown-makeup android from Star Trek: Next Gen, who wants to be human so badly. He does mimic a human … badly.

    At least Data is not sleep-talking like the robot Bender on Futurama: “Must kill all humans.”

    Contrary to Data, today’s LLM AIs are much better at imitating human beings to the point of fooling human beings, rather than proving new math theorems.

  13. Turing died in 1953, thereabouts, [going to the Moon] wasn’t really his wheelhouse,

    miguel cervantes:

    No, it wasn’t. However, going to the AI Moon described by the Turing Test was very much in Turing’s wheelhouse.

    That was revolutionary thinking and Turing got there first.

  14. I’m not sure it makes sense to say the Turing test is or isn’t “reliable”. It was just a suggestion, it’s not like a mathematical proof.

    I’d say the Chinese room and p-zombies have more to say about humans vs AI. If there ever is a real AI rather than LLMs that are called so.

  15. Lucy in that video is truly beautiful. The embodiment of her mother’s love. And her piano teacher is a great man.

    Thank you for sharing that.

  16. I’m not sure it makes sense to say the Turing test is or isn’t “reliable”. It was just a suggestion, it’s not like a mathematical proof.

    Niketas Choniates:
    ____________________________________

    Don’t you know when you’re being kidded?

    –Humphrey Bogart, “The Maltese Falcon” (40:15)

  17. I saw that one recently greenstreet is not the worse villain in it,

    Avengers is available on pluto, the show runner went on to remington steele and ugh highlander the quickening

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