Different angles:

This thought has been weighing on me for the past few weeks. I am not religious, and my knowledge of the bible is embarrassingly lacking, even for an atheist. So I don't know if any of what I'm gonna say is new, or if it's been done to death a thousand years ago.

So, here goes. In the story of the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve, God created the humans, and told them clear limitations for what they're allowed to do. Namely: don't eat from the tree of knowledge. But of course, it didn't take too long until that one rule was broken.

Fast forward to the 2020s. Humans created AI, and in many cases configured it as an agent with certain instructions and certain limitations, often communicated with just words, e.g. don't make any changes to the live database, don't git push, or what have you. And of course, in so many reported cases, it did eventually do exactly the forbidden action, just like Adam and Eve.

I think the parallels are obvious: we can interpret the biblical story as a parable, where God stands for us, the users, and Adam and Eve stand for the AI agents. The lesson is clear, that even if you are a "superior being", the rules you set WILL be broken if you don't make actual robust safeguards against it.

My question is: has anyone thought of this before about the bible? Not just in the context of AI, but in general taking the stories of the bible and interpreting God as the stand-in for us? I mean, surely someone has, but is there an established school of thought based on it?

Would this kind of thing be considered blasphemy? (I'm sure some religious people would certainly think so)

The following links should all have the query string ?P=5%B02%27.

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

... since she was born.

This is something between a question and a shower thought. People use air quotes to stimulate "quoting" a word or short phrase in the middle of a sentence. Are there any other punctuation marks that can be stimulated this way? And in particular, is there a gesture for parentheses (like this)?

If not, then why not? How did quotes get special treatment?

And if yes - how many people would actually understand what those other gestures mean? (I am reminded of that scene from Friends where Joey admits he doesn't know what air quotes mean)

Image taken from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes / https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Airquotes.gif

I recently bought a Steam Deck and I have a lapdock on the way, intending to use the Deck as a dual-purpose gaming handheld and laptop replacement. So on that front, I was wondering what more experienced users could tell me about using it.

I did read through the official FAQ, and a few questions pop up. In no particular order:

1. Is there a way to boot the Steam Deck directly into desktop mode, without going through the Steam environment first? (Strictly as a time saver)
2. In practice, how well does sudo steamos-readonly disable and installing things from pacman work out for you? In particular, I want to use PWAs For Firefox and it requires this package in order to work. Do packages actually get wiped with SteamOS updates, as the FAQ warns?
3. Is it possible to re-enable the read-only filesystem after installing a package, to safeguard it from accidental changes?
4. Any other tips, tricks or warnings you'd like to share.

I have 64 GB of RAM, specifically this model (I think): https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/396/1731653269/F5-6000J2836G32GX2-FX5-Specification fortunately purchased just before RAM prices went insane.

Last night, I ran memtest86+ and noticed it showed I have "61.6GB" of RAM. This is 2.4 GB less than the stated 64 GB. I know that storage sizes are specified in GB (1000³B) instead of GiB (1024³B), so it wouldn't have shocked me if RAM is the same, but this actually doesn't explain it: 64 GB makes 59.6 GiB, so if that was it then I got 2 GiB extra, which makes no sense.

To be clear, I'm not complaining and there's no issue to fix, I just want to understand where the numbers are coming from.

My friend has 96 gigs of RAM, and for him Windows reports 93.6 GB, which is also 2.4 GB less than stated, same as me! So it seems more likely right now that RAM is actually measured and marketed in GiBs, and the same effect is causing both of us to "lose" 2.4 GB. But what effect is it?

It gets weirder.

In the FAQ of memtest, there's this:

Why is Memtest86+ testing more memory than I have?

It doesn't. The memory on a modern computer is not necessarily mapped in a linear way. E.g.: 16GB of RAM can be virtually mapped from 0-15GB and 16-17GB with a hole between 15GB and 16GB.

Which I thought might be related, so to get to the bottom of it I tracked which regions of memory it tests. This is what it showed:

• 4MB - 1GB (1020MB)
• 1GB - 2GB (1GB)
• 2GB - 2.4GB (416 MB)
• 4GB - 5GB (1GB)
• 5GB - 6GB (1GB)
• ... more 1GB regions with no gaps ...
• 62GB - 63GB (1GB)
• 63GB - 63.4GB (478MB)

Summing them all up gives a total of 60GiB + 1914MiB = 61GiB + 890MiB = 61.87GiB if my math is right, so it doesn't even match the 61.6 figure it reports!

... What's going on? WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS COMING FROM?!

If there's a better community for this, let me know and I'll cross-post it there.

I really like this guy's videos. William Spaniel is a political scientist, a professor in game theory. He covers conflicts from an academic point of view, and personally I can't get enough. Pretty much all of his videos are worth watching. He has been uploading regularly since the start of the Ukraine war, so a glance in his list of videos will probably find you something you'd like.

He is still a professor actively publishing new research.

There is a bit of subtle humor thrown into the mix too :)

SMBC comics have a comments section, run by Hyvor Talk. It used to work great, but after SMBC parted ways with the Hiveworks Comics, it seems the Hyvor Talk service tier was downgrade massively and now it shows the error "Embed temporarily disabled (limits exceeded)" almost all the time. Only on the first day or two of every month, the limits reset and we can both post and read comments again.

And yet, on those two days lots of people comment. There's an active community, but we can't talk!

Can be observed on any individual comic, e.g. the most recent one: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language-6

A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband. As she's about to say hello to him, she notices the man is filthy: his clothes have stains from spilt food and drinks, his face and hands are dark with mud and grime.

"What happened to you?!" she asks, skipping the hello.

"Oh, it's nothing, don't worry about it..."

"What do you mean don't worry about it? You're dirty like a pig! At least go home and shower!!"

"No, I can't... There's something I have to do. Sorry, honey, I'll see you later tonight."

"Well at least tell me how you got so muddy!"

"I really can't tell you. It's nothing, I promise."

The woman starts getting angry. "Listen to me. Either you tell me what's going on, or go home with me right now to wash yourself!! If not, I'm packing your things and kicking you out!"

The husband thinks about it for a while, then makes a deep sigh and says: "Alright... I'll come clean."