I, for one, welcome Britain's brave strides into the 18th century.
11.03.2026 00:20
π 1
π 0
π¬ 1
π 0
I, for one, welcome Britain's brave strides into the 18th century.
Another step in Britain's long bourgeois revolution against the aristocracy: www.bbc.com/news/article...
I remember really enjoying Lydia Liu's paper on Margaret Masterman 'Wittgenstein in the Machine' as well: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
It could be interesting to compare the different editions of Jurafsky and Martinβs Speech and Language Processing. The changes tell a story about the directions the field took.
Too late, Iβve already ascribed you mental contents that are more proximal than the distal state you intended to represent. Youβre not even able to think of a refutation of my position. You're just trapped in your own labyrinth of internal representations.
The name is from the specific isabellinus, Neo-Latin for "greyish-yellow", and is likely in reference to Isabella I of Castile, who is said to have promised not to change her undergarments until Spain was freed from the Moors. "Wheatear" is not derived from "wheat" or any sense of "ear", but is a 16th-century linguistic corruption of "white" and "arse", referring to the prominent white rump found in most species. The genus name Oenanthe is derived from the Ancient Greek oenos (ΞΏΞ―Ξ½ΞΏΟ) "wine" and anthos (Ξ±Ξ½ΞΈΟΟ) "flower". It refers to the northern wheatear's return to Greece in the spring just as the grapevines blossom.
The etymology of the isabelline wheatear is a lovely combination of unexpected facts.
A Philosophy Documentation Center that contains people's best work but which nobody has access to feels like something from Borges. I love it.
I think there is something poetic about this. It's a nice quirk of the discipline.
Philosophy has this journal and the papers in it are so good that they have to lock them up in a place called the βphilosophy documentation centerβ so that no one can read them.
In the end, I donβt think βthe system doesnβt have the internal features we would expect to find according to our best models of consciousnessβ will really cut past βmy imaginary friend is talking to me and how dare you say he isnβt conscious!β
The universe looks indistinguishable from something designed by an intelligence and the onus is on someone to decisively prove it isnβt [checkmate atheists]. Except weβll get that with consciousness. Andβ¦ I donβt want to do this.
The debate on machine consciousness is going to recapitulate the most tedious features of evangelical vs atheist discourse from the early 00s and so Iβm wary of even making jokes about it in case I get dragged in.
Philosophers have never successfully defined wetness. How do you know a climate model isnβt wet?
That sounds great! I'll put it next on the (parallel, distributed) reading list.
To be maximally explicit, this thread was a response to this stuff: www.wired.com/story/gramma...
There are no good kings. Only beautiful palaces.
This isn't really a serious academic proposal but they may want to watch Leonard Bernstein's The Unanswered Question on Youtube. It's an early and fun attempt to apply ideas from generative grammar to music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fHi...
It has come to my attention that vegetable sandwich should be understood as a rigid designator for a kind and not as a description. In all worlds, it designates an egg and tuna sandwich.
I think chapter 3 of Von Fintel and Heim's Intensional Semantics does this (it's not too technical if you don't mind a few lambdas): web.mit.edu/fintel/finte...
Signage for a sandwich: Sandvitx vegetal Tuna salad sandwich β’ SΓ‘ndwich vegetal
Love how theyβre spelling sandwich in Valenciano. Donβt love how theyβre defining vegetable.
And I put off properly reading Peter Godfrey-Smithβs βDarwinian populations and natural selectionβ for far too long. This book is a treat!
It's pretty cool to be related to every organism on the planet through a shared ancestry, quite an overwhelmingly beautiful and exciting thing. I'm grateful to all the biologists and folks who support their work who have helped us understand this.
This PhD studentship will look at how concepts in ethics and political philosophy might give us new perspectives in philosophy of science about concepts of idealization, representation and model use.
Find out more & apply by 16 March π
edin.ac/46cHXPd
FULLY FUNDED PHDs IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
I'm looking for *two* PhD students to join my ERC project on refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The positions are funded for four years, and you get to join our lovely community in Bristol. Please share widely!
philjobs.org/job/show/30997
But I think that feeling I had, when the moral law bubbled up in my throat and reminded me that I am not to treat others as a means to an end, was probably right.
He was cool with it anyway but I feel I learned a lesson.
I felt my email was a bit like saying βhereβs a doll I made of you, what do you think???β I hadnβt thought of any of this when I was making it because I was focused on little technical problems, trying to make it work better, the fun mix of creativity and code that lets people do awful things.
The moment I clicked send, it hit me what an intensely creepy thing I had just done was. Like, if I had been drawing lots of pictures of him, that would be creepy, but having conversations with a fictional version of him I had designed seemed⦠wrong.
I then sent him an email containing some of the conversations I had had with it.
It was a super simple system using a cosine similarity algorithm. I found some of the responses amusing because back then it was possible to be amused by the bad answers of your home-made chatbots.
