Rather than assigning each finger the same value of 1, assign them values of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. Then there’s some combination of fingers that can represent any value from 0 to 1+2+4+8+16=31. It’s like using digits to count instead of tally marks.

FYI a normal human can count to 31 on one hand using binary.

Imagine if in another 250 years, the USA still has a system of government substantially similar to its present day form, but with a population of tens of billions spread across several planet Earths in alternate dimensions. Most people are wealthy enough to own a personal spaceship. Medicine has advanced to the point where doctors can bring you back from the dead as long as your brain is more or less in one piece. But now everyone judges the people of the 21st century for eating meat - it’s considered pretty much the worst thing that anyone can do. Maybe you’ll be convinced that you were wrong to eat meat, or maybe you won’t. Even if you’re convinced that you were wrong, maybe you’ll think that the people of the future should have left wild animals alone rather than intervening to eliminate predation. But overall you would probably think the future was going rather better than you expected…

My dog was a true patriot who would go to fireworks shows with me.

Is the implication that this is a French catgirl?

What you’re missing out on. (Not that I’ve gone myself.)

Would having experts capable of telling real videos from fake ones even solve the main problem, that being the problem of public perception? The experts would have an important role in, for example, intelligence agencies, but the public is still going to trust its eyes, and in the presence of multiple contradictory videos, its biases, especially since there’s always going to be someone claiming to be an expert to back them up.

It’s more reasonable than the headline makes it sound. The commissioner pointed out that he’s not in charge of the decision to use Flock cameras and told the group of people who wanted to express their opposition to him anyway to pick one representative who would do so.

I’ve been to meetings where people repeatedly express the same negative opinion of a policy to someone with no control over that policy and I guess that’s what the commissioner wanted to avoid.

It’s not actually ridiculous in principle.

Let’s say I start out owning a bank with ten billion in assets, and the bank’s value comes entirely from its assets so it’s worth ten billion.

The bank loans its ten billion to you, and you pay me those ten billion for the bank. Now I have ten billion in cash instead of a bank that was worth ten billion, and you have a bank worth ten billion to which you owe ten billion. No one’s net worth has changed.

You default on your loan to your own bank. Now the bank is worthless (its worth came entirely from the loan) and you have no debt, so your net worth still hasn’t changed. Effectively nothing has happened.

Why? English isn’t my first language but I can’t think of a single time that knowing my native language (not Spanish) was necessary to accomplish something useful in the USA (other than talking to my family, which isn’t relevant for the children learning a foreign language in school). I can’t think of a single time that not knowing Spanish prevented me from accomplishing something useful, either.

It’s a type of marble cheese, specifically Colby-Jack.

Nothing wrong with eating cheese for dinner.

Serve and obey? No. Treat well? Maybe. Meanwhile I’m excited about the possibility of good futures for superhuman AIs themselves, not just for humans.

While I agree with your general sentiment, I think you have chosen a metaphor that is almost maximally unpersuasive to your target audience.

Very occasionally I run into something that used to be doable without a smartphone but requires a smartphone now, but that’s quite rare. Not having a smartphone now would be very inconvenient, but generally not more inconvenient than living without a smartphone was before they existed. I expect the same with this technology, if it ever arrives.

I’m not sure why the tone is so negative in this article given that the plan being discussed is to make the technology so useful that most people want it despite the disadvantages. That’s not coercion.

You don’t need calculus to do this. Neither one is accelerating, so “5 seconds after they started moving” is irrelevant. Just calculate the velocity of one in the reference frame of the other by subtracting the vectors: from the point of view of the boy, the girl’s velocity vector has orthogonal components of -5 ft/sec north and 1 ft/sec east, so the magnitude is 26^0.5 ft/sec.

I worked somewhere once where we were literally locked out of a system - the door control computer stopped responding and we couldn’t get into the room it was in to reboot it, because of course it controlled that door.