One month after the OP, the Adobe Stock genAI collection (tagged; there are more that are not) is over 12 million - 12,004,534

We can celebrate by making a yummy fruit smoothie - although I'm really afraid of this mixer...

The mixer is clearly Borg and in the process of assimilating the kitchen.

Resistance is futile!

3. The question is what is more unusual and extraordinary?

I would say that the assumption that humans are the pinnacle of intelligence and technical development in the universe / multiverse / the wider reality is just preposterous. I would even say that it is the pinnacle of arrogance. Humans only invented bicycles a few generations ago, and most humans have big problems imagining a "simple" tesseract.

Also, if you watch the videos with Professor Donald Hoffman that I linked above, you will realize that we can only perceive a tiny little bit of reality, and even that little bit is completely distorted. Hoffman showed evidence that evolution hides the reality from us.

If humans were the most advanced beings and there were no other beings capable of visiting the Earth across the whole wider reality, I would say that it is pretty "extraordinary".

You are mixing up two different things here. I think that practically nobody claims that we are the most advanced species in the universe, except perhaps some people who do not believe that intelligent life exists on other planets for religious reasons.

Given the number of stars in the universe and that we have discovered a number of solar systems with planets among the limited number of stars close enough for us to detect this, it is very likely that there is large number of planets in the universe where life developed and also very likely that some of them are more advanced than we are.

However, whether any of these planets are near enough for the inhabitants to reach Earth is a totally different question. Not nearly every solar system with planets is suitable for life. There needs to be a planet large enough to hold an atmosphere at the right distance to the sun. There probably also needs to be water on the planet. And it needs to have a magnetic field in order to protect it against solar winds.

With the current technology, it would take us more than 50.000 years to reach the nearest solar system, Proxima Centauri, which probably does not have a plant with life. Even with far more advanced technology the voyage would very likely take at least a numer of decades, if not centuries.

But lets say that by an astonishing conicidence one of the adavanced species live on one of planets in the solar systems near to us, say 10-20 lightyears away and they somehow managed to travel to Earth. I guess it is theoretically possible.

But then, according to the non-denialists, they just hang around here for decades (or some people believe even for centuries or millenia) without making formal contact and sometimes get seen by some people and sometimes they lose an aircraft for whatever reason and don't seem to be able to retrieve it before the US government seizes it, inspite of their advanced technology.

Sorry, but I am not convinced.

Double post

Quote from: Big Toe on July 19, 2023, 14:42

That is true. There is certainly non-human intelligence on this planet. I mentioned this before. There are chimpanzees, other great apes, dolphins and to a lesser degree cats and dogs and many other animals. And it is in fact a global phenomenon. Just recently, I detected a cat in my neighbours garden.

Very funny  Consider a career of a stand-up comedian

Thank you! However, having watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I know that is not so easy to make a living in that field.

If these claims are not true, then some high-ranking US officials are nuts, mentally unstable or whatever.

Yeah, what else is new?

Denialism at this stage is nothing else than a religious belief. I don't know if Grusch and others are nuts.

"Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, published a critique of the Grusch claims on June 22 with Big Think. Frank writes that he does "not find these claims exciting at all" because they are all "just hearsay" where "a guy says he knows a guy who knows another guy who heard from a guy that the government has alien spaceships".[24]"

From:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grusch_UFO_whistleblower_claims

In 1945, the troops of the USSR, mainly thanks to Ukrainian soldiers, very quickly occupied half of today's EU. And the Russians want to repeat it.

That was a totally different situation. The Soviets basically only had the German army as an opponent at that point, not the whole EU or NATO and they had massive help from the USA and the UK, partly by delivering large amounts of weapons and other goods to the Soviet Union and partly by attacking the Germans from the west at the same time. Not to mention the massive air strikes the western allies directed against the German cities.

But you can continue to cling to my words, find errors in my text and try to make me look like an idiot.

Stop posting nonsense like Merkel being a KGB agent, then you can avoid looking that way.

Quote from: Big Toe on July 15, 2023, 09:28

Quote from: stoker2014 on July 15, 2023, 06:15

Unfortunately, I cannot support only what is beneficial only to Ukraine. I understand that even if Trump was the best choice for Ukraine, this man organized the storming of the Capitol, and this is all very bad. I also understand that the policy of the Democrats can lead both to the defeat of Ukraine and to the occupation of half of the EU.

Trump is only the best choice for the Ukraine in some sort of parallel universe.

Probably the same universe where Merkel is a KGB agent, the Democrats have been in power in the US for 30 years and where Russia is going to invade Germany with the help of 5 million Ukrainians.

Quote from: stoker2014 on July 15, 2023, 05:30

Therefore, Ukraine is not a beggar who should say thanks to the US and the EU, but a full partner, whom the US and the EU should listen to and do what Ukraine says.

No, the Ukraine is not a beggar, but neither are they in a position where the US and the EU have to do everything the Ukraine tells them to.

Stop helping Ukraine and together we'll see how it ends for the EU. 

In 1945, the troops of the USSR, mainly thanks to Ukrainian soldiers, very quickly occupied half of today's EU. And the Russians want to repeat it.

But you can continue to cling to my words, find errors in my text and try to make me look like an idiot.

I never said that we should stop helping the Ukraine. In fact, I think we should help them more than we currently do, however, you have to understand that the European (and US) governments also have other obligations, particularly to minimize the risk of a nuclear war. For this and other reasons, the Ukraine will probably also in the future not get every weapon system they may wish for. And there is also no endless supply of the weapon systems they get from the west, because most European countries have downsized their armies considerably during the last decades. The German armed forces for example have only a few hundred Leopard II tanks themselves and only about 140 Eurofighters, with probably not nearly all of them operational. So we cannot really afford to transfer significant numbers of those weapons to the Ukraine, if any at all (in the case of the fighters).

Quote from: Big Toe on July 05, 2023, 09:55

Now, what could possibly be more lucrative than an infinite amount of money per hour?

You cannot have it both ways. Either you are doing stock photos because it is what you love, without financial considerations and then what does it matter that something else would earn you more money, when it is just a hobby?

Obviously that's absurd. It is a logical tool used to prove that the Jensen hypothesis is flawed.

My point is that Time is never free. Time costs money even when you do something you enjoy.
Time is probably our most expensive resource, and it must be accounted for.

Think about this:

Would you swap your life with Warren Buffet - one of the richest and most respected people in the world?
Or with a person with only 100 USD in her/his pocket?

Buffet is 92. The poor person is 18.

Doesn't your example show the opposite of what you claim? Obviously, there is no equivalency between money and time.

Buffet cannot buy himself more time with his money (or only to a limited degree with better healthcare) and the 18 year old person cannot necessarily monetize the years they have ahead of them.

Sure thing.

Then my ♾️/hour stands correct, since almost all my photos and videos are made while on vacation, or on trips paid by my company, thus I had zero production costs.
And since I also enjoy keywording, not just shooting and processing, then I also have zero keywording costs.

This makes my hourly rate ♾️/hour

Well, I guess you can see it that way. I would question, though, whether it makes sense for you to calculate an hourly rate at all, since in your case, you seem to be enjoying windfall profits for basically doing nothing, similar to winning the lottery. You would not usually calculate an hourly rate for that either.

no scientifically knowledgeable  person claims we descended FROM apes  -=-  instead, evolution shows we descended from a common  ancestor 6-9 million years ago, so there's no scientific reason for apes to disappear

That is a little inaccurate. Our most closely related living relative is the genus Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos). Together with them we form the taxon Hominini. The closest relativ of the Hominini is the gorilla and then in turn the orang utan. These species together form the familiy Hominidae (great apes or hominids).

Here you can see the relationship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominini

So, biologically speaking, humans are still great apes (a member of the family Hominidae). If you go with the common language usage, where the term great ape only refers to the non human members of that familiy, then you would have to say that we are descendants of great apes. If the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees would still be alive today, there can be no doubt that it would be classified as a great ape. Of course that is still no reason why great apes (or apes in general) should not be living today.

was searching for some of my ai on AS ---  for ai generated with keywords "venice gondola" not only did mine not show up in first few pages (not a  big concern here) but the first page & a half were filled with similars most of which had at best only tiny gondolas and none showed venice (more likely amalfi coast)


heres's the search  https://tinyurl.com/3z35792b

The results get a lot better when you switch from "Most Recent" to "Relevance" and go to the first page. The reality still beats AI by a fair margin, though.

Quote from: Big Toe on June 08, 2023, 18:11

Bernado Kastrup is a philosopher and not a physicist and therefor cannot to be expected to really understand quantum mechanics.

For what it's worth, Bernardo Kastrup worked at CERN. He literally helped to build technology for the Large Hadron Collider. That was his first job. He built technology for the world's top physicists when he was fresh out of university. I would assume he knows a thing or two about quantum physics. At least, much more than a "regular" philosopher. He only turned to philosophy later in life.

He seems to have worked as a kind of technician there. This does not necessarily mean that he has a deeper understanding of the physics involved.

Regarding quantum mechanics, it is possibly that he thinks that he understands it, however, that would mean that he does not understand it, as someone recently made me aware of:

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don�t understand quantum mechanics." � Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics

And if he does not think he understands quantum mechanics, then that would raise the questions why he feels he can argue about them with a physicist who has worked in the area.

Quote from: Big Toe on June 08, 2023, 17:21

The which-way detection can take place immediatley after the slit, but before the waves had a chance to interfere. After that it is too late to get the which-way information.

What you are suggesting is that generations of quantum physicists, including Nobel Prize winners, simply didn't set up their experiments properly and didn't have a clue what they were doing. Possible, but extremely unlikely.

This is not what I am suggesting. What I am saying is that some popular descriptions about what some of these experiments mean are very inaccurate and misleading.