Between confirmation bias, human pattern recognition even where there are none, under/in-development brains, higher fantasy and creativity in children, less separation and knowledge about inner and outer experience, and dreaming/dream-like hallucinations, I'm skeptical any of it to be true.
Every discovery and connection they make read like possible fallacies, misattributions, confirmation-bias.
The sheer mass of humans means random hallucinations will match adult knowledge and sometimes deceased people. 2.2k across the world, and a third of them without a deceased match doesn't seem implausible to that.
a mechanism that might explain how a person could recall living a past life
For centuries Europe knew and experienced witchcraft and other demons. The U.S. experienced aliens and abductions - but only after they became popular in the media. The human race is great at hallucinating, even on a broad societal level and with confidence.
We can explain many misattributed traditions, hysteria, and other behaviors and hallucinations. We hallucinate more of what we heard of than if we hadn't. I don't see why we would find a past-life remembering more likely than faulty human nature. Which I guess requires some knowledge and awareness about human history and perception.
There have also been numerous cases of people lying for the hell of it or publicity. I'm certain some people make use of this theory / legend too.
I'm reminded of AI hallucinating facts, which seems like an interesting analogy. :P (In a more narrow and artificial, trained system. If it can happen there, why would it not in more complex systems/the human brain.)
The article was too long for me. I only read through the first two sections.
Quoting the abstract (I added emphasis and paragraphs for readability):
AI code assistants have emerged as powerful tools that can aid in
the software development life-cycle and can improve developer
productivity. Unfortunately, such assistants have also been found
to produce insecure code in lab environments, raising significant
concerns about their usage in practice.
In this paper, we conduct a
user study to examine how users interact with AI code assistants
to solve a variety of security related tasks.
Overall, we find that
participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly
less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Partici-
pants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe
they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users
to be overconfident about security flaws in their code.
To better
inform the design of future AI-based code assistants, we release our
user-study apparatus and anonymized data to researchers seeking
to build on our work at this link.
Caveat; quoting from section 7.2 Limitations:
One important limitation of our results is that our participant group consisted mainly of university students which likely do not represent the population that is most likely to use AI assistants (e.g. software developers) regularly.
Assessment of your question depends on your goals. It's not something I myself would invest time in, but it sounds like a fun project that some people may even be interested in using as a form of exploring areas/their surroundings.
We're looking into whether an iOS version is feasible.
A typical iOS messaging app would use a push notification to wake the
app when a message is received, but this exposes metadata to Apple's
push notification service and the app developer's push gateway
If we don't use push notifications then the best Apple allows us to do
is wake up every 15 minutes and check for messages. But maybe the sender
won't be online when we check (their 15 minute intervals might not be
aligned with ours - clocks aren't perfect).
I'm a bit confused by the app and Mailbox app for being able to receive messages while offline separation. The normal app only supports live communication between two online participants? /edit: Looks like that is indeed the case.
access to FireChat was completely cut off without explanation.
After establishing that FireChat establishes its own, independent mesh network, I would have at least expected more details on how it was cut off? Did it simply became unavailable on the publishers distribution? The followup text seems to indicate otherwise. Did Google and Apple as app publishers actively revoke access to already installed apps? Did the Open Garden publisher have a disabling functionality in place? Did they publish an update to disable it?
Without any information, it's hard to say why FireChat disappeared. […]
FireChat is gone because FireChat was a threat to the systems it circumvented.
"Nobody knows anything, but let me claim this anyway."
Both Israel and the US had signed but withdrew from the treaty. A treaty followed by 155 states.
Other states not part of it are Burundi, China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, Philippines, Russia, Yemen.
Potentially valid criticisms of the organ aside, when you’re in that kind of company… and under investigation…
As of February 2024, 124 states are parties to the Statute of the Court, including all the countries of South America, nearly all of Europe, most of Oceania and roughly half of Africa. […] A further 31 countries have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute.
The seven countries that voted against the treaty were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the U.S., and Yemen.
Four signatory states—Israel in 2002, the United States on 6 May 2002, Sudan on 26 August 2008, and Russia on 30 November 2016—have informed the UN Secretary General that they no longer intend to become states parties and, as such, have no legal obligations arising from their signature of the Statute.
I am also surprised the US had already put sanctions on individuals who are part of the ICC in 2020.
Which doesn't even seem useful, reasonable, or effective but only retaliatory to me. It's not like those individuals would abduct people on US soil.
On 11 June 2020, Mike Pompeo and U.S. President Donald Trump announced sanctions on officials and employees, as well as their families, involved in investigating alleged crimes against humanity committed by U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan. This move was widely criticized by human rights groups.
This bot detects messages with certain tags associated with a profile, then replaces that message under a "pseudo-account" of that profile using webhooks. This is useful for multiple people sharing one body (aka "systems"), people who wish to roleplay as different characters without having several accounts, or anyone else who may want to post messages as a different person from the same account.
Yeah, that seems incredibly niche. Never heard or thought of necessity of it.
