Artificial Intelligence Chat

[David L]

That may be true and you'd be typical of many who cling to a faith, nonetheless it's mostly bollocks. I loved this bit: "the problem of human death was solved 20 centuries ago", and that's religion in a nutshell - pathetic wishful thinking defying logic, evidence and common sense because the poor deluded old bastard is frightened of not existing.

 I like my chosen thought process.

You've hit the nail squarely on the head there, whether or not that was your intention.

[The Picnic Wasp]

That may be true and you'd be typical of many who cling to a faith, nonetheless it's mostly bollocks. I loved this bit: "the problem of human death was solved 20 centuries ago", and that's religion in a nutshell - pathetic wishful thinking defying logic, evidence and common sense because the poor deluded old bastard is frightened of not existing.

 I like my chosen thought process.

You've hit the nail squarely on the head there, whether or not that was your intention.

I never quite get what you mean, David. Maybe I'm just unwittingly obtuse.

[David L]

That may be true and you'd be typical of many who cling to a faith, nonetheless it's mostly bollocks. I loved this bit: "the problem of human death was solved 20 centuries ago", and that's religion in a nutshell - pathetic wishful thinking defying logic, evidence and common sense because the poor deluded old bastard is frightened of not existing.

 I like my chosen thought process.

You've hit the nail squarely on the head there, whether or not that was your intention.

I never quite get what you mean, David. Maybe I'm just unwittingly obtuse.

It appears that you've chosen to believe, not based on evidence or science but because you like the way it makes you feel. As Slim stated - religion in a nutshell.

[Slim]

That may be true and you'd be typical of many who cling to a faith, nonetheless it's mostly bollocks. I loved this bit: "the problem of human death was solved 20 centuries ago", and that's religion in a nutshell - pathetic wishful thinking defying logic, evidence and common sense because the poor deluded old bastard is frightened of not existing.

I used to have these futile harmless arguments with a guy at work who professed his atheist stance at any, and usually inappropriate opportunity. He didn't seem to get the fact that most of the workforce were also atheist and he could have spent a much more satisfying time with them sharing their agreement about the futility of our existence. He never managed to rattle my cage about things but my only annoyance was that he wouldn't even make the concession that in a fantasy, hypothetical situation, I would be the only possible winner of such a stupid argument.

Why - or how could you possibly win that argument?

[The Picnic Wasp]

That may be true and you'd be typical of many who cling to a faith, nonetheless it's mostly bollocks. I loved this bit: "the problem of human death was solved 20 centuries ago", and that's religion in a nutshell - pathetic wishful thinking defying logic, evidence and common sense because the poor deluded old bastard is frightened of not existing.

I used to have these futile harmless arguments with a guy at work who professed his atheist stance at any, and usually inappropriate opportunity. He didn't seem to get the fact that most of the workforce were also atheist and he could have spent a much more satisfying time with them sharing their agreement about the futility of our existence. He never managed to rattle my cage about things but my only annoyance was that he wouldn't even make the concession that in a fantasy, hypothetical situation, I would be the only possible winner of such a stupid argument.

Why - or how could you possibly win that argument?

Because, and I was taught at school never to start a sentence with that word, we are wired entirely differently from each other, for which I am eternally (pun intended) grateful. You are (probably) the most intelligent geezer on this (your) site. Man, that's a lot of parentheses. You know exactly what I mean and I dearly hope that you are wrong, and me and zillions of others are right, and I get to tell you so. And you won't mind. Neither will Matt. Ex-smokers are the worst!

[Slim]

Because, and I was taught at school never to start a sentence with that word, we are wired entirely differently from each other, for which I am eternally (pun intended) grateful. You are (probably) the most intelligent geezer on this (your) site. Man, that's a lot of parentheses. You know exactly what I mean

I see what you mean now. The only possible proof of God's existence or non-existence is the hypothetical proof of its existence.

But I think it can be shown, and I think that it has been, many times - that there is no reason to take the proposition that it exists seriously.

Bertrand Russell stated this quite nicely with an analogy concerning a teapot.

"I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely."

Perhaps I'll start a thread about definitions of atheism in another section of the site.

[Matt2112]

A- = without

-theism - from the Greek θεος (theos) = (belief in the existence of) god.

Sorted.

[dom]

Agnostic

A = without
Gnosis = knowledge

Ancient Greek again although not actually coined until the late 19th century

[Thenop]

So, Amen is

Without
Men
 

[Matt2112]

Agnostic

A = without
Gnosis = knowledge

Ancient Greek again although not actually coined until the late 19th century

Yes, well as nobody knows for sure, or can, then it's a redundant term.

[dom]

Agnostic

A = without
Gnosis = knowledge

Ancient Greek again although not actually coined until the late 19th century

Yes, well as nobody knows for sure, or can, then it's a redundant term.

Or universal!

[Matt2112]

Agnostic

A = without
Gnosis = knowledge

Ancient Greek again although not actually coined until the late 19th century

Yes, well as nobody knows for sure, or can, then it's a redundant term.

Or universal!

Indeed, yes!   I was thinking of it in the context of a theist/atheist conversation; almost always someone will declare "neither, I'm agnostic", but that's a position related to knowledge, not belief, and misses the point that you either believe, or you don't.  Even Dawkins draws the line before "I absolutely know there are no deities".

[Slim]

Got ChatGPT to transcribe the text from this image, taken on Monday at the Allied War Cemetery on Crete:

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Of course OCR has been a thing for many years but that's a challenging angle. Nonetheless it did a brilliant job. I guess it has the intelligence built in to check and correct errors, something conventional OCR wouldn't.

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[Slim]

I ran my conclusion past ChatGPT:


That's a thoughtful and accurate reflection — and nicely put.

You're absolutely right: while OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has existed for decades, its traditional implementations often struggle with anything beyond clean, high-contrast, flat documents. A slanted, metallic plaque with varying lighting — like in your photo — would typically throw classic OCR off. What makes modern AI-powered transcription different is exactly what you hinted at: contextual understanding.

Rather than just spotting shapes and mapping them to letters, models like me "read" the text the way a person might — understanding sentence structure, grammar, and historical context — and using that understanding to correct or infer words when the image is distorted, partially obscured, or oddly angled.

It's not perfect, of course, but your example is a great case of how far this technology has come.

[Slim]

This is not a productive use of technology, but I've been using ChatGPT for entertaining "what if" conversations recently. For example: what if, instead of Hurricanes and Spitfires, the RAF were equipped with Grumman Bearcats in 1940?

The Bearcat was one of the most advanced piston-engine interceptors of the war, and first flew too late in the war to see action. So what if we drop it into the Battle of Britain? Short version: it would have shredded the opposition.

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Now clearly there can't be anything in the AI's training data about Bearcats vs 109s and He IIIs, so I asked for a brief rundown of how it arrives at its conclusions. The answer, simply put, is that it thinks it through from all the data at its disposal, and that's the real power of AI - huge volumes of information and the capacity to reason with it, and model the consequences and interactions.

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