Thank you for this! I have read Blindsight but I have long wondered why everyone thought it was so revolutionary. I kept thinking I was missing something. And I think this is it! In that I already thought/knew that everyone is basically sleepwalking through life and are not really conscious of what's going on.
I came to my conclusions on this mostly through my own studies on Illusions and other studies on consciousness. Knowing basic facts of how we see, and all the ways that our sight, touch and hearing really, fail us. Seeing the studies of how people who have their hemispheres separated can have parts of their body act independently of each other really blew my mind when I first learned about it.
Too many people believe that they themselves are sitting in a box and looking out through windows when really we're in a dark room reading a bunch of instruments and guessing what's out there. Plato's Cave is real and we are, all of us, already inside it.
It's just an analogy, you're not supposed to think too deeply about them.
The main take away for a lay person is that _like_ the mattress space is being deformed. That's where the analogy stops. Taking it further, like with all analogies, breaks the analogy.
If the analogy was a perfect one, then it would just be the reason and not an analogy.
My main gripe is how hard for most people it is to extrapolate that deformed mattress into a 3d space.
It's also a a problem because not all states are the same, some don't allow O, some do. Some allow 0, some don't! The cameras need to be able to read both.
The cameras that they have to read plates in a lot of different conditions and various states of cleanliness. Some states allow O and some states allow 0, and some states don't care. Combine the two issues and cops get lazy and want to check the plate with both the 0 and O just to "make sure".
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
I think at this point you need to consider how the human eye see color. It's not like each wavelength gets picked up and then communicated perfectly.
(I'm going to skip over some basic stuff, and use some generalities)
Each Cone in the eye responds to a range of frequencies. This means that things that unless it's on the extreme low, or high, end of the frequencies that the human eye can discern you are going to have two, or all three, Cone types responding. The strength of those responses is what your brain uses to interpret the color that you see.
The real problem is that out in space there is no attenuation of sunlight, it's bright. Super crazy bright. It basically overloads all of your Cones, and Rods, all at once, there is no way for your brain to find a signal of "oh there's more higher wavelengths here so interpret bluer than normal" because all of the signals got maxed out. If you max out all of the signals, you get white.
It doesn't matter that in absolute terms there's more blue, the lower and mid frequencies are also maxed out.
What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3.
In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
I have said much of the same about dune in my own life to others, about how the main thesis is "hard times make strong men, ...", but that still does boil down to might makes right.
Saying that the first book alone doesn't make any assertions about morality is somewhat hilarious. The baron is queer coded, so too is feyd, the "good guys" are strong manly men. Even just the idea that "hard times make strong men, .." is a morality in and of itself.
I never said I was uneasy about the idea of a white savior, you are reading far too much into my beliefs and ideals. I would also appreciate that you do not project onto my any of your imaginings of my own beliefs. You do not know me.
That said, if you have only read the first books you truly are getting only one small facet of the story that Herbert was trying to tell. A lot of what is laid out in the first novel is inverted and overturned by the 3rd and 4th novels.
Finally, you have written a lot about one book out of a long series of books. I would suggest that, like your wont to project some sort of belief onto me, you, too, are projecting too much upon just the first entry of a much, much, larger epic.
A lot of what is great about Dune are the inversions of the story past the first novel.
If you take the first book alone you're left with only one facet of a much grander story. You're also left with the idea a white savior story that says might makes right, which really isn't what was going on at all.
The point of Dune, or the Butlerian Jihad within Dune, isn't that Humans are more capable than the Thinking Machines. It is that Humans should be the author of their own destiny, that and the Thinking Machines were enslaving humanity and going to exterminate them. Just like how the Imperium was enslaving all of humanity and was going to lead to the extinction of humanity. This was seen, incompletely, by Paul and later, completely, by Leto II who then spent 10,000 years working through a plan to allow humanity to escape extinction and enslavement.
What if you had told it again that you don't think that's right? Would it have stuck to it's guns and went "oh, no, I am right here" or would it have backed down and said "Oh, silly me, you're right, here's the real dosage!" and give you again something wrong?
I do agree that to get the full usage out of an LLM you should have some familiarity with what you're asking about. If you didn't already have a sense of what a dosage is already, why wouldn't 100mcg be the right one?