ProfessorScience

HIPAA allows medical care providers to share your information with each other for the purposes of providing care (whether that sharing happens through MyChart or some other means). It does not require your consent (and this could be a good thing if, for example, you were taken to a hospital while unconscious). You simply may not have a lot of options for preventing this. As NOT_RICK mentioned, you could opt out of Care Everywhere at the psychiatric hospital to prevent them from sharing your information that way. You could also try to amend their record or request that they restrict access to your records, as per https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-regulations/index.html#general. All of those options would require interacting with the original psychiatric hospital, so if you're unwilling to do that, I'm not aware that there are other options available.

Small correction, but this bit isn't quite correct:

If you go just below light speed, you’ll see the world outside go past like it’s being fast forwarded, and when you return, 8 years will have been compressed into something that seems much shorter to you.

During the time that you are just below light speed at a constant velocity, clocks that are "stationary" will appear to be moving slow to you. And clocks moving with you will appear to be running slow for a "stationary" observer. As I mentioned in a comment in another reply, the trip would feel short to you because the distance to your destination would contract to nearly zero. "Fast forwarding" (ie, having both you and a stationary observer agree that more time has passed on the stationary observer's clock) would happen during the periods of acceleration/deceleration at the beginning and end of the trip.

Just want to add that what the person on the ship observes is length contraction. When their ship is at near light speed, the distance to their destination contracts to nearly zero (because it is moving at near light speed relative to them); this is why the trip seems short to them.

If I ran the zoo, then any AI that trained on intellectual property as if it were public domain would automatically become public domain itself.

One of my favorites is the "ladder paradox" in special relativity, although I originally learned is as a pole vaulter rather than a ladder:

A pole vaulter is running carrying a pole that is 12m long at rest, holding it parallel to the ground. He is running at relativistic speed, such that lengths dilate by 50% (this would be (√3/2)c). And he runs through a barn that is 10m long that has open doors in the front and back.

Imagine standing inside barn. The pole vaulter is running so fast that the length of the pole, in your frame of reference, has contracted to 6m. So while the pole is entirely inside the barn you press a button the briefly closes the doors, so that for just a moment the pole is entirely closed inside the barn.

The question is, what does the pole vaulter see? For him, the pole has not contracted; instead the barn has. He's running with a 12m pole through what, in his frame of reference, is a 5m barn. What happens when the doors shut? How can both the doors shut?

I will admit that I have never used this thought experiment for any practical end.

Maybe a jersey knit sheet?

and will we ever return to this singular state?

This is the "big crunch" question, and I think the current theory is that no, there's enough energy, and space is curved in such a way that it won't crunch back down. At least not all at once? We do have black holes that are sort of similar in that they pack so much stuff into small spaces that the current laws of physics are unable to completely describe them.

How do we know that this was the actual beginning of the universe?

We don't. It is "the beginning" in that it is the farthest back the laws of physics can be "rewound" before they break down (in the sense that once you rewind the clock back far enough, there's enough matter and energy in a small enough space that the interactions between quantum mechanics and gravity become increasingly relevant, and we just don't know how those play together; see Quantum gravity)

We know that space is expanding faster than light can travel. How do we know that the Universe isn’t trillions of years old, but we just can’t ever see it because it’s beyond the distance that the faintest detectable light can travel?

We don't. But there's no evidence to suggest that the universe outside of what we can see might be different from the parts we do see. We can't really speak much about what's outside of our light cone (what we can see). All we can say is that the parts we do see all looks basically the same (homogeneous, astronomically speaking).

43% of people:

4: English, Spanish, French, and Japanese Bonus: Yes

I installed linux on my PC a couple months ago. The other day I wanted to log back into my windows partition for the first time in a while in order to clean up some of the files on that partition (even though the drive is mounted in linux, the windows "fast boot" option apparently leaves it in a state that linux considers read-only). Windows apparently wouldn't let me log in without a microsoft account, instead of just using my regular windows username.

So yeah, that partition's gone now. No going back!

Cherry-picking a couple of points I want to respond to together

It is somewhat like a memory buffer but, there is no analysis being linguistics. Short-term memory in biological systems that we know have multi-sensory processing and analysis that occurs inline with “storing”. The chat session is more like RAM than short-term memory that we see in biological systems.

It is also purely linguistic analysis without other inputs out understanding of abstract meaning. In vacuum, it’s a dead-end towards an AGI.

I have trouble with this line of reasoning for a couple of reasons. First, it feels overly simplistic to me to write what LLMs do off as purely linguistic analysis. Language is the input and the output, by all means, but the same could be said in a case where you were communicating with a person over email, and I don't think you'd say that that person wasn't sentient. And the way that LLMs embed tokens into multidimensional space is, I think, very much analogous to how a person interprets the ideas behind words that they read.

As a component of a system, it becomes much more promising.

It sounds to me like you're more strict about what you'd consider to be "the LLM" than I am; I tend to think of the whole system as the LLM. I feel like drawing lines around a specific part of the system is sort of like asking whether a particular piece of someone's brain is sentient.

Conversely, if the afflicted individual has already developed sufficiently to have abstract and synthetic thought, the inability to store long-term memory would not dampen their sentience.

I'm not sure how to make a philosophical distinction between an amnesiac person with a sufficiently developed psyche, and an LLM with a sufficiently trained model. For now, at least, it just seems that the LLMs are not sufficiently complex to pass scrutiny compared to a person.