Do a philosophy minor if you have any affinity for it. Do a major in something that pays. Use that set of big picture critical thinking + a decent fallback plan to secure yourself. Then decide later in life what you love to do

I think it’s pretty worthwhile being paranoid about Tor. Not because of hackers, but because of the government, they are clearly watching all the forums and markets there very closely, setting up agents and honeypots. Tor itself may or may not be secure, you never really know for sure. For pretty much all legal privacy usecases, a VPN is enough, and much more performant

Install this sign into your home to automate gaslighting your partner

I really don’t understand why lemmy hates ai so much. I get massive productivity gains every day from AI. I agree with this exec that we probably won’t hit AGI using current tech or maybe ever, but we still have:

• incredibly useful image generation that dramatically speeds up the work of designers
• coding agents that, when used skillfully, generate usable code, and review code pretty well in PRs
• suno, which can generate stems that my musician friends are regularly using instead of having to hunt through the Internet for days for the right trumpet melody

How this translates to profit is unclear since there is a race to the bottom, companies are choosing to give away the tech to gain market share rn, but the technology is undeniably useful, and already rolled out inside of every major tech company

*these dice

There’s a whole school of philosophy that has argued about this for … Well forever, but especially the last 100 years, the philosophy of mind. The problem is definition: what does it mean to think. Some may argue that it requires consciousness, but then the problem of definition is what the hell is consciousness?

So on the trivial side, yes, of course computers can think, if thoughts are nothing special. Computers have states, they can react to and inspect their own states. Is that thinking? LLMs use something like neural networks modeled after the mind to generate streams of words, and encode knowledge and concepts using statistics. Is that thinking?

On the other side, well no, computers don’t think because they don’t have souls. Are souls real? Or maybe there’s more to human thinking than just neural networks, like quantum effects? Or more complexity due to chemical biology? Is the ability to answer a question the same thing as understanding a concept (see Chinese room experiment)?

These are the questions that philosophers love to masturbate with, publish many papers on, and make no real progress towards. Definitions are funny like that

Guns?

Wow holy crap, great work - the world badly needs this. Im assuming the mechanism is the same, you inject a js script into your site. I’m also very interested in pure server side solutions for analytics, but they can’t hit all the features you did in a generic way afaik

Might as well just run Linux at that point and if you want android apps, waydroid. The value prop of Chromebooks was supposed to be that you can just factory reset it at any point and log back in

Eyyyy SteamOS, Arch + KDE. This looks like a great product. ETA: 2037

And so the gap between the classes widens again. 1.2m in interest on a 420k asset, paid over your entire adult life. Imagine being stuck paying >2000$/month for life to a bank, BUT with the additional costs of maintenance & probably an HOA & rising property taxes. At that point, renting is the only option, but the prices of that will rise too. So GG capitalism, it’s time to tape leaves to a tent and live in the middle of a roundabout with your 4 cats and a handgun

Yeah sure you can do that but people won’t listen. What I mean by thought police is actually doing policing, like “no you can’t say that or we will arrest you” which goes against the idea of freedom of speech. It’s reminiscent of when ussr was jailing karate teachers

Well yes, and I think it’s probably true, you can use one model to train another, effectively cloning it. It seems like it’s much more expensive to make the first round of good models. Part of the argument could be that openai/anthropic are actually still driving the frontier, developing the researchers and expertise to do that, and continuing to innovate the tech

Yeah you can’t do a thought police

Yeah, the situation got resolved when harm came in. You gotta commit an actual crime to be punished right? I’m familiar with the documentary and actually have friends who continue to be followers of Osho’s teachings. It’s not all bad, there was a lot of very good outcomes for some people’s health and wellness there too, the documentary frames it as a situation where the second in command basically drugged him and became an egomaniac. Shit happens. When evaluating cults, which are basically just small religions, the best criteria is about how much they help their constituents and community vs how much do they demand from them. It’s worth noting that many of the cults of America’s past were more Christian branded and became gigantic, with some mix of outcomes. But the alternative of not allowing people to express the freedoms of religion and speech would be much worse in my opinion

We don’t, that’s what freedom of religion means. If it gets overly militant or political, then there are already mechanisms that come and raid and disband them, which we have seen many times in the history of America

The mind while lucid dreaming is creating a whole environment, which for some people has incredible level of detail. Your “consciousness” is experiencing a whole video game or whatever, which must be simulated to be percieved. Imagine you had some kind of really advanced VR setup and body suit that could touch your senses very richly - something must be feeding that perception, a simulation

People who are lucid dreaming simulate a full reality that’s nearly indistinguishable from the one they find themselves in during waking time. If your brain can’t tell the difference during this time, how can you be sure you’re not dreaming right now reading this?

The scope of what a simulation is has always been limited by the technology we know. It is only a failing of imagination and knowledge to assume that algorithmic computation is the only valid form of simulation in the future, these have existed for barely 100 years, but even Plato’s cave was talking about the larger philosophical problem

This is such a boring take, I wonder how anyone gets funding or publication making a statement as useless as “see godels incompleteness theorem that proves that there’s more truth than what mathematics can prove, therefore reality is not a simulation”. Yes, we know, you don’t need a PhD to know the major theorem that took down the entire school of logical positivism. The fundamental philosophical error here is assuming that all forms of simulation are computational or mathematical. Counterexample: your dreams are a form of simulation (probably). So I can literally disprove this take in my sleep

Hawaii already doesn’t do DST … Since 1967