Mlem handles it with no problems

People being convinced that something is conscious is a long, long way from a compelling argument that something is conscious. People naturally anthropomorphize, and a reasonably accurate human speech predictor is a prime example of something that can be very easily anthropomorphized. It is also unsurprising that LLMs have developed such conceptual nodes; these concepts are fundamental to the human experience, thus undergird most human speech, and it is therefore not only unsurprising but expected that a system built to detect statistical patterns in human speech would identify these foundational concepts.

“So rocks are conscious” isn’t, at least in my opinion, the classic counter to panpsychism; it’s an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, but not a very good one, as the panpsychist can very easily fall back on the credible argument that consciousness comes in degrees, perhaps informed by systematic complexity, and so the consciousness of a rock is to the consciousness of a person as the mass of an atom is to the mass of a brain.

The problem with panpsychism is, and has always been, that there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s true. It’s a pleasingly neat solution to Chalmers’ “hard problem” of neuroscience, but ultimately just as baseless as positing the existence of an all-powerful God through whose grace we are granted consciousness; that is, it rests on a premise that, while sufficiently explanatory, is neither provable nor disprovable.

We ultimately have absolutely no idea how consciousness arises from physical matter. It is possible that we cannot know, and that the mechanism is hidden in facets of reality that the human experience is not equipped to parse. It is also possible that, given sufficiently advanced neuroscience, we will be able to offer a compelling account of how human consciousness arises. Then—and only then—will we be in a position to credibly offer arguments about machine intelligence. Until then, it is simply a matter of faith. The believers will see a sufficiently advanced language model and convince themselves that there is no way such a thing is not conscious, and the disbelievers will repeat the same tired arguments resting on the notion that a lack of proof is tantamount to a disproof.

Not a huge beach guy, but I live for the summer. 80F is the ideal temperature; anything up to 100 is great too, as long as I don’t need to perform prolonged manual labor outside. Long sunny days make my lizard soul happy, and all of my best clothes are summer clothes.

“Never use a knife as anything but a knife or you’ll end up disappointed and with a broken knife.”

Not sure where I heard that first, but it’s stuck with me.

I have a friend who was a classic Catholic libertarian in college–he held some views on trans rights, abortion, and economic justice that I find deeply disagreeable. It made conversations a little tricky because there were a whole set of topics I couldn’t bring up unless I wanted to wade into a debate immediately; sometimes I did, but often I just wanted to hang out and chill and that was hampered.

It took him exactly one year of being out of college and working a real job to realize that his economic views were fucked, and the whole rest of it unraveled from there. He’s now a staunch leftist, and it’s way, way easier to hang out with him.

That’s not, however, to say it’s not worth having friends you disagree with. We remained friends because we were able to disagree productively, and I feel I understand my own political views far better for all those long nights discussing them. Still, it was a friendship that took unusual effort to maintain.

Haven’t seen this one on Mlem

My big dumb orange boy loves to sit right in front of the subwoofer. I guess he’s a metalhead at heart.

~In a modern title designed to be played at 60+, definitely. I’ve been having a blast in dark souls 1 and GTA:SA recently, both of which are capped at 30. Older games are made to work at that FPS, and it takes remarkably little time to adjust and have it feel normal. If I tried to play armored core at 30fps, on the other hand, I think I’d rip my teeth out in frustration.~

Edit: misinterpreted the comment above as “unless it’s VR (i.e., in all cases except VR), you are not having fun” rather than “unless it’s VR, in which case you are not having fun.”

Nuclear power isn’t renewable. Joule for joule, our reserves of nuclear fuel and petroleum are comparable. It’s a decent bandaid, but between the finite fuel supply and the nuclear waste problem it’s hardly the future and should be used as sparingly as needed to get us off of oil and onto renewables.

I presumed it to be a standin for just directly using Math.max, since there’s no nice way to show that in a valid code snippet

Not using thief is professional incompetence unless you’re doing something deeply cursed

I’ve been perusing their website for a little while now, and there is a rough pattern:

At least for acoustics:

• The first two letters are the series. This is the most variable component, but follows some loose guidelines:
  • The initial letter is often indicative of what what onboard electronics that series of guitar comes with, even if the particular guitar doesn’t have them (C guitars come with Fishman CD-1, F come with Fender, P come with Fender/Fishman sonitone plus). This letter is sometimes omitted (see the simple D10 dreadnought)
  • The second (or first, if there is only one) letter generally indicates the body style. D is dreadnought, C is concert, B is bass (or banjo!), O is orchestra (?)
• The number generally indicates quality. Bigger number more expensive within a series.
• S after the number indicates a solid top (no S indicates laminate)
• C after the number indicates a single cutaway body
• E at the end indicates that the guitar has onboard electronics

Personally I found the combat as fun and balanced as can be expected in a game where power scaling is not directly tied to progress. If you just fuck around doing side quests and farming loot for 20 hours, it’s going to feel super easy, and if you try to blitz the story and run early game stuff then enemies will feel like bullet sponges. That’s just a mechanic endemic to the open world rpg genre. My first playthrough I did side missions as I stumbled across them on my way through the story, and the combat felt pretty balanced. Second time I went much more methodically and ended up cruising through story missions like nobody’s business.

Are you FOSS?

Mlem. There isn’t really a main reason. I like it because:

• It’s native SwiftUI, so it feels super snappy and “Apple-y” the same way Apollo used to
• It’s FOSS (though that’s sort of table stakes around here)
• The widget customizer thingy on the beta build is absolutely fantastic
• It’s not ugly. There are a bunch of apps that just sorta aped the Apollo UI without any of the attention to detail
• I have a ton of faith in the stability of the dev team. There was a bunch of drama early in its development and I was pretty sure the project was going to die, but it didn’t and it’s been (as far as I can tell) smooth ever since

My only gripes are that the scrolling is still sometimes funky on the beta build and development isn’t the fastest, but once all the apps are in their fully-built stable state I think Mlem is absolutely going to stand out among the crowd.

There are a lot of good resources in this thread, but nobody has mentioned the single most important part by far:

actually practice philosophy

Study is worthless if you don’t engage in the practice of philosophy. Find people to debate with, preferably ones who have a formal grounding (and I mean a real debate, where you make reasoned arguments and investigate the truth of a matter, not the bullshit-flinging points game that gets popular online). Write arguments, revise them, give them to people to tear them apart.

The literature is good, but it will only teach you (a) how philosophers approach questions, (b) what arguments and counterarguments have been successful or popular, and © what the big questions are. If you do not practice philosophy, you will never learn philosophy; you will only learn what philosophers have said.

Yet another thing the lord of the rings movies absolutely nail. The evolution of the Rohirrim theme from a single lonely violin when Gandalf and co. arrive in Edoras to a grand orchestral arrangement over the assembled host gets me every time.

Passed mine first try. It helps to take it somewhere suburban-almost-rural–the roads will be way easier and the instructors are more inclined to pass people because it’s much more important for people in those places to have licenses.

This isn’t a coin and doesn’t appear to be an attempt at fraud, though

Mlem. I miss Apollo dearly, and used Voyager for a bit, but while it’s faithfully aped the UI you can feel that it’s mobile in a way I just can’t stand–it’s sludgy and just subtly off. Mlem is snappy and feels at home on an iPhone in the same way Apollo did, even if it’s still a little rough around the edges.