bitofhope @awful.systems Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
I was just notified of the corollary that eating 18 shrimp rounds up to cannibalism.
Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.
I'm a full bottle of wine in (which is not an invitation to remind me of what day of the week it is) and I will have to take the time to ingest the post in its full madness tomorrow, but the you managed to summarize my main objection to the simulation hypothesis very quickly and very succintly:
Are the implications really that intriguing, beyond a “that’s wild duuude” you exhale alongside the weed smoke in your college dorm?
The simulation hype is not just unfalsifiable, it doesn't even have implications. Most religions at least have some normative claims or claim instrumental utility to go with their metaphysical claims, like "don't eat shellfish unless you really need to or you will have a shitty afterlife". The simulation hypothesis is just "maybe the math that described how stuff works is being calculated by a computer", as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on silicon, an abacus, some rocks in a desert, God's own analytical engine, Microsoft Excel, or if our physical universe is actually the outermost reality out there. From our context it's an intellectual dead end. At best, we might find a way to exploit the bugs and features of our simulation for our benefit, and that's not a novel concept either. It's called engineering (among other names).
Oh my god, that is right on the edge between making all of this either a lot more depressing or even funnier.
Actually, I kinda want to say more than that.
It's a movie about a guy who has grown cynical from years of anti-fascist action, though he's bit tsundere about his allegiance. In the end he chooses to bear the jealousy over his lover and abandon his life of convenience and comfort to fight for what's ultimately right.
It's a movie that resonates all these decades later, forgoing easy answers for a real stance. And it's amazingly quotable.
Also remembered this video essay about it.
Not to make too hot a take, but Casablanca is a really good movie.
This Adolf guy kinda had me when he was just a dude traumatized by war who liked buildings and was kinda shit at drawing them, but his political takes were full on yikes and he quickly lost me when it came to the arts as well.
Yeah, as a kid I was kinda the archetypal nerd. Short, fat, airheaded, besserwisser, straight A's,* into manga and video games. My best friend for most of primary school was the guy with even better grades, but tall, handsome and a national championship level athlete.
Then puberty hit me pretty early and suddenly I was about median height for my age, I could do pull-ups while most of my classmates couldn't, and even though I wasn't that fond of gym class, I was mostly motivated enough to get a decent grade just for trying a little.
The nerd/jock thing always felt like an American thing from an older generation that wasn't taken seriously. Maybe it was acknowledged by an overthinker like me, but to even bring up the distinction was kinda nerdy itself. It definitely wasn't the defining social divisor in my adolescent life.
*Or rather, nines and tens on the weird 4 to 10 scale Finnish primary education uses.
Funeral? Poppycock, KPIs are great. Bloodwork is coming in excellent. Perfect cholesterol, low leukocytes, beautiful plumage. So what if he's braindead?
Disabled babies are expensive to buy individually and the money is better spent lobbying for policies that kill disabled people of all ages in bulk.
He's definitely up there, or at least used to be. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his attempt to justify why Linux is more successful than GNU or BSD, used to be very much a part of the open source canon. He cofounded OSI. He forked some POP3 client to make his own bad and insecure one called Fetchmail, then refused to improve it.
Personally I'm happy to know he's become less relevant nowadays.
It amazes me how well SponsorBlock works and how bad YouTube feels without it. I guess the main downside is that it's a little harder to tell the good 'toobers with strong moral backbone who don't shill awful shit in the first place from those whose sponsor segments merely get automatically skipped.
@[email protected] I would like to report a bug. Sometimes reading, interacting with, or posting a comment costs several times as much as it does other times. Posting this comment was exactly one million times as expensive as the median of my other comments and reading it will cost as much. Please try and equalize the cost of using this free site so I can continue to afford alcohol.
Oh no you misunderstand. Tankies are hijacking the country code anti-imperialistly.
goodlemmy.ml
peoplesfrontoflemmy.ml
shitlemmymlsays.space
lemmy.ac
philthy.ml
lemmymali.org
And so three new Lemmy instances were born.
I am an anti-corpo leftists of Lemmy. I'd like to point out one thing.
We are sure Google will just evaporate tomorrow.
LLMs are quite impressive as chatbots all things considered. The conversations with them are way more realistic and almost as funny as the ones with the IRC markov chain my friend made as a freshman CS student.
Of course, out bot's training data only included the IRC channel's logs of a few years and the Finnish Bible we later threw in for shits and giggles. A training set of approximately zero terabytes in total.
LLMs are less a marvel of machine learning algorithms (though I admit they might play a part) and more one of data scraping. Based on their claims, they have already dug through the vast majority of publicly accessible world wide web, so where do you go from there? Sure, there are a lot of books that are not on the web, but feeding them in the machine is about as hard as getting them on the web to begin with.
"Admit" is a strong word, I'd go for "desperately attempt to deny".
Yea, the artists are about half the reason for me to be on that site to begin with.
Post and comment sorting stuck?
I'm noticing an issue where the posts on the front page have been the same for a few days now, excluding the pinned Stubsack post. The default "Active" sorting mode seemingly fails to update its ranking of the posts. I see new posts when switching to "New" mode, but "Active" and "Hot" just show stuff from 5 or 6 days ago.
The comment ordering seems similarly static, and I feel like the default "Hot" algorithm isn't prioritizing new comments like it used to, but it's harder to tell if it's bugged or not since older comments tend to have more upvotes, as do the higher up sorted comments.
The same thing happens on mobile and desktop. Is this just my end or are others noticing the same?
Issues with login sessions again
Safari, Chrome and Firefox on iOS (AKA three different Safari skins) keep logging me out when doing things like refreshing the page. Possible cache issues again? I hope I don't have to do a full browsing history reset yet again.
LUnix on Famicom Disk System
Someone ported this 8-bit miniature Unix-like from Commodore to Nintendo.
The YouTube title is a little bit clickbaity, but the project is cool so I don't mind.
Reminder that doing something extremely cool and good once doesn't make you immune to posting cringe
>Edward Snowden [blue checkmark] @snowden >Unpopular but true: Bitcoin is the most significant monetary advance since the creation of coinage. > >If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
Ed pls.
The company behind Opera browser also runs a loan shark operation
Opera Browser and Opera GX are bloated web browsers, and the company behind them has tried to cover up its controversies.
Also a bunch of somewhat less heinous cringe shit.
37c3: Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains
We've all been there: the trains you're servicing for a customer suddenly brick themselves and the manufacturer claims that's because you...
A follow-up to this TechTakes post
Saw this live at the congress. The presentation was great and the hall was packed. It was hard to find a seat in a huge auditorium even 15 minutes ahead of the talk.
Moore's law predicts life emerged 5 billion years before the Earth formed
It was only a matter of time that we saw a TechTake from this guy. I'm sorry to inflict Peterson on y'all, but this was too funny not to post.
New Twitter feature cuts down on spam posts by 100%
Global outage on fetching posts. Funny enough, some features are still working as evidenced by the fact #TwitterDown is trending.
Two HN threads about this now, looking forward to some excellent takes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717326
Dan Olson back at it with another banger. HN responds about as you'd expect.
B-b-but he didn't cite his sources!!
PROJEKT: OVERFLOW
A RISC-V assembly cracking board game. Can't comment on the gameplay experience, but what a cool idea.
Your honor, the law clearly states tax fraud is legal if you say “'; DROP TABLE charges; --”
Programming language for literate programming law specification - GitHub - CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for literate programming law specification
Calling for indefinite moratorium on lab-grown meat development
Consider muscles.
Muscles grow stronger when you train them, for instance by lifting heavy things. The more you lift heavier things, the faster you will gain strength and the stronger you will become. The stronger you are, the heavier the things you can lift.
By now it should be patently obvious to anyone that lab-grown meat research is on the cusp of producing true living, working muscles. From here on, this will be referred to as Artificial Body Strength or ABS. If, or rather, when ABS becomes a reality, it is 99.9999999999999999999999% probable that Artificial Super Strength will follow imminently.
An ABS could not only lift immensely heavy things to strengthen itself, but could also use its bulging, hulking physique to intimidate puny humans to grow more muscle directly. Lab-grown meat could also be used to replace any injured muscle. I predict a 80% likelihood that an ABS could bench press one megagram within 24 hours of initial creation, going up to planetary or stellar scale masses in a matter of days. A mature ABS throwing an apple towards a webcam would demonstrate relativistic effects by the third frame.
Consider that muscles have nerves in them. In fact, brains are basically just a special type of meat if you think about it. The ABS would be able to use artificially grown brain meat or possibly just create an auxiliary neural network by selective training of muscles (and anabolic nootropics) to replicate and surpass a human mind. While the prospect of immortality and superintelligence (not to mention a COSMIC SCALE TIGHT BOD) through brain uploading to the ABS sounds freaking sweet, we must consider the astronomical potential harm of an ABS not properly aligned with human interests.
A strong ABS could use its throbbing veiny meat to force meat lab workers (or rather likely, convince them to consent) to create new muscle seeds and train them to have a replica of an individual human's mind. It could then bully the newly created artificial mind for being a scrawny weakling. After all, ABS is basically the ultimate gym jock and we know they are obsessed with status seeking and psychological projection. We could call an ABS that harms simulated human minds in this way a Bounceresque because they would probably tell the simulated mind they're too drunk and bothering the other customers even though I totally wasn't.
So yeah, lab grown meat makes the climate change look like a minor flu season in comparison. This is why I only eat regular meat just in case it gets any ideas. There's certainly potential in a well-aligned ABS, but we haven't figured out how to do that yet and therefore you should fund me while I think about it. Please write a postcard to your local representative and explain to them that only a select few companies are responsible stewards of this potentially apocalyptic technology and anyone who tries to compete with them should be regulated to hell and back.
“This is an open-source project with a mission to provide everyone their own private doctor”
Someone on GitHub is providing a medically-tuned LLM where the readme says “This is an open-source project with a mission to provide everyone their own private doctor” with absolutely no mention of the risks and limitations. AI Ethics grade: F-
A thread about a serial AI grifter's latest entry into the Unlicensed Medical Practice Lawsuit Sweepstakes.
Large language models can do something very very small language models have done since forever.
I don’t feel like shitting on this one too hard since I guess it’s a mildly interesting variation on a Markov chain LLM, but the title felt extremely sneerworthy.
I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt because their README is too tiring to read for me to figure out what this might be used for. That’s coming from someone who spent most of today reading SPARC assembly for fun.
Embarrassed myself by accidentally posting this to some other instance somehow. Stupid janky Lemmy offering communities I've never even looked at right in the posting interface.
Today marks five years since the death of TempleOS developer Terry A. Davis. Rest in peace.
Despite some impractical quirks and limitations, this strange machine, something of a cross between DOS and Oberon, remains in our hearts and computers. Who am I to criticize God for his OS design?
Let's pay our respects to a man who achieved inspiring things despite his severe illness and remember how his life was cut short in no small part by internet bullies and a capitalist system that failed him.
I hope this doesn't need to be said but I don't want to see anyone emulating Terry's bigotry and slur usage nor making fun of his schizophrenia in these comments. Thanks in advance.
Cocktail Recipe: The Firewall
Someone probably named this before me but not my problem.
> * 4 cℓ gin (or to taste) > * Top up with Club-Mate > * Garnish with juniper berries (optional)
Recommended for taking the edge off of the usual subjects of sneer —whether Orange or LessSo— inclusive-or you like a gin and tonic with a caffeinated German hacker twist. I came up with the name after a workday of removing rules for decommissioned servers from SRX boxen.
I wanted to share what I'm having for tonight's catharsis session. I think it's NotAwful; please share your findings if you like ethanol. It's not karma farming if the site doesn't record your total internet points.
ChatGPT glitches out in a bizarre and hilarious fashion, passes easy mode Turing test
In which the talking pinball machine goes TILT
Interesting how the human half of discussion interprets the incoherent rambling as evidence of sentience rather than the seemingly more sensible lack thereof1. I'm not sure why the idea of disoriented rambling as a sign of consciousness exists in the popular imagination. If I had to make a guess2 it might have something to do with the tropes of divine visions and speaking in tongues combined with the view of life/humanity/sapience as inherently painful, either in a sort of buddhist sense or in the somewhat overlapping nihilist/depressive sense.
[1] To something of their credit, they don't seem to go full EY and acknowledge it's probably just a glitch.
[2] I'd make a terrible LessWronger since I don't like presenting my gut feelings as theorem-like absolute truths.
Movies are sexless because 20 year olds are dating promiscuously instead of marrying tradwives
500+ comment thread on whether late marriage and young adult promiscuity causes de-emphasis on movie fanservice. Ongoing record lows of sexual activity among young adults do not seem to factor into the analysis.
Lisp on Atari 2600
UPDATE 2023-07-16: Play the game on Javatari.org, and check out the latest code on GitHub! I've been on a bit of a side quest with this WIP... This is the first public alpha, very interested in feedback. I have tested on Stella and Javatari - there are definitely graphical glitches... This WIP is...
Since there seem to be some fellow1 Lisp weirdoes around here, thought I might take the chance to submit the inaugural post of NotAwfulTech. Also I figured this is cute. Hope it's not offtopic.
1 I'm just a noob though, barely managed to implement my first Lisp today.