They’re talking about the visions of sci-fi authors, filmmakers, and artists. The tech Bros are the ones being drawn towards those artists’ visions.

IMO if we ever get to a point that pulling information from the Internet is as simple as “remembering” it the same way we remember any other information, that could have both significant advantages over having to first read the data visually to ingest it, and terrifying potential to implant “facts” into someones mind.

I think it depends on the project. Some projects are the author’s personal tools that they’ve put online in the off-chance it will be useful to others, not projects they are really trying to promote.

I don’t think we should expect that authors of repos go too out of their way in those cases as the alternative would just be not to publish them at all.

Yeah, actually moderating an online space with even modest activity is fucking hard and takes a shitton of time.

I think a lot of people underestimate the effort involved and quickly lose interest once it becomes apparent.

That’s a really interesting perspective I didn’t think I’ve seen before. Thanks for posting.

I know I learned it in high school at one point but definitely isn’t something I would have been able to recall on my own.

I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

Your example is a really really good one.

At a sketch:

• We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted

• You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.

• While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.

• Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.

• If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.

• If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.

There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.

Why would you assume consciousness is a fundamental force rather than an emergent property of complex systems built on the forces?

Not a treasure

In many cases it should be fine to point them all at the same server. You’ll just need to make sure there aren’t any collisions between schema/table names.

I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

Same. I write FOSS software in my free time and also paid.

Man, I really think you should either saddle up, don’t block ads, or use a free, non-ad-supported alternative.

Sync is made by a single dev who uses it as his main source of income. It’s not made by a corporation. Taking the fruits of someone’s labor, that they have priced to make it worth their time, feels kinda shitty to me.

If you really feel it’s so much better than the alternatives that you won’t even use them, then pay what the person making it feels they need to keep making it.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

Lol, Texas and Florida are doing a good enough job of knocking themselves down without help from me.

Except in a true free market zoning laws wouldn’t keep adorable, high density housing from being constructed to artificially boost housing prices.

Other than that I agree with you.

I agree with the other poster that you need to define what you even mean when you say free will. IMO, strict determinism is not incompatible with free will. It only provides the mechanism. I posted this in another thread where this came up:

The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.

In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.

In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.

One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.

Except.

We are looking at this through an implied assumption that the brain is some mechanism, separate from “us”, which we are forced to think “through”. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.

But there is no deeper “self”. We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it’s statistical and we just have a baked “likelihood” of that response.

The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it’s deterministic or not it’s just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.

This reminded me of an old joke:

Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other “I’ll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit”. To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.

A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he’ll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.

Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they’ve accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.

The two economists look rather taken aback. “Well sure,” they say, “but we’ve grown the economy by two million dollars!”

I joined the Star Trek instance solely because I like startrek.website being in my handle.