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2 yr. ago

  • There's two separate addictions going on with smoking: habit and chemical. What patches, nicotine gum, etc are trying to help people do is tackle them separately.

    This means you can focus on getting out of the habit of lighting up after a coffee, or after a meal, or whatever triggers you had, while delaying the chemical withdrawal which seriously messes with your head until later. Tackling the two seperately is easier for many people.

    With that said, patches don't work for everyone, and I hope you find the cessation aid (if any) that works for you. Quitting smoking is an absolute bitch.

    For me personally, the most helpful aid was nicotine gum, and then swapping out the nicotine gum for normal gum once I was confident I'd kicked the habit part and could focus on the chemical withdrawal.

  • The kitchen is operated by volunteers and rely on donations and food banks. I Believe this is also common practice in many temples within India proper.

    Here's a great little mini-documentary on that I saw on exactly that a few months back. Sikh temples seem amazing in terms of the sheer numbers of people they feed with no limiting criteria.

  • Lol, took me a minute to figure out you're literally talking about a football match happening now. I was re-reading my comment thinking "Wait, what's this got to do with Ukraine? Did the Romanian government do something that hit the news I don't know about? What does this mean?!?" xD

  • Probably most countries think so of themselves.

    Funnily enough, Romanians are the exact opposite in this regard. Romanians tend to think that Romania is terrible, backwards, and filled with awful people. That isn't exactly the case (like any country, it has it's pros and cons, and there's a lot we need to work on) but it is how they tend to see it.

  • to have this relationship between A and B you have to make a third database

    Probably just a mistake here, but you make a third table, not a new database.

    Apart from that (and the fact that one to many and many to one is the same thing), yeah, looks correct.

  • Even the question of "who" is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the "who" doing the thinking in the first place :))

  • So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

    The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are "simply" more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

    Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

    While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn't cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

    Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

    There's many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as "the force that pushes you downwards".

    To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito's brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I'm not saying we'll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I'm just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

  • That's a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

  • This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That's what they are.

  • I'm happy with the Oxford definition: "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills".

    LLMs don't have knowledge as they don't actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

    If asked to answer 10*5, they can't reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren't in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.

  • No, I'm not talking about the 1936 constitution. I meant specifically the disempowerment of local and union soviets.

    I'm no expert on Russian history, so I may be misinformed about this, but as far as I understand it he put in place a series of reforms that stripped power from the local level and empowered the central committee.

  • Are the concepts of freedom and working towards collective good so mutually exclusive?

    Not necessarily, and I also disagree with the commenter above that without the USA suddenly the world would be singing kumbaya.

    The problem was dictators seizing power in turbulent times. In Russia, Stalin abolished the soviets (A.K.A worker's councils, kinda like mega unions) in the Soviet union. I think that says a lot.

    In Romania (I'm a bit better equipped to talk about this one), things were a bit different.

    The original communist government (1945) was essentially a Russian puppet state that drained the wealth of Romania via war reparations. Stalinist purges happened often during this period.

    During the 1950s and early 1960s, Romania got a degree of independence and things were actually looking up. Society in general (infant mortality, gender equality, literacy, standard of living, etc) were all improving rapidly without Russia draining us and making decisions for us, and we didn't have a surveilance state of the scale that would come later. This was a period marked by political battles between the liberal communists and the Stalinist communists for control, with Stalinists commiting some pretty horrible atrocities (if you want nightmare fuel for some reason, look up the Pitesti experiment).

    Then, 1965, Ceacescu took power. During his early years, he actually looked like a liberal (EDIT: Just to be clear: I mean a liberal communist. This means more individual freedom for citizens in a communist economy). He allowed some emigration, some free speech, and even spoke out about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This, at the start, did not look like a typical authoritarian communist state. Unfortunately, Inspired by the "amazing" society of North Korea in 1971, he started to make changes in the structure of society to be more like it, which included an expanded Securitate. 2 years later, harsh austerity policies to repay foreign loans led to a massive drop in living conditions, which led to riots, which led to crackdowns. Things rapidly spiralled, and the Securitate were given more and more power to keep control.

    This then became the police state that everybody thinks of when they think of communism. A combination of too much power in 1 person's hands, an authoritarian imperialist overlord (Russia), and rising backlash against dropping living conditions.

  • I'm no expert, but I did watch a minidocumentary that explained that these best by dates are mostly arbitrary aside from perishable foods.

    For some products they'll have taste testers rate the same product packaged at different times from 1-10 with 10 being factory fresh, and when it drops below an average of 7, that's the date they put on the packaging

  • Honest question: isn't OSx considered the OS of choice for video and music editing?

  • Linux from Scratch and Gentoo are also pathways to abilities some would call... unnatural

  • Freemasons also don't let atheists in. Was a hard pass from me at that point. I'm not faking belief in some deist creator god just to join in their weird rituals and bridge clubs.

  • I really like slrpnk.net, their ecology & climate change communities are really top notch in terms of the well-sourced academic articles they post.

  • I'm going to echo what seems to be the majority opinion here and say that defederation should not be taken lightly. The last big defed discussion here I was in favor of, but that was a very different case. That was a hatespeech instance with the barest veneer of "just asking questions bro", run by a free speech absolutist who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Their daily posts consisted mostly of transphobic, islamophobic or anti-semitic rage-bait (or some combination of those). EDIT: Oh! There were also a lot of covid conspiracy posts there too, now I think about it.

    There are some communities there I avoid, but that doesn't merit defederation. In my mind at least, that should be reserved for instances that allow illegal content, pure unadulterated hatespeech, instances that have been overrun by bots so badly the admin can't handle it (temporarily for that one ofc), or instances that regularly brigade and the admin encourages this behavior.

    And besides, I've also had some pleasant and interesting conversations with .ml users. There are some problematic users and communities, but that's why we have block buttons.

  • Start looking now. Tell prospective employers that you're working on the certification and include it in your CV (as a work in progress, ofc). Job searches take a long time, and the sooner you start, the sooner you're out.

    Edit: @MrBobDobalina@lemmy.ml has exactly the correct approach for getting it in writing. Keep it professional, emotionless, as close to an accurate summary of the situation and the decisions made as possible.

  • Considering Ronald McDonald was a character primarily aimed at young children, I don't think they were mentally capable of having personal responsibility at that age.

    As for the parents who were pestered to buy happy meals by their children, there's like 50 ways to answer this question. I personally think that in a mentally healthy adult, personal responsibility is a factor, but it's not the only one and is balanced by social conditioning, genetic predispositions, mood in the moment, and a ton more factors.

    The children who for one reason or another were brought up eating fast food are conditioned both socially and biologically to eat fast food, and breaking out of that addiction (as with any other addiction) can be very difficult, and is more complex than doing the equivalent of saying "git gud scrub".

    Wow, that turned into a wall of text, sorry.

    Tl;dr: it's way more complex than just "personal responsibility".