Opinionhaver @ Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a differ

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6 mo. ago

Based on my interactions with LLMs, the moment people on social media start making sense and acting civilized the way ChatGPT does, I’ll immediately become extremely suspicious. Right now, I’m not worried one bit.

Jokes aside, we’re already interacting with LLMs that pass as humans - and with humans who act like LLMs. In that sense, I don’t see a huge difference. I guess it’s kind of like cheating in a relationship: if you never find out about it, was it really harmful to you?

My understanding is that, according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, everything that can happen will happen - so for every choice you’ve made, there’s an alternate timeline for every other possible choice you could have made. But it still makes no sense to claim that you could’ve acted differently in this timeline.

Free will and the “self” - just two sides of the same coin. You’re not free to choose, because there’s no “you” in the first place. You’re just a collection of atoms obeying the laws of physics. It makes no sense to say you could’ve done otherwise. No, you couldn’t - whatever caused you to make a decision in the first place would compel you to make the same choice every single time, no matter how many times you rewound the universe, assuming everything else stayed the same.

We do things for two reasons: either because we want to, or because we have to. There’s no freedom in being forced to do something - and you don’t get to choose your wants or don’t-wants.

I'd rather have even just one podcast with massive library of episodes over all the music in the world.

The issue isn’t that you can’t get a proper workout without gym equipment - it’s that most people simply don’t stick with it. They start training at home, but it becomes more and more infrequent until they stop altogether. Getting a gym membership tends to create more accountability, and I think going to the gym is actually an easier habit to build than working out at home.

Even for me, with a gym membership, I’ve noticed that if I go home between work and the gym, I’m much more likely to skip the workout. But if I go straight to the gym - having already decided to do so and with my gym bag packed - then I might as well do the workout since I’m already there.

I was hoping you'd be wrong so I looked into it and while that's not the whole story, it's not entirely wrong either.

Damn, and I thought I was bringing in good news.

It’s going to be an uphill battle to get in shape without proper gym equipment. Even among those who start going to the gym, most end up quitting because it’s a lot of effort and the results don’t come fast enough. Trying to work out at home makes it even harder. To gain muscle mass, you need to be lifting at the absolute limits of your strength - and that’s really difficult to achieve outside of a gym setting. It can be done, but I generally advise against it, because the odds are stacked against you.

Also, keep in mind that you can’t effectively lose weight and build muscle at the same time.

Considering the 30+ year long streak of pure good luck in my life I'll probably get cancer when I hit 50.

Quite widely accepted definition among philosophers and scientists is "the fact of felt experience" Which is basically how Thoman Nagel defined it in his essay "What's it like to be a bat"

“An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism - something it is like for the organism.”

First, one needs to define consciousness. What I mean by it is the fact that it feels like something to be from a subjective perspective - that there is qualia to experience.

So what I hear you asking is whether it’s conceivable that it could feel like something to be an AI system. Personally, I don’t see why not - unless consciousness is substrate-dependent, meaning there’s something inherently special about biological “wetware,” i.e. brains, that can’t be replicated in silicon. I don’t think that’s the case, since both are made of matter. I highly doubt there’s consciousness in our current systems, but at some point, there very likely will be - though we’ll probably start treating them as conscious beings before they actually become such.

As for the idea of “emulated consciousness,” that doesn’t make much sense to me. Emulated consciousness is real consciousness. It’s kind of like bravery - you can’t fake it. Acting brave despite being scared is bravery.

I had a long period that I never did. I've became much less careless since and nowdays I'd say I drop it once every 2 to 3 months.

It’s all about how certain the bank is that they’ll get their money back. Like you said, they’re very wealthy - so it may well be that their overall wealth is still greater than the amount they owe. Lending money is profitable for the bank as long as the borrower has the means to repay it, along with interest.

This is actually how many wealthy people fund their living expenses. Their wealth is usually tied up in property and investments, and rather than selling those assets, it’s often easier to borrow money at a lower interest rate than what they’re profiting from their investments.

For example, I could pay off my mortgage if I wanted to - but I won’t, because the average yearly return from stocks is around 7%, whereas the interest on my mortgage is 4.452%. The returns from my investments outweigh the cost of my debt.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

It’s a traditional Finnish general-purpose axe made by Kellokoski

They should be mostly visible in the modlog.

He was asking for examples of extremism on Lemmy, and when I provided examples of another user’s removed messages, he dismissed them one by one. Then he started digging through my comment history to find something to get angry about - which he did - and decided to dedicate the rest of his evening to a smear campaign against me.

It’s a traditional Finnish axe design - the brands are Fiskars and Kellokoski. Kellokoski, along with Billnäs, was later bought by Fiskars.

I’ve got a handful of these axes. While they’re not exactly rare, ones that don’t need a new handle are somewhat hard to come by - especially outside of Finland. They’re no longer being made, and an axe head like this can easily be 70 years old, if not older. There are bushcraft and camping purists out there who’d pay good money for an axe like this.

A small canister of some sort - lighter fluid, I presume, though it doesn’t say on the label.

I should've flipped the sledgehammer the other way around and put it on it's side..

I don’t think they’re complaining about the fact that political discussion happens, but rather the quality of it. It’s not far off to say that it usually ends up as either a circlejerk within people’s own bubbles or a complete free-for-all mudslinging match - which, in the entire history of the internet, has never produced anything other than deepening the divide between opposing sides.

Careful what you ask for.