bunchberry @ bunchberry @lemmy.world

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Boiling things isn't guaranteed to make it safe, because sometimes bacteria produce toxins as a byproduct that are heat-stable, so if you kill the bacterial you can still get food poisoning if you drink it.

I am an American and i own an electric kettle and use it frequently. I switched to an electric kettle after accidentally turning my microwave into a smoke bomb when I put instant ramen in there and forgot to add the water. Now I only make instant ramen with hot water from a kettle or on the stove.

we need to figure out what consciousness is

Nah, "consciousness" is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. The path to AGI has no relevance to it at all. Even if we develop a machine just as intelligent as human beings, maybe even moreso, that can solve any arbitrary problem just as efficiently, mystics will still be arguing over whether or not it has "consciousness."

Edit: You can downvote if you want, but I notice none of you have any actual response to it, because you ultimately know it is correct. Keep downvoting, but not a single one of you will actually reply and tell us me how we could concretely distinguish between something that is "conscious" and something that isn't.

Even if we construct a robot that fully can replicate all behaviors of a human, you will still be there debating over whether or not is "conscious" because you have not actually given it a concrete meaning so that we can identify if something actually has it or not. It's just a placeholder for vague mysticism, like "spirit" or "soul."

I recall a talk from Daniel Dennett where he discussed an old popular movement called the "vitalists." The vitalists used "life" in a very vague meaningless way as well, they would insist that even if understand how living things work mechanically and could reproduce it, it would still not be considered "alive" because we don't understand the "vital spark" that actually makes it "alive." It would just be an imitation of a living thing without the vital spark.

The vitalists refused to ever concretely define what the vital spark even was, it was just a placeholder for something vague and mysterious. As we understood more about how life works, vitalists where taken less and less serious, until eventually becoming largely fringe. People who talk about "consciousness" are also going to become fringe as we continue to understand neuroscience and intelligence, if scientific progress continues, that is. Although this will be a very long-term process, maybe taking centuries.

I can't say I've ever gotten ant on my finger then proceeded to smell my finger.

When I was younger I would play X-Wing Alliance on my PC with an actual like pilot joystick controller with all the lights turned off. That game is a Star Wars game where you fly space ships and fight other space ships, but it's all in first-person, so you see out of the pilot cockpit.

The space mechanics was definitely one of the great things about that game, in my opinion. Most space games when you land you just press a button and it plays an animation. Having to land manually with a landing camera is very satisfying. When you crash and parts of your ship break and you have to float outside to fix it, that was also very fun. I feel like a lot of space games are a bit lazy about the actual space mechanics, this game did it very well.

You can indeed make money by selling it at a higher price without ever using or modifying it, and even if you do use or modify it, profits from the sale still come directly from not using or modifying it.

In Cuba they have a law that requires you to sell your house if you buy a new one. That also means you can't be a landlord or else you yourself would be homeless. They also have a law that guarantees that if you don't own your own home, you at least get public housing guaranteed, which has rent capped at 10% of income so it can never exceed that. They have the lowest homelessness rate in all of the Americas.

fumo is a basic human need

Not sure I see the relevance. Yes, housing maintenance costs money, what's the relevance? Who says housing upkeep is free? What's the relevance to anything at all?

It always impresses me how much people worship landlords, even Canada up there is having a housing crisis but nobody dares question the sanctity of landlords. You can watch both the major parties arguing for hours and nobody ever brings up landlordism once. A lot of them choose to instead become hostile to immigrants, both parties moving further right on immigration because stopping immigration or potentially even kicking out immigrants to them is more acceptable than questioning the sanctity of landlords. You also saw a similar thing here in the USA, I remember after the Trump/Kamala debate when they revealed the plans for bringing housing prices down and Trump was "mass deportation" and Kamala was "a tax credit." Not sure about every country definitely here in US and Canada, people here treat landlords like unquestionable deities, the idea that their right to rule should even be called into question is not even something that passes through most people's heads.

Not surprising as much of online conservatism these days is just gooning. They're all porn addicts who cry about the wokes taking away their softcore porn from their video games.

the closest thing i guess would be his hyperloop white paper lol

I don't really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn't really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I've personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I'm not sure how it compares to reddit's in terms of algorithm.

Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone's position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit's like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they're looking for an "own" to farm likes rather than a real discussion.

Sure, there might be sometimes when a person's opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don't even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I've never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to "own" you to farm upvotes.

Complex numbers are just a way of representing an additional degree of freedom in an equation. You have to represent complex numbers not on a number line but on the complex plane, so each complex number is associated with two numbers. That means if you create a function that requires two inputs and two outputs, you could "compress" that function into a single input and output by using complex numbers.

Complex numbers are used all throughout classical mechanics. Waves are two-dimensional objects because they both have an amplitude and a wavelength. Classical wave dynamics thus very often use complex numbers because you can capture the properties of waves more concisely. An example of this is the Fourier transform. If you look up the function, it looks very scary, it has an integral and Euler's number raised to the negative power of the imaginary number multiplied by pi. However, if you've worked with complex numbers a lot, you'd immediately recognize that raising Euler's number to pi times the imaginary number is just how you represent rotations on the complex plane.

Despite how scary the Fourier transform looks, literally all it is actually doing is wrapping a wave around a circle. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on his channel of how to visualize the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform, again, isn't inherently anything quantum mechanical, we use it all the time in classical mechanics, for example, if you ever used an old dial-up model and wondered why it made those weird noises, it was encoding data as sound wave by representing them as different harmonic waves that it would then add together, producing that sound. The Fourier transform could then be used by the modem at the other end to break the sound back apart into those harmonic waves and then decode it back into data.

In quantum mechanics, properties of systems always have an additional kind of "orientation" to them. When particles interact, if their orientations are aligned, the outcome of the interaction is deterministic. If they are misaligned, then it introduces randomness. For example, an electron's spin state can either be up or down. However, its spin state also has a particular orientation to it, so you can only measure it "correctly" by having the orientation of the measuring device aligned with the electron. If they are misaligned, you introduce randomness. These orientations often are associated with physical rotations, for example, with the electron spins state, you measure it with something known as a Stern-Gerlach apparatus, and to measure the electron on a different orientation you have to physically rotate the whole apparatus.

Because the probability of measuring certain things directly relates to the relative orientation between your measuring device and the particle, it would be nice if we had a way to represent both the relative orientation and the probability at the same time. And, of course, you guessed it, we do. It turns out you can achieve this simply by representing your probability amplitudes (the % chance of something occurring) as complex numbers. This means in quantum mechanics, for example, an event can have a -70.7i% chance of occurring.

While that sounds weird at first, you quickly realize that the only reason we represent it this way is because it directly connects the relative orientation between the systems interacting and the probabilities of certain outcomes. You see, you can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing the distance from 0% on the complex plane and squaring it, which in the case of -70.7i% would give you 50%, which tells you this just means it is basically a fair coin flip. However, you can also compute from this number the relative orientation of the two measuring devices, which in this case you would find it to be rotated 90 degrees. Hence, because both values can be computed from the same number, if you rotate the measuring device it must necessarily alter the probabilities of different outcomes.

You technically don't need to ever use complex numbers. You could, for example, take the Schrodinger equation and just break it up into two separate equations for the real and imaginary part, and have them both act on real numbers. Indeed, if you actually build a quantum computer simulator in a classical computer, most programming languages don't include complex numbers, so all your algorithms have to break the complex numbers into two real numbers. It's just when you are writing down these equations, they can get very messy this way. Complex numbers are just far more concise to represent additional degrees of freedom without needing additional equations/functions.

Well, what is boring and non-boring I guess is in the eye of the beholder. What I moreso was referring to is what is difficult to wrap your head around.

The nondeterminism is kind of unavoidable as long as you don't want to change the mathematics of the theory itself, but I also don't really consider nondeterminism to be that unintuitive or difficult to "understand." I mean, throughout most of human history, it wasn't that common for humans to actually believe in determinism in the Laplacian sense of being able to make absolute prediction to the future based on complete knowledge of the past, that was largely popularized with the rise of Newtonian mechanics, and even by the 19th century you had even a lot of materialist philosophers calling it into question on grounds of logical consistency. Personally, I think the strong desire to maintain Laplacian determinism is really a physicist thing. They work with Newtonian mechanics first and it becomes so intuitive some don't want to let it go when it comes to quantum mechanics. But I doubt if you went and talked to the average person, most probably wouldn't be that strongly adherent to Laplacian determinism.

The kinds of views I was talking about are more things like people who try to interpret the state vector as literally representing a physical wave spreading out in space that collapses like a house of cards when you perturb it, or try to envision a literal multiverse where everything is just a big "universal wave function." A lot of these bizarre views are not only unintuitive but literally impossible to visualize, and they run into a lot of problems in logical consistency and there have been mountains papers and books published on the subject trying to work out all the conceptual issues. If you are a person just learning QM and the philosophical interpretation around it bothers you, if you listen to people who talk about these weird things, you will need to read through dozens of books and maybe even hundreds of papers just to get a general idea of what is going on, and even then most of these interpretations still have not resolved their mountain of conceptual issues.

To me this really bothered me when I got into quantum computing for the first time. I wanted to not just learn the math but have some sort of intuition of what is actually going on. I then went down a rabbit hole of reading tons and tons and tons of books and academic papers to try and find some way to make the math make sense on a philosophical level. Most of the mainstream views you see in the popular media just overcomplicate things for no reason because the person wants to make QM sound more mystical than it actually is. What I ultimately came to realize is that most of this confusion is just self-imposed in the sense that they are based on assumptions which are not actually demanded by the mathematics and entirely optional (such as interpreting a list of probability amplitudes a literal entity in a physical space) and thus most can be stripped away.

You can't strip away every aspect of QM that makes it unique, because it clearly does differ from classical mechanics, but by dong this you do really hone down on what actually makes QM unique and what is genuinely an unavoidable consequence of the mathematics. And what you get down to is just interference effects, which arise from the fact that probability amplitudes are complex-valued, thus can cancel each other out, which can't occur in classical probability theory. Nondeterminism and context-dependence then follow from this as a necessity for the theory to be logically consistent, but both of those are fairly easy to have an intuition for.

Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover's algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it'd technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.

No, they are not, they are incredibly wealthy millionaires whose campaigns are bought and paid for by billionaires. The Democrat party is actively supporting an ongoing holocaust, an industrial scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions of people from their homeland. The idea that these people are all secretly saints who are just too scared to act on it is such a completely ridiculous belief. They do not do moral things because they are not moral. They are not saints. They simply do not represent those values. You elect a party that openly believes X and then claim they don't do Y because they're too scared to do it. No, they don't do Y because they don't represent Y, they represent X. Democrats are by no means in any way "soft-willed." Whenever it comes to something they actually believe in, they are very good at rallying the votes to get it passed, such as when they are passing something in favor of the military industrial complex or the Israel lobby.

Democrats are heartless genocidal freaks, and hardly "spineless" they just don't care. It's a party of billionaires. I have no idea how you can unironically believe this ethos that they're all a bunch of bleeding hearts but are just too scared, quivering in their boots to act but they all mean well... apparently! No, they just never fight for those values you want them to fight for because their party does not represent those values, and pretending they do at this point... I have a bridge to sell you.

Democrats like losing because they only disagree on Republicans on like 2 issues and their funding is great when Republicans are in power.