stravanasu @ pglpm @lemmy.ca

Posts

38

Comments

279

Joined

2 yr. ago

There are surely pros and cons, possibly good and possibly bad outcomes with such restrictions, and the whole matter is very complicated.

From my point of view part of the problem is the decline of education and of teaching rational and critical thinking. Science started when we realized and made clear that truth – at least scientific truth – is not about some "authority" (like Aristotle) saying that things are so-and-so, or a majority saying that things are so-and-so. Galilei said this very clearly:

But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.

The problem is that today we're relegating everything to "experts", or more generally, we're expecting someone else to apply critical thinking in our place. Of course this is unavoidable to some degree, but I think the situation could be much improved from this point of view.

I have a feeling of having seen some old shows re-advertised sometimes. But this could very well be a false memory.

Agree. I didn't like the bit where the Machine went ::: spoiler spoiler "Father, I'm so sorry..." ::: either. I think it was end of 3rd or 4th season.

True that! It'd be great if it was advertized some more.

I don't know what you have in mind with "trustworthy", and about what, so maybe this comment is worthless for you. But I've been using their cloud storage for several years (like other commenters here), for work-related files, and to sync them between computers and phone. Their syncing system and apps are actually great. No complaints on my part.

Yes, I actually remember when (infrared) TV remotes started to circulate...

Maybe LiFi + UV-tanning deals will become a thing 😂

Here's the original newsletter article from Monash university.

I started Permutation City now and am really enjoying it. Thank you so much for this fantastic recommendation. I feel like I felt when reading Asimov. The author is indeed a physicist, funny enough I knew him from a physics note but didn't know he was also a sci-fi writer.

Thank you for such a thorough and informative answer! And for sharing your user experience too. I had not heard about GnomeOS. As soon as I have some days to experiment, I'll give Neon a try.

Thank you for sharing this! Yesterday I was searching online for Tumbleweed user experiences on Thinkpad, but I only found info about older Thinkpad models. I'll try it from a live disk. I might also switch to Framework later on...

I ditched the show after two episodes, as it suddenly appeared to be just another "hey let's show some blood, sex, and CGI" one. Thank you for the well written review, I'm glad to know I didn't miss anything and saved myself some heartache.

Thank you for sharing your experience. May I ask which machine you're using? (I'm on a Thinkpad.)

That's a neat description.

Mathematical language is a language, but mathematics is not just a language. It is a structure with internal rules that are not determined by pure convention (as natural languages are). We could internationally agree from tomorrow to call "blue" whatever it's now called "red" and vice versa, but we couldn't agree to say that "2 + 2 = 5", because that would lead to internal inconsistencies (we could agree to use the symbol "5" for 4, but that's a different matter).

This is also related to a staple of science: that scientific and mathematical truth is not determined by a majority vote, but by internal consistency. Indeed modern science started with this very paradigm shift. Quoting Galilei:

But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.

If we want to train an algorithm to infer rules from language, we need to give samples of language where the rules are obeyed strictly (and yet this may not be enough). Otherwise the algorithm will wrongly generalize that the rules aren't strict (in fact it'll just see a bunch of mutually inconsistent examples). Which is what happens with ChatGPT.

Edit: On top of this, Gödel's theorem and other related theorems have shown that mathematical reasoning cannot be reduced to pure symbol manipulation, Hilbert's unfulfilled dream. So one can't infer mathematical reasoning from language patterns. Children learn reasoning not only through language training, but also through behaviour training (this was pointed out by Turing). This is why large language models have intrinsic limitations in what they can achieve and be used for.

Never heard about Garuda, cheers!

Great advice, thank you! I'll give a first try to the first three through live disks :)

Same here (Firefox on Linux). From what I saw, if you select (with ctrl+click) multiple languages in the "Languages" option in the settings, every time you post you'll have the option to select one of these languages in the "Language" drop-down menu of the post. But you have to choose one every time. It'd be nice if we could select one as default in the settings, so that we need to use that drop-down menu only when we're posting in one of the other languages.

Exploring and learning are the essence of life :)

Thank you for the info. From what I understand, one only sees up/downvotes from one's own instance (lemmy.ca in my case). When I posted it I saw it going down to -3 in a couple of minutes, so I was wondering if my question was really dumb...

I got lots of great advice in this post!

I'll delete my edit :)