Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • How do you ever solve a problem if you don’t acknowledge it exists?

    I’m not from the US, but live in a country that is a US ally with a lot of military bases. The US election effects us. The fact the DNC is fielding an old age pensioner who should be sitting comfortably in a retirement home complaining about the birds obstructing his view against an equally old fascist is deeply worrying.





  • No, but most people do think of Reality as a god.

    But they don’t think He is a god

    These two statements directly contradict eachother. Either you think of Reality as a god, or you do not. If you don’t think reality is a god, then you don’t think “he” is a god (wow, the tautology was weird to type).

    People are perfectly capable of worshipping, praying to, and generally being religious towards someone they refuse to believe is a god.

    What’s your opinion on people who do neither? That don’t believe in a god and don’t pray to anything either?



  • At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals

    This is absolutely the right approach, even if you were planning to quit from the start (not the case with you, but still). “This is my last ever cigarette” just caused me to delay and delay and delay. The only realistic way to do it for me was one craving at a time (“I’m not smoking for the next hour”), then a day at a time. Handling the hours and days was hard, but once you do that the weeks and months take care of themselves.

    Vaping for me was a major misstep. Just caused me to consume more nicotine than when I was smoking.


  • 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.








  • 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.




  • 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. He allowed some emigration, some free speech, and even spoke out about the 1968 invasions of Czechoslovakia. This, at the start, did not look like a typical authoritarian communist state. 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. 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.