People being convinced that something is conscious is a long, long way from a compelling argument that something is conscious. People naturally anthropomorphize, and a reasonably accurate human speech predictor is a prime example of something that can be very easily anthropomorphized. It is also unsurprising that LLMs have developed such conceptual nodes; these concepts are fundamental to the human experience, thus undergird most human speech, and it is therefore not only unsurprising but expected that a system built to detect statistical patterns in human speech would identify these foundational concepts.

“So rocks are conscious” isn’t, at least in my opinion, the classic counter to panpsychism; it’s an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, but not a very good one, as the panpsychist can very easily fall back on the credible argument that consciousness comes in degrees, perhaps informed by systematic complexity, and so the consciousness of a rock is to the consciousness of a person as the mass of an atom is to the mass of a brain.

The problem with panpsychism is, and has always been, that there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s true. It’s a pleasingly neat solution to Chalmers’ “hard problem” of neuroscience, but ultimately just as baseless as positing the existence of an all-powerful God through whose grace we are granted consciousness; that is, it rests on a premise that, while sufficiently explanatory, is neither provable nor disprovable.

We ultimately have absolutely no idea how consciousness arises from physical matter. It is possible that we cannot know, and that the mechanism is hidden in facets of reality that the human experience is not equipped to parse. It is also possible that, given sufficiently advanced neuroscience, we will be able to offer a compelling account of how human consciousness arises. Then—and only then—will we be in a position to credibly offer arguments about machine intelligence. Until then, it is simply a matter of faith. The believers will see a sufficiently advanced language model and convince themselves that there is no way such a thing is not conscious, and the disbelievers will repeat the same tired arguments resting on the notion that a lack of proof is tantamount to a disproof.

It does appear to be available for Windows, though there’s no mention of Android.

That’s most definitely not “ceasing all road construction,” and actually sounds like a feasible (ignoring realities of modern politics) plan that I would get behind.

OK so… demonstrate it? Explain how, with absolutely 0 maintenance for 20 years (or whatever you consider a reasonable time to bring every single road up to bicycle and pedestrian usability standards), the roads would be able to support the flow of commuters, emergency vehicles, and deliveries. You can appeal to your own authority all you want, but it’s worth just about jack if you don’t back it up.

Given that it takes a long time to bring a street up to standard (budgeting, design, contracting, and constructing), that would probably be 10-20 years at an optimistic estimate to get every street up. In that time, under your proposal, the roads would become undrivable, and therefore:

• Emergency vehicles would be unable to operate. Thousands die.
• Traffic increases exponentially as the usable roads become increasingly infrequent and commuters flock to the few good ones. The above problem is made worse; gas usage increases dramatically as more and more cars sit idle for hours a day.
• Highway safety plummets. Thousands die in avoidable crashes.
• Roads become impassible to trucks. Deliveries of food and goods grind to a halt. Starvation, food riots, economic collapse follow.

I’m all for increasing walkability and bikability; I’m fortunate enough to live in a city that is both, and it’s great. Proposals like this, however, do nothing but make it look like the movement is a bunch of “fuck cars” knee-jerkers who know nothing about infrastructure and can thus be safely disregarded.

They’re definitely better entertainment pound-for-pound. I’d contend that the book gives you a lot more to think about, so it really depends what you’re after. I like them both a lot–I think they complement each other very nicely.

It’s not a matter of what people can use, but what people do use. Like it or not, Discord is the de facto standard, and it’s a lot easier to install workarounds that make Discord usable on Linux than it is to convince all your friends to switch platforms.

For many people, socialization is a core part of gaming, and Discord is far and away the most common platform for that socialization.

Eh, depends on the language and the context. I still use 80 for C, but I’ve found 120 to be a much more reasonable number for Java.

I guess so lmao

Where tf do you live that a banana is $10?

My car gets about 250 miles on a charge, so I’m only ever at a public charger if I’m taking a trip longer than that. At that point my day is pretty much fucked by traveling, and it’s actually really nice get off the road for an hour. Usually I find a nearby coffee shop and work on the same stuff I would at home, and when I get back on the road I can feel that I’m alert and focused.

Board state in marketing photos cracks me up. Who needs corners? What is a big move? Attachment fights only pls

I’ve been migrating one of my company’s apps from microservices back to monolithic Java. It’s wonderful. I haven’t touched a line of yaml in weeks.

Because cross-platform apps inevitably feel out of step with the OS they run on. Native apps can use system components and behaviors and will almost always run better because they don’t need to be wrapped in a cross-platform framework. Admittedly a platform-locked app isn’t going to be a universally perfect Lemmy app, but it can certainly be a platform-specific perfect Lemmy app.

With no disrespect to Voyager, its devs, or its users, this is why I can’t use that app despite its impressive feature set and high level of polish–the ui feels fundamentally wrong on iOS, and the fact that it’s a very direct Apollo clone but not written in native swift makes it feel like a knockoff.

doesn’t understand that this is a useful first step in debugging

reacts with anger when devs don’t magically have an instant fix to a vague bug

Yep, that’s a manager

Haven’t seen this one on Mlem

The maintainer also comes off as a colossal asshole about the whole thing who didn’t even deign to offer a scrap of credit to the programmer who found and fixed a six-year-old bug. If the article is truthful, the maintainer is the sort of toxic, power-tripping, self-obsessed repo czar that actively makes the open source community worse.

Fair enough, though I contend that for a common-case application like a database-backed REST API where the architecture is basically standardized there is no meaningful time difference between writing crappy code in a clean architecture and writing a crappy pile of spaghetti.

I’ve been tasked with updating some code a senior programmer (15+ years experience, internally awarded, widely considered fantastic) who recently left the company wrote.

It’s supposed to be a REST service. None of the API endpoints obey restful principles, the controller layer houses all of the business logic, and repositories are all labeled as services–and that’s before we even get into the code itself. Genuinely astounding what passes for senior-level programming expertise.