croniev

> trick yourself into thinking something is beautiful

No. It's about directing your attention at the memories that, as you correctly say, scars may remind you of, and appreciating this. This perspective was hidden insofar as beauty standards reduced scars to the physical appearance, turning a blind eye to their signifying properties.

> Beauty is a word expression a sensation.

Interesting take. Is beauty the sensation or that which is being perceived? Are you meaning to say that the same tentatively beautiful things always illicit the same 'sensation' type in all people? What about the different kinds of aethetic experiences (such as the experience that viewing my scar might ellicit when it wakes good memories)? And what about cultural differences in what is perceived as beautiful?

> that you should be able to trick yourself into thinking something is beautiful is just as valid as the assumption that it will change the power of the word for you

Again, it's not about changing the word or tricking yourself. It is about directing attention and disclosing a new perspective on things. It's not black-and-white beautiful or ugly - it also depends on the context you are assesing this with. If there is a 6 on the floor and one person is standing on the top end while another is standing at the bottom end, one will say its a 6, the other will say its a 9. Who are you to decide that one of them is wrong? However, if someone claimed that its a spaceship, they are clearly wrong. Noone is claiming that you can do anything if you just use different words. Thats your straw people. What is hindering you from accepting the existance of multiple perspectives/points of view?

> It's positivity for the heck of it, to get clicks. In internet parlance, it's gas-lighting yourself.

You might have a point here. Some positivity is really shallow and performative. Whether that applies here I don't know. But even if so, they still make a valid point about the beauty of scars (from a symbol perspective).

It is only your straw-people that propose this kind of relativism. This was about gaining a perspective for appreaciating scars, as they carry memories. It is pointing at the beauty of scars. It is not inverting the meaning of the word, but aiming it at something thus far hidden. The fact that some scars for some people carry heavy trauma does not defeat the point in question.

Also, don't forget that there is no objective criterion for beauty - it is a judgment call. Therefore it is also mediated by language. Even if you correctly see that changing words does not on its own change the world, you are shooting past the target in denying that they have any unique power.

Are you implying that on a basic level or for simple arrangements transformers do explain what happens in the brain? If so, I would be curious to hear how.

What confuses me about this analogy is that it seems to imply this is a matter of a knowledge-base and logical inferences. But the whole reason why LLMs are so successful is that the logical approach was abandoned in favor of a statistical one (and huge amounts of data, compute, and weights). The argument is precisely, that what is not in the training does not find its way into the probability distribution. To claim that LLMs reason is a very far stretch that I don't feel comfortable to let pass.

I like the idea! Now you're just left with the dilemma of what happens when you reach many people with it - will Scrappy be made for thousands of users, polished and flashy?

I agree, but there are also cases where it is blatantly clear that companies are not only on Trumps side but taking initiative themselves to corrode our political culture, and people here in europe are too comfy to make a switch, apart from a lack of similar alternatives.

X and Meta are most obvious, and I don't know about google's involvement, but have been trying to convince people to move away from it for years. It's a similar situation with streaming services.

I'm sorry but it sounds like you were trying to spread conspiracy theories, the way you are putting it. Do you have some examples?

In comparing neural networks to brains it seems like you are implying a relation between the size/complexity of a thinking machine and the reasonability of its thinking. This gives us nothing, because it disregards the fundamental difference that a neural network is a purely mathematical thing, while a brain belongs to an embodied, conscious human being.

For your implication to be plausible, you either need to deny that consciousnes plays a role in reasonability of thinking (making you a physicalist reductionist) or you need to posit that a neural network can have consciousness (some sort of mystical functionalism).

As both of these alternatives imply some heavy metaphysical assumptions and are completely unbased, I'd advise to avoid thinking of neural networks as an analogue of brains with regards to thinking and reasonability. Don't expect they will make more sense with more size. It is and will continue to be mere statistics.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke... I've been wanting to read that too! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell has been one of my favorite and most immersive books, absolutely brilliant!

Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/

Timeshift does not work for me because I encrypted my ssd, decrypt on boot, but linux sees every file twice, once encrypted and once decrypted, thinking that my storage is full, and thus timeshift refuses to make backups due to no storage. At least thats as far as I'm understanding it atm

Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy. Heres a take for you:

This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people will argue that there is some sort of static meaning hidden behind the actual words which enters the consciousness of the listener, others will say that the meaning is only generated by the person hearing the words.

This is as philosophical of a question as it gets, and has been debated even more heatedly ever since Wittgenstein.

If you do not see that debating these questions is relevant and interesting, but would rather reduce all of philosophy to that first obvious-seeming and thus "not a real problem" position, then I wish you a good time bathing in your ignorance.

However, if you comprehend that what we take for granted in every area and discipline can be subjected to reasonable reflection, then I welcome you to the dark side. Nothing is clear, no knowledge absolute - many engineers seem to forget this while over-indulging in an overly simplistic world view :)

Human creativity turns into a point on that curve. One mission of art is to find a different dimension, out of the curves reach, until eventually it becomes more common and the curve can be fitted to it again. AI cannot think outside of the box because it cannot think at all, there is no meaning behind what it does.

I'm in the following camp: It is wrong to think about the world or the models as "complex systems" that may or may not be understood by human intelligence. There is no meaning beyond that which is created by humans. There is no 'truth' that we can grasp in parts but not entirely. Being unable to understand these complex systems means that we have framed them in such a way (f.e. millions of matrix operations) that does not allow for our symbol-based, causal reasoning mode. That is on us, not our capabilities or the universe.

All our theories are built on observation, so these empirical models yielding such useful results is a great thing - it satisfies the need for observing and acting. Missing explainability of the models merely means we have less ability to act more precisely - but it does not devalue our ability to act coarsely.