funimpoded

Chicago School jerks got their way in the '70s and we effectively decided to stop doing that. This was the first notable fruit yielded by the postwar pro-rich/business "think tank" and intellectualism-washing push which was quickly followed by that set dominating almost everything.

Good luck reversing that and bringing back the "giant enterprises may be assumed harmful" standard (the one under which it was possible to win these cases more than once in a blue moon, without unreasonable costs) now that rich right-wingers just openly steer most news media.

Do I think supernatural things like thoughts not being represented in physical reality exist? I defer to Russell's Teapot on this one and lean toward "no". If they do, then attempting to reason about anything gets pretty iffy anyway. Who knows what might exist or be true, in that case!

Possibly metaphysical naturalism is wrong and supernatural things exist! And maybe thoughts (and/or the experience of consciousness) are among those supernatural things. That could be it. In which case sure, maybe solving math problems can create consciousness (why not?).

\s?

Yes, brains apparently can do consciousness.

Can descriptions of brains do consciousness? I don't know why we'd expect that they could. You can describe a fire in all the detail you like, and burn nothing.

Can electronic brains be conscious? I dunno. If I had to guess? Sky's-the-limit ignore-all-physical-and-temporal-constraints? Probably. Within the bounds of what humans will ever achieve? Maybe. I doubt they'd look as little-removed from tabulation machines as ours are, though. Like I definitely don't think you get there solving math problems. That would be surprisingly metaphysical.

> Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening?

Yeah, of course.

What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's not precise enough but because it's something else entirely.

"Resolution" has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

No amount of scribbling graphite onto paper will produce a butterfly.

Computing something isn’t the same thing as it actually happening.

You can add everything and commit all at once in git, so you’re technically using staging but it doesn’t feel like it.

I stopped using it the first time I committed something I didn’t want to, over a decade ago, haven’t used it again since so I forget the exact invocation, but I think it was just “-a” or something.

Before it bit me though yeah, that did seem like a default I’d have preferred. Not any more.

“Yo, this violates your rules” and then twitter sometimes going “yep, true, we’ll do something” and sometimes “nah” is pretty low on my list of concerns, yeah.

Then again I also don’t think any company should have the reach any of the major media companies do these days. But antitrust and media-diversity regulations and laws have been out of fashion since the ‘70s.

I once spent an hour or so tracking down and reading parts of the twitter files specifically highlighted by people loudly complaining about them (as I figured those would be the worst bits) and it was mostly pretty yawn-worthy in context.

That might be why they didn't get more attention.

It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.

Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.

Same, I can't pass any test that relies on getting syntax correct. If you want me to fizzbuzz on a whiteboard in a language I've been writing dozens or more of lines of per day for a year up to and including the day before, and require that I don't mess up the syntax, I reckon I've got a coin-flip chance of passing at best (meanwhile, sure, of course the actual logic of fizzbuzz isn't tricky for me)

I once got the method invocation syntax wrong for PHP in an interview. I'd written thousands of lines of PHP and had most-recently written some the week before.

This, despite starting off my programming journey in editors with no hinting or automatic correction. If anything, I've gotten even worse about remembering syntax as I've gotten better at the rest of the job, but I was never great at it.

I rely on surrounding code to remind me of syntax and the exact names of basic things constantly. On a blank screen without syntax hints and autocompletion, or a blank whiteboard, I'm guaranteed to look like a moron if you don't let me just write pseudocode.

Been paid to write code for about 25 years. This has never been any amount of a problem on the job but is sometimes a source of stress in interviews and has likely lost me an offer or two (most of the sources of stress in an interview have little to do with the job, really)

> this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up

To this day there exist office workers—ones old enough that no, it's not because the were introduced to computers via smartphones—who use a computer for hours every single weekday day but get totally turned around in a file manager, and don't know even the extreme basics like how to copy and move files.

There are offices full of such folks, in non-tech offices, where the person who knows how to sort-of use a GUI file manager is the "computer whiz" they go to with questions.

Not even joking that the main benefit I've seen from "AI" for editing code is that it lets me quickly do all the things I could already have been doing just as quickly if I'd ever bothered to learn to use my tools.

Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.