Reach for the Stars 
@antares@qoto.org
- Pronouns
- It's complicated. IDK. Maybe ze/zim/zir https://pronouns.org/ze-hir
- Degree
- Physics, Cal Poly SLO
- Work
- I fix broken stuff
#Technology, #baseball (Dodgers), #politics, #religion (#Christian)
Joined Apr 2022
@hankg this tracks with my programming experience in the 1980s. BASIC was the easy language to learn on, but the goal was to advance to C where you could write actual software and then learn C++ so you could try out this new Windows thing. I was in my 30s before I met the academic work of the 80s like Ada, SmallTalk, and Lisp/scheme.
@mor10 how many times as an undergrad and even in my master's program did a prof give me feedback that amounted to "you have not studied the topic enough to have original thoughts, please just stick to analysis of the existing literature." It seems very much like the AI is doing exactly what academic culture expects of students - a shallow analysis of existing thoughts.
@mandlebro @freemo @fourmajor Yes, I see this. I was working from the neuroscientists perspective which I think is what we are really asking when we wonder if an AI is conscious.
Jason from Everlander is the kind of all around hacker I want to be some day.
This video shows how he hacked a #starlink dish onto an overland camper.
@Popehat Oh look the Mastodon #TonePolice have arrived in force.
@dinsmoorsheepskins (Ok I guess a 1 or 10kHz PWM signals count, but the best I've got for those is 24v)
@dinsmoorsheepskins Ok, got to know where you found 400hz AC. I've met 60hz 120v AC a lot, and had one encounter with a florescent light ballast that comes in at 600v. But I've never met something outside of 60 cycle.
I share with you the end of my little #WikiBender. In Walker v. Time Life Films the 2nd Cir Court of Appeals made an official ruling that cockfights, drunks, stripped cars, prostitutes and rats are essential elements of the South Bronx.
784 F.2d 44 (2d Cir. 1986)
Reach for the Stars
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January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all! https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/
Reach for the Stars
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@mike Nice! As in many cases, it turns out that doing better accessibility work makes the thing more accessible to everyone, not just the original target audience. 😃
Reach for the Stars
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Please consider writing your hashtags in upper camelcase so screen readers have a chance at figuring them out.
#whyistayonmastodon sounds like an giant undecipherable mess of sounds.
#WhyIStayOnMastodon reads out "Why I Stay On Mastodon" 😄
(Reason #44 I stay here: my previous requests like this have been generally well-received, proving that most people are awesome.)
Reach for the Stars
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@micahflee many of those are bot sites that scrape posts from Twitter and repost them on the fediverse. Nice if you have people Over There who you still want to follow without logging into the Muskverse. I follow my local elected officials who have not seen the light for example.
@freemo @fourmajor On Second thought, Becky Chambers would be a far better person to write this story, but she is not on social media as far as I know so I'll stick with tagging someone who is.
@freemo @fourmajor For all the well-worn philosophical reasons, yes, it is vexing to prove ones own consciousness. But, that was not the problem proposed. The question is to evaluate consciousness in another, which is a somewhat less abstract problem. I suspect it will be a value judgement (Is it noise or is it music?) but one that those of us reasonably convinced of our own consciousness will likely be able to come to some general agreement on if we don't let the skeptical philosophers get in the way.
As an aside I now want a short story a la @scalzi which is a first "person" account of an AI trying to prove it is the first conscious AI to a group of skeptical philosophers and failing. With the twist at the end being that the whole thing was an internal simulation and the AI concluding that it is not in fact conscious or self-aware.
Reach for the Stars
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When humans have important experiences, such as we have in school (either as a youngster or a parent), those will bias our beliefs about the experience for others. We assume everyone’s experience in school was like ours. (It was not—even for classmates.) We assume that everyone should learn what we learned and how we learned it. (This may be true, but it may not be true.) As a result, many adults pursue work in schools with the intent of replicating the structures and instruction they experienced, but that may not be what all students need.
@fourmajor I disagree to an extent. This is a "how many hairs make a beard" question. There is some liminal space, but your profile picture clearly has one and @freemo 's clearly lack one. There is a realm of existence on the edge of consciousness, but it is unstable. I propose that while there may be debate about what hit the historic marker of the first artificial consciousness, that it will be perfectly evident if and when such a thing comes into being.
A strange game.
The only winning move is
not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
Reach for the Stars
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One magical thing about #hashtags is that they provide an opportunity to reach a whole new audience every time you toot. Following people is still very valuable, in many ways, don't get me wrong, but the number of people who follow me (for instance) is much, much smaller than the number of people that might see my posts when properly tagged.
- Pronouns
- It's complicated. IDK. Maybe ze/zim/zir https://pronouns.org/ze-hir
- Degree
- Physics, Cal Poly SLO
- Work
- I fix broken stuff
#Technology, #baseball (Dodgers), #politics, #religion (#Christian)
Joined Apr 2022
