aaa
1mo ago
I have no idea what is going on
What you are looking at, probably, is amplified noise. They display three models of increasing statistical complexity, the simplest one (model 1) got them almost no results, with almost all their results coming for the most complicated one. None of the models is explained in any great detail and this wasn't a pre-registered study (AFAICT) so who knows how many models they even tried.
aaa
1mo ago
The guy is probably old and doesn't want to run a landscaping business anymore. Now he takes what he can get. Because that is what the market will bear.
Oftentimes in those cases the guy running the business is the business. Once he leaves the business is essentially worthless, existing clients will re-evaluate who they are buying from: you spent a million dollars and you would be in the same position if you had started your own landscaping business in the same area.
aaa
1mo ago
PS. someone referencing himself as a "young buck" is probably the cringiest thing I've seen this year so far.
aaa
1mo ago
A piece about the alt right that doesn't mention Yannapoulos, Bokhari and the wider anti-sjw sphere looks completely delusional to me. It's true that there is a real distinction between the Alt Right™, led by Richard Spencer, and the wider anti-sjw movement of the late 2010s that got lumped in as "alt right", sometimes without even being on the right. However the former was basically along for the ride, Richard Spencer was a marginal figure in his own heyday.
aaa
3mo ago
The alt right was always a vague term ambiguously used to describe either anyone who voted for trump but also interchangeably with neo nazis. However the Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right is relevant here.
aaa
4mo ago
And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?
aaa
4mo ago
I suggest you try to get it to solve that problem correctly, it isn't easy. The prompt is already giving clear and simple instructions and even reminding it not to use the highest value card for the second part of the ordering doesn't work.
Even so, for problems this simple once you start trying to read and find out bugs in the code it produces you have already lost, it would have been faster to write the implementation yourself.
aaa
4mo ago
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that?
Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.
Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:
- Jesus was a human but operated like a remote controlled meat robot for God: adoptionism
- Jesus didn't exist before he was born in human form: socinianism
- Jesus never actually had a human body, he was something different throughout: docinianism
- Jesus is actually a separate thing from God: arianism
- Father, Son and Spirit are three different forms taken by God (kinda like water can be liquid, ice or vapor): modalism
aaa
4mo ago
As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"?
Almost nothing, race horses get routinely blessed.
aaa
4mo ago
There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.
This is actually not a factor for ChatGPT plus, you can attach the input file to the request and it will examine it. Doesn't seem to help it at all, but it's a thing.
(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)
Day 8 is a bit of a bad example, the general solution is the chinese remainder problem which isn't much harder anyway.
True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?
How could other humans learn how to construct those solutions? They read the same textbooks that are in the training set of ChatGPT (a miniscule fraction of them) and they understand their contents.
Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?
I wouldn't call it an order of magnitude, it's the same model but with a different prompt and the ability to run code on its own. Anyway the logic is this: I had fun doing this but its a silly project and I didn't want to spend 20$ on it. Plus I didn't have to because a youtuber did it for me.
You can also look at this as a question of whether ChatGPT Plus is worth it in general: it did better than straight API calls but I spent 2$ of API calls vs 20$ for plus, it isn't 10 times better.
aaa
4mo ago
I think the bigger factor here is the recent concentration of media ownership, there used to be more competition in the past.
aaa
4mo ago
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.
The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.
aaa
4mo ago
Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?
But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.
aaa
4mo ago
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
aaa
4mo ago
This explanation is often repeated but it's a lot less certain than people would have you believe. The theory goes "it was a widespread belief among ancient jews that prophets lived perfect lives and died in the same day they were born", also known as the "integral age theory".
There's two problems with this, the first one is that it is almost completely unsourced. The only source that exists is in the Rosh Hashanah and states that only Moses was born and died on the same day (for rather contrived reasons). Now, that text is about right in terms of dates for the establishment of Christmas and Jesus was supposed to be better than Moses, so it makes sense. However there is another problem: Jesus didn't die on the day of his birthday.
So the entire argument is moot, someone placed Jesus birthday on the 25th for some reason, that reason has been deleted from history. It is plausible that the integral age was used as a contrived excuse to place it there, but we don't know for sure. It can not be the real reason (because a straightforward application would just tell you that he was also born on easter). The real reason has likely been deleted from history.
Sources:
aaa
4mo ago
Christmas trees came about in the 1500s in the Baltics and are decidedly Lutheran in origin. The notion that Christmas is merely a rebranded pagan holiday (Yule or Saturnalia) is anti-Christian propaganda.
I think this is bullshit. I've read the arguments, I know what historians think about this and I'm still convinced their arguments are weak.
There is no logical reason you would decorate an evergreen tree to celebrate the birth of the son of god, which happened in a cave and involved no trees at all. The christmas log is an even better example, somehow there's local customs, spread from the uk to turkey relating to a magical chunk of wood. Where does that come from? Turns out, nowhere. It just starts getting mentioned out of nowhere. Same thing with the christmas tree, at some point it just starts existing for no logical reason.
I think there are two explanations, one is that they are pre-christian traditions that survived underground until they re-emerged at some point (it doesn't even have to be that much underground, it just needs to be a topic that wasn't recorded in writing). Or they are new traditions that don't have anything to do with christianity, a sort of repaganization of europe.
It's hard to tell which is the case because the christian middle ages didn't bother keeping a record of pagan european tradition.
aaa
4mo ago
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
aaa
4mo ago
Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now
My guess is that anyone who wanted broadband in 2004 had it. In the US penetration was 25% for broadband and 30% for dialup and dialup started declining in 2001. And dialup back then was completely fine for porn. The internet adoption curve post 2000 is a lot flatter than you'd think
Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today.
Hard disagree on this one. Back in the Kazaa days you would easily download CP by accident.
I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days).
I have a hard time believing any of this would make much of a significant difference.
Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.
Fair enough but even hub sites are almost 20 years old at this point, youporn for example launched in 2006.
aaa
4mo ago
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
aaa
4mo ago
I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.
Metacommentary: I wouldn't pursue this line of argumentation. At best your interlocutor will be utterly confused and think it's complete nonsense. At worst you'll have to end up defending extremely shoddy concepts of teleology.
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