Exceed is still the only program that handles graphically intense Unix X11 sessions properly for Windows machines. It's still not great though.

Some of us still have to slog through old CAD applications that have long been abandoned.

His speculation about total fuselage failure due to the door departing is completely off the rails and bordering on fear mongering.

There are lots of stupid people.

Same. It was a shock to me reading all the replies of people not just turning down the master volume. Usually there is a button on you keyboard specifically for that!

How is it exploitation to offer a service to someone for money?

You're mixing up the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation.

Assuming you meant the Drake equation, more than half of the variables we have absolutely no statistical basis to decide on a fraction. Obviously they are non-zero, but they could be extremely improbable. We only have one example of intelligent life developing radio communications. Any estimate of a statistical likelihood of that using Earth as an example is meaningless without other examples.

Some pessimistic estimates give solutions as small 9.1 x 10^-13 which indicates we would be alone.

The Fermi Paradox riffs on the optimistic answer to Drake's Equation. If other intelligent life is a certainty, why haven't we found them yet?

engineerguy (Bill Hammack) is a great channel where Bill explains all kinds of different things.

I finally overhauled my home server. I built a 12TB storage and media server using a few parts from the old server but am running it on Linux using docker rather than my old gaming PC's windows 7 install. Should be much better for security and easier to upgrade or move.

Paid for PlexPass finally since hardware transcoding is locked behind the paywall.

Dropped Netflix after over a decade of using it regularly because the prices went up and I had been using it less.

Have used ChatGPT for help planning trips and developing goals and plans at home. I was restricted from using it or anything like it at work so I haven't been able to properly use it to my advantage much.

Finally upgraded my router to WiFi 6 and my Internet bandwidth to gigabit from 250 mbps. It's refreshing! Probably the best decision I made in 2023.

Dropped reddit (to include blocking the domain on my pihole). I still waste time but less of it is on social media.

Inspection intervals are based on expectation of damage over time, not to verify if the installation procedure was properly followed.

Design requirements for airplane parts that experience rotation or are part of control systems are regulated to have locking features to prevent loose bolts from happening. If the initial installation was done improperly it could be a failure in quality control at Boeing. Or if they were installed properly but weren't designed with sufficient locking mechanisms it may be an improper design. Either way this could turn into an Airworthiness Directive which is when the FAA steps in to ensure safety.

"Do your own research" is a phrase with a lot of baggage. It means more than doing your own research.

It's a phrase that has been used online in debates over every kind of conspiracy theory, religious idea, or political stance and carries with it the unsaid presumption that alternative sources are the key to learning the "actual truth." It's a loaded phrase that acts as a calling card for people who are overly confident that they have the right answer but can't articulate how they arrived at it.

I roll my eyes whenever I read or hear someone say "do your own research" because I know the debate ends there and there's no convincing them otherwise.

Prove it.

It's more like educated guessing, which is a lot faster than brute forcing. They can use code to check the answers so there is ground truth to verify against. A few days of compute time for an answer to a previously unsolved math problem sounds a lot better than brute forcing.

Generate enough data for good guesses and bad guesses and you can train the thing to make better guesses.

These are so cool! Do you have a link to buy?

Edit: Found them! These are crimpless solder sleeves. Crimpless Solder Sleeve Heat Shrink Variety Kit - 90 Piece

Print this out for him: https://xkcd.com/627/

Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!

When trying to resolve a problem it's really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.

I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can't figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it's almost impossible to figure out.

This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.

Playing devil's advocate here, but is it truly a public good to have as many works as possible accessible to the public?

What if misinformation outweighs real information in the aggregate?

Relevant username?

Keith David makes a great Vice President too: https://saintsrow.fandom.com/wiki/Keith_David

You really butterfingered that setup.

Got mine a year ago and the OLED is really tempting. I've had the OLED switch and steam deck side by side and the screen on the switch is much better. What I'm hoping is that the screen is a drop in replacement option for the original.

Edit: Damn...

Too little :D

His breakdown of Wozmon was my introduction to him. He is incredibly good at explaining and breaking things down. I was riveted when I started watching.

8-Bit Guy is great. Love his deep dives on how older technology works.

Ronald Finger AKA Fingerprints Workshop

His videos on restoring a 1985 Fiero got me hooked. His video subject matter and editing style are interesting and fun.

It is undefined because the inverse of division is multiplication. If you multiply by zero, every answer is zero. If you try to invert that operation you can't know which number was multiplied by zero to get zero because multiplying by zero doesn't produce a unique answer for each operation.

Additionally, if you take the limit of 1/x as x approaches zero from the positive side the result approaches positive infinity. If you take the limit from the negative side it approaches negative infinity.

An interesting thing to think about is whether multiplication by zero really makes much sense in the concrete world. You can't really have zero groups of something or some number of groups of zero. Zero groups of anything is still nothing. We can think of that abstractly once we have the abstract concept of numbers, but in the real world that idea is nonsense.

I've found my ADHD is more difficult to deal with later in life. It is not because my symptoms are worse, it's more because my responsibilities have grown. More and more of my goals are longer term issues that require constant attention over long periods of time and following through with plans in a timely manner.

I also feel that medication has exacerbated my hyperfocus on things unrelated to my true goals. I get by just dealing with the high stress times that occur when things have been procrastinated long enough to become urgent.

Recently dealt with this. Save all your tabs as bookmarks, then import to Firefox. Open all bookmarks. Delete chrome.

Toothpaste. Generics are awful.

I use it with Firefox. I'm not sure if it's available for Chrome.

There are some uBlock Origin custom filters that bypass a lot of paywalls. The one I use is called Bypass Paywalls Clean.

I feel you on the muscle cramps and jaw clenching. I hear exercise is great for stress reduction, but I also have a terrible time sticking to it. Stimulants don't help with that. I feel like I only get relief from a hot shower.

A Wrinkle in Time and The Green Book were my first introduction to Sci-Fi books, but I was well versed in movie sci-fi by then.

What is consciousness in this context though? What do you mean by "a bit of?" Are atoms only partially experiencing being atoms?

I don't think this is true. Most philosophers agree to define consciousness as what it is like to be something, or the act of experiencing.

If you experience things, you are conscious.

Can you provide a panpsychist definition of consciousness? I had a hard time finding an actual definition in searching. I understand the idea that panpsychists believe that mind is a fundamental part of reality, but haven't seen a solid definition of consciousness in that context.

Also are you on the Panexperientialism or Pancognitivism bandwagon? Or maybe both?

Edit: From plato.stanford.edu I found this, but it is attributed to analytic philosophy:

"something is conscious just in case there is something that it’s like to be it; that is to say, if it has some kind of experience, no matter how basic."

This is the hottest question in theory of mind right now thanks to David Chalmers. It's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness and it's about connecting the reductionist view of the brain's function with the first-person experience of consciousness.

I think that any explanation of consciousness completely from "the outside" will result in not being able to quantify the experience part of it. Any explanation completely from "the inside" will eventually run into the same issues as empiricism where it will be limited by subjectivity. I think that fundamentally we can't rigorously combine these two views because they aren't compatible. The starting points for each view carry different base assumptions.

Both may be true from within their perspectives but combining them is basically just stating that a subjective experience "maps" to a physical function. There isn't any explanatory usefulness of mapping. It doesn't explain why the subjective experience is there just that it happens when these other physical things happen. I'm not sure we'll find an answer that truly resolves the hard problem, but we're still trying.

I'm a personal fan of Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts theory of consciousness. The biggest problem of defining consciousness is that the deeper you look into where it comes from the definitions we commonly use to describe consciousness fall apart.

It's a collaborative effort between different parts of your brain and the environment. A lot of it we aren't even aware of. At the same time we often generate explanations for our behavior after the fact so our experience of consciousness tends to be mostly a justification mechanism, not necessarily primarily a control mechanism.

Here's the thing, the LLM isn't recalling and presenting pieces of information. It's creating human-like strings of words. It will give you a human-like phrase based on whatever you tell it. Chatbots like ChatGPT are fine tuned to try to filter what they say to be more helpful and truthful but at it's core it just takes what you say and makes human-like phrases to match.

It's the trust thermocline again. When will companies learn to do more ground level research before pulling bullshit like this?

You bring up some interesting points about content. I agree that a large majority of media today is so focused on quantity and hype that meaningful information is lost in the noise. I think there is a common thread there with the Silicon Valley style VC hype around whatever current thing is hot at the moment, but I felt you didn't quite support that much in your post.

Time will really tell for disruptive technologies we keep seeing in headlines. But I think we won't find out until much farther in the future than people expect. Bitcoin is still around after 15 years, but didn't prove to be as revolutionary as expected and has massive externalities that make it unappealing. It found it's niche though.

It takes a long time to find the unintended long term consequences that makes or breaks these high concept tech ideas. By then the gravy train is over and the next big thing is in. Some of these are grifts where someone smart enough to see the problems can avoid it but others like Air BnB or Uber don't get sorted out until long after they screw up the market.

A lot of this is due to the push to get a user base first then make it profitable later where the profit comes from scale and efficiency. In the meantime they sell a product that seems too good to be true because it isn't currently sustainable.