Winsaucerer

I'm very interested in approaches that avoid cloud, so please don't read this as me saying cloud is superior. I can think of some other advantages of cloud:

- easy to setup different permissions for users (authorisation considerations).

- able to transfer assets to another owner (e.g., if there's a sale of a business) without needing to move physical hardware.

- other outsiders (consultants, auditors, whatever) can come in and verify the security (or other) of your setup, because it's using a standard well known cloud platform.

> A fixed-price deal sets up the wrong incentive structure. It’s in the client’s interest to agree the lowest price possible, and then to squeeze the consultant for every drop of juice they can get. So that sucks.

>

> On the other hand, it’s in the consultant’s interest to do the quickest and cheapest work necessary to get the client to sign off on the job. After that, they have zero incentive to fix any problems that arise. It’s just bad news all round.

I don't agree with this at all. If you give a fixed price contract that includes bug fixes for a period, then your incentives are well aligned.

- You want to release robust code (to avoid warranty bug fixes), and your client wants that too.

- You want to finish quickly to get final payment sooner, and your client wants it finished quickly too.

- You set the price to what it needs to be and you'd be happy with, and if it's too rich for the client, you just don't take the job (does require you to be in a situation where you can reject underpriced projects, and requires you to be good at quoting).

- Client shouldn't care if you took half the hours you estimated, and they don't need to know. You both agreed to a price that works for you both, so ideally both sides have had a winning experience.

I have had experience with a client that tried to squeeze every drop of juice, and that sucked. They had no choice though because their budget was completely unmovable (came from grants). My thinking is that it's probably best to prune such clients when you can, and stick with those whose expectations align well with your way of working. Not every client tries to squeeze every last feature out of you.

Hourly is easy for the seller, but it's a sucky experience for the client. It builds distrust, and unlike fixed price, I think it's actually hourly pricing that misaligns incentives. I also don't like the social aspect. E.g., where people question how you're spending your hours, or you have a chat about the weekend don't know whether to make it clear that you're not billing for that time, etc.

On a related note, I also hate Imgur. Can be a pain in the arse on mobile, forcing me to use the app, making it hard to view just the image, sometimes looking terrible when not using the app.

Yes, the scripting is very nice. At first, I played around with Go templates to generate the Typst templates, since that is what I was used to doing with LaTeX. It was very nice to discover it allows you to use JSON with its scripting engine directly pretty easily.

You've had some good replies already, but just want to add my thoughts. Markdown to me is more about (a) the content (the actual words) and (b) the semantics (text emphasis, headings, etc, which communicate information about the importance or meaning of particular things).

Typesetting systems like Typst or LaTeX go beyond this. They're also about presentation, how precisely it is laid out, on mediums such as print or PDF. Is that something you need? If you care more about the content and its meaning, and are happy to have it rendered differently in different situations (a preview in Visual Studio Code, or passed through a markdown-to-html renderer, or viewed in Obsidian, etc), then Markdown might not just be fine, it may be preferable. But if you need to do things like print this on paper for mailing, email in a PDF, that sort of thing, then you'll want something more.

On that page is a "products" menu link up the top (or under the hamburger button on mobile). It shows you the various products that they have.

That's why I try (but sometimes forget) to extensively comment my queries that have any kind of complexity :)

I feel like a foreigner in another land when I read your comment and others like it. For as long as I can remember using SQL, I can't remember ever finding it more difficult or backwards than anything else I use.

That difference might go some way towards explaining why I prefer a much more database heavy/thick approach to writing apps than my peers.

I was looking for a static site hosting option recently and tried out cloudflare pages. Fit my need perfectly. The generous free tier and the reasonable pricing model were the big factors.

Oh, and the ability to put some authentication in front of it was a big feature for me.

> How does this make sense? There is some divine being that only sometimes looks at the actual synapses to decide if it should feel nauseous or happy?

One possibility: the experiences that God gives me at any moment are what they are because of the state of my brain. This isn't a sometimes thing, but an always thing. I see or experience what I do because of the state of my brain, but not only because of the state of my brain.

The problem is that the physical states alone don't entail anything about the experiential -- nothing about the phenomenology. The physical explanation leaves out things that are real and need explaining.

I think you're on the right track here. I usually try to reason down a similar line. I wouldn't say that the claim is that the equations and laws combined can be conscious. Instead, I would say that none of the equations or laws that we come up with involve mental attributes (such as consciousness or qualia) as either inputs or outputs.

You look at all the proposed laws of the universe, and they involve things like energy, mass, time, position, work, etc, as inputs or outputs. No equations have inputs of these sorts of natural quantities and outputs that entail consciousness or that first-person experience.

We can see from these equations how things like tree leaves blowing in the wind, or mountains, might arise. These things involve motions and mass and things interacting with each other. While we might not be able to paint the full picture, we can see that the inputs and outputs of those equations are the right kinds of things that might plausibly lead to mountains and leaves blowing in the wind, at the right scale.

We can't see from these equations anything that might plausibly lead to the first-person experience, the what-it's-like to be something.

Note that the naturalist cannot then just inject these mental/consciousness related parameters into their equations. That would amount to a form of dualism, and destroy their project. What I think the naturalist needs to do is somehow explain away consciousness, because I don't see any path they could take to explain it in purely natural terms. They need to deny that there's anything here that needs explaining at all.

> if you consider experiences to be "execution"...

Why would anyone think that is true? The problem I find with responses like yours is that I think you haven't understood or fully appreciated what it is I'm pointing to that needs explaining. There's something real here that needs explaining or accounting for in a full theory, and an explanation like this doesn't even touch on it. In the full story of "what is experience", there is absolutely without doubt a computational side. But there is an aspect of experience, the 'felt'-ness of it, or the phenomenology, the qualia, that is not explained even in part by reference to computations or any other physical process.

There's just nothing like that, no precursors of it, to be found in the physical world. It's not the computational side of experiences, but rather the what-it's-like-ness of it.

Here's an example of it: what, given naturalism, explains the redness of seeing red? This is not a question about the wavelengths of light, or light hitting the retina, or processing in the brain that leads to the brain states that correspond to having that experience. This is a question about what it's like to see red -- the experiential side of the experience, as opposed to the physical causes of it. Why, given naturalism, would we think that anything experiences (first person perspective) anything at all?

Nice joke :)

I never denied the claim that changing the brain can change mental states. I think that the experiences we have are ones we have because of physical states (primarily, the brain). I just do not think that the experiences themselves are physical things, and on a purely naturalistic explanation of the universe experiences would not exist.

You are right that on naturalism there isn't really a place for non-physical-stuff consciousness. And yet, the existence of non-physical-stuff is the one thing I am most sure of, the one and only thing I have access to. So the challenge is to explain it (or explain it away). As you say, there's no place for it in a naturalist view of the world, and I agree.

> If the world is all ideas, then it's just as impossible to explain why different minds have a coherent shared illusion of the physical world, or even any kind of communication between minds at all.

It is far from impossible. There are many idealist models. Here is one: there is a central consciousness (call it God), and God is able to give experiences to other consciousnesses, and those consciousnesses can communicate back to God.

On that model, there is a shared world because God gives experiences to these other consciousnesses as of being in a shared world. The other consciousnesses, in turn, communicate back to God what they will, and that influences future experiences that God gives to those other consciousnesses. That gives a shared illusion of the physical world.

Note that whether you're a naturalist or an idealist, you're going to postulate some things as true without justifying them. For the naturalist, they postulate the existence of physical things without explaining why the physical exists at all. For the idealist, they postulate the existence of mental things without explaining why mental stuff exists at all. If the idealist asks to be granted the above simple postulates, then a coherent shared illusion is possible. I'm willing to grant the physicalist whatever physical postulates they need, and from that I would like to see how they explain (or explain away) consciousness.

> I’ve always found the denial of the existence of experiential consciousness to be kind of funny. If you removed all my senses and put my brain in a vat to keep it alive, what would be left? As far as my brain is concerned, consciousness is the _only_ thing for which I can be definitively certain of its existence.

Yes exactly, it is the thing that is most familiar to us, most accessible, and the only thing of which we can be certain. Descartes in his Meditations went down this path, starting with that foundation.

But I don't think you need to land on solipsism, because we don't have to believe only those things which can be proved. To me, it seems a reasonable hypothesis to suppose there are other consciousnesses. For an experimental line of thinking that leads to that conclusion, I would recommend the aforementioned Meditations.

Many are tempted to think that the physical world is the certain thing that we have, missing the fact that we experience the physical world, and so it is experience that we have access to, not the physical world itself. That I am conscious and have experiences of such and such is the thing I am most certain of. Whether there are physical things that correspond to those experiences is an extrapolation.

I have a vague familiarity with that view, and that is definitely not the view I hold.

That view states, as you describe, that somehow the whole is more than just the sum of the parts. I reject that. Instead, my claim is that if the only parts you have are physical parts, you will not get consciousness. You need other parts too -- specifically, mental/consciousness parts.

(although, this sounds closer to a dualist view, while my view is more idealist)

My own view is probably atypical among dualists and idealists, and hard to explain. I'll just state what I think is true, without justifying why I think these things are true or compatible with each other. I think:

- Most or all of what makes us human, like love, pain, sense of belonging, seeing, hearing, find almost all of their explanation in the physical. I include even things like thinking, reasoning, beliefs, and so on, as finding almost all their explanation in the brain.

- The experiential/phenomenological side of these things (love, pain, sense of belonging, seeing, hearing, etc) are non-physical mental/consciousness things. Everything else besides the phenomenology finds its explanation in our brains (or some wider physical states than just the brain).

- I am not surprised that LLM's could be as powerful as they are today (though I am surprised that I was alive to see that), and I can see them getting better.

- The foundation of reality is ultimately mental/consciousness and not physical, and the physical (to use a philosophical term) supervenes on the mental.

Regarding definition of consciousness: I'm not so bothered with how we define words. I think a lot of philosophy is pointless arguing that amounts to no more than people disagreeing about how we should define a word. I see no point in that. Instead, let's just stipulate what we mean by a word, and get on with the meat of the discussion. In this particular instance, when I talk about consciousness, I'm talking about the thing that the 'hard problem of consciousness' is talking about. I'm not talking about, e.g., consciousness in the sense of wakefulness (where being asleep or under a general anaesthetic would count as unconscious).

It's not the only one. Naturalism/physicalism, a monist view, claims there is nothing else except for natural entities or causes. Dualism claims there is nothing else except for natural and mental entities or causes.

There is another monist view though, one that sometimes gets called idealism, that says there is nothing else except for mental entities or causes. I lean towards this view.

The challenge for naturalism is to explain (or explain away) consciousness (the mental). We call this challenge 'the hard problem of consciousness'. The challenge for idealism is to explain (or explain away) the physical. However, there is no analogous 'hard problem of non-consciousness' (but the explanation of this would take an unreasonable amount of words that I cannot fit here).

I agree with you that the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup (whether that's synapses or more). But that's not the point of contention -- the point of contention is whether those synapses are enough to explain (or explain away) consciousness. And to me it is plainly obvious that physical stuff (synapses or whatever) can never explain (or explain away) consciousness.

(side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states)

> unless you're a dualist, you have to admit that our biological brain is a massive bundle of cells from which consciousness somehow arises

This is indeed a consequence of a physicalist/naturalist reductionist view. On that view, there is only natural entities and causes, and everything else reduces to just natural entities or causes. Therefore, as you imply, consciousness must somehow be explained by our biological brain or other natural entities/causes (note that I didn't say "arise", since some naturalists deny there's actually any such thing as 'consciousness' to be explained).

But you can also approach this from the other direction: it is impossible for naturalism to explain (or explain away) consciousness, and consciousness is real, therefore naturalism is false. That's my position. There isn't even the seed of an explanation given naturalism, and I think the naturalist's best position is to simply deny there's anything to explain. The whole project, given naturalism, is hopeless.

Again, it's not a problem of scale but rather kind. Naturalism just doesn't have the right building blocks to explain (or explain away) consciousness.

> What is consciousness? The firing of a gazillion synapses you will never fully understand.

This doesn't fit with the other examples. Consciousness is not a problem of scale, but a problem of kind. We can see from simple models how you might make things more complex until they become something like GPT 4.

So too with human cells, we can see analogous engineering feats that make it possible to imagine that there could be a way to have a system that can produce a human from small beginnings. Again, simple systems show us how the complex might be possible.

But there are no simple building blocks that we can point to and say "yes, I can see how more of these would produce consciousness".

EHLO

I obviously don't watch anywhere near as much YouTube as you do.

The price is higher than I pay for any other streaming service. I don't drink coffee, but a quick look suggests it's 4 to 6 cups of Starbucks coffee here in Australia.

I remind again that this is the price I'd need to pay for my household, not just one individual (just like the other streaming services I subscribe to which is used by the whole household).

It's so expensive. I have multiple people in the house, and I already pay for music with Apple. It's a big price to just get no ads and nothing else.

It's not leniency in words. I see images in my mind, with colour and shape. I'd go so far as to say these are literal images. Dreams at night are like participating in a movie, with animations and sounds.

I think about other senses like smell, sound, touch, and taste. I can imagine sounds very clearly in my mind. I can also imagine very well how something would feel to touch, to the point where the imagination is almost as clear as the real thing.

However, what I can do for images, touch, and sounds, I cannot do for taste and smell. And this helps me to appreciate something of what 'aphantasia' might be like, though with different sensations.

I have a question I like to ask people, that I think helps show some external measurable consequence of this. I ask people to tell me how many doors there are going off the hall in their house (it may help you to take a moment to try answering before reading the next part).

For myself, and many others, we imagine a picture in our mind of us standing in the hall, and in the picture we just 'look' around and count off the doors. However, I made an error and missed a door when I did the counting, I forgot to count the door that was behind where I imagined myself standing in the hall, because I couldn't "see" it.

I asked someone with aphantasia this same question, because I couldn't understand how they could answer it (I'm a very visual thinker). He told me (if I understand right) that he does something like tell a story via words, and uses that to somehow enumerate the doors and answer the question. Perhaps his strategy is prone to analogous mistakes like mine, but presumably not the same mistake.

It's something that is known and a work in progress: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16lti15/comment/k169...

> None of them were claiming they were the only people who thought "rationally"; rather, they were mostly claiming that only rational thought could reach truth, and empirical evidence need not factor into it.

This is not my understanding. Rather, the disagreement relates to the primacy and necessity of rational thought in some places. Check out https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/ and you can find two examples of possible interpretations of each position. To be a rationalist does not mean to say that empirical evidence need not factor into knowledge, but just that some is unobtainable via experience, or that gained via rational thought is superior.

There's no doubt multiple views people have held that fall under each umbrella, but I just wanted to highlight that I think the rationalist does allow for some sources of knowledge that are obtainable only via experience. And I can't see how they could deny that experience is required for some knowledge.

(I may have gotten some subtleties wrong, it's a long time since I looked into this)

This doesn't sound convincing at all, and I'm struggling to follow your reasoning. I think it's an open question for Christians whether or not there are aliens.

There's almost as many ways to make a modern website in 2023 as there are developers of modern websites. You'll find plenty of opinions in here, and I of course have my own :)

You can still write websites using the technologies you're familiar with, such as Rails. If your goal is to get something out the door, then I'd suggest you pick something that feels familiar and comfortable, or will hold your attention, and is good enough for the job.

No matter what you choose, there's going to be pro's and con's. That's not to say that each choice is equally good -- some options are on balance worse than others, and the optimal choice also depends on the nature of your project. But chasing the optimal choice can cause delays. I've personally been guilty of swapping a key part of my stack (the website part) half-way through a project, just because I wanted to do it a different way (for that project though, it did not matter).

With that out of the way, my bias: I strongly suggest you pick postgres for your database, which is a favourite on HN for good reason.