d_theorist

It comes from Nagel's famous paper "what is it like to be a bat?"

He argues that something is conscious only if there is "something it is like" to be that thing. "Something it is like" meaning an answer to a question like "what was it like to speak on stage for the first time?", implying that there is some subjective character to the experience.

I only read the abstract, but this sounds a lot like the dust theory from Greg Egan's books.

This is one of the main things that made me seriously doubt my prior assumption that consciousness supervenes over computation.

Shocking that the McDonald's app knows about your McDonald's purchases.

This is - forgive me - a McNothing Burger.

The last 40 years is not "the range within which modern human civilisation developed". It's a very thin slice of time even on human scales. Let's try not to vastly overstate the data.

They haven’t removed the government. They removed Maduro. Very different.

So your problem isn’t with “banning” books in schools per se. You just have a difference of opinion over which books should be “banned”.

I just block what I don't want with screen time. My wife sets and knows the passcode. I don't. So I can't override.

I think the "click a link in the email" solution is more than a "tiny" bit better isn't it? It almost completely solves the attack pattern you laid out. Passing the whole link to BAD is not only more tedious but totally ridiculous. That is not the kind of thing that even totally naive users would do.

And there is a significant benefit of not needing to worry about weak or repeated passwords, password leaks etc.

Overall that pattern feels significantly better to me than a normal password system, and MUCH better than the "we'll send you six digits to copy and paste" solution.

As far as I can tell, the main reason people give for moving off X is that “there’s more hate speech/misinformation/disinformation since Elon took over because he got rid of a lot of trust and safety controls”

So, how does moving to a platform with the explicit aim of being decentralised solve this? Even Elon Twitter has more oversight than a decentralised platform with zero control.

> Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow via app store, they would probably already be there if it wasn't for the pesky EU.

People have been saying this ever since Apple added the App Store to the Mac in 2010. It’s been 14 years. I wonder how much time has to go by for people to believe it’s not on Apple’s todo list.

It’s extremely relevant to the question, which is what the negative nature of the image has to tell us about the relative probabilities of the two hypotheses (miraculous hypothesis vs fraud hypothesis).

In my view, it is a big problem for the fraud hypothesis because you have to explain why and how it was done. At a time when the idea of a photo negative was entirely unknown, and when there are no other examples of negative images, or even any mention of the idea of making such images, why would the fraudsters seize on the idea of making their fraudulent image a negative? There is no record of anybody even recognising that it is a negative until the 19th century. So, it’s not at all what you would expect given the fraud hypothesis. You would expect a straightforward image.

Why would they have done it?

Whatever else you might want to say about the shroud, one thing we know for sure is that it is not a painting. Analysis shows that the image is extremely superficial, only penetrating about 200nm into the fibres of the cloth. This is inconsistent with a painted image.

Of course they weren’t dumb, but having a great understanding of shadows is a far cry from being capable of creating a photo negative. They didn’t even have the concept of a photo negative. How would they even have thought to achieve such a thing? And for what purpose?

And, by the way, the image on the shroud is not made of paint, so contemporary proficiency with painting techniques hardly seems relevant.

There is a reason, because DEI introduces non-merit-based criteria for hiring, which necessarily results in less qualified hires.

What is meant by "civil society" in this article?

How do you know?

I agree you need to control for other factors. But I don't think that is particularly beyond the wit of man.

The relevant metric should be accident rate per million miles driven. What is the rate with autopilot vs without autopilot.

Let me tell you how all this works: you see, Team America is funded by the corporations, so they fight for the corporations... while they sit in their corporation buildings... and they're all corporation-y... and they make lots of money!

Or probably just an innocent oversight? I imagine they might have taken this decision early on when they were far too small for anybody to even think of not wanting to be crawled by them, and just never revisited the decision.

This is defamatory. We should all be a bit more careful and thoughtful before making unfounded accusations about people.

>> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.

>Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.

Not to me. The difference between us is that I am perfectly happy to work with people who do not share my political viewpoints.

You think that gay marriage is a good thing, but many people do not.

The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.

You cannot decide moral questions by couching them in terms of “rights” and assuming that whichever side “advances rights” must be the correct side. Why? Because you can do that arbitrarily either way and for anything. e.g. “admitting gay marriage denies people the right to live in a society where traditional marriage is protected”.

Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.

I invite you to imagine the equivalent but reversed scenario. What if Brendan Eich had been contributing money to the pro-gay-marriage campaign and had been forced out by right-wing staff at Mozilla? Would that have been appropriate?

Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, the mere fact that Mozilla forced out its CEO for having an unpopular political opinion is reason enough not to trust its leadership. Its one of the reasons I use Brave and not Firefox.

>Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol?

>There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Isn't this a bit naive? The risk I see is that Threads embraces ActivityPub, gets its claws into the Mastodon network, gets loads of people subscribing to Threads accounts (and vice versa), and then starts adding features or "improving" the protocol. Mastodon instances have a choice between either staying interoperable by keeping up with the FB version of ActivityPub, or creating a schism, which users might not like. Ultimately Facebook could end up in the driver's seat of the protocol.

It’s bikeshedding.

Please can we stop with this ridiculous exaggeration. It is actually very harmful. There is no evidence of “planetary destruction” or anything like it.

Also interested in Framework.

I would love to see a machine with the repairability and upgradability of Framework combined with the security focus of Purism.