dreamlayers

With technical questions, I've gotten a lot more hallucinations from Google than from ChatGPT. It feels like they added the AI to try to stay competitive, despite them not being good at it.

Why isn't Wayland better than X11?

I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.

To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them.

Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.

I cannot imagine why someone would like Windows 9x enough to use it, let alone develop something so complicated for it.

I view World War 2 as Nazis harnessing discontent in Germany to motivate Germans to fight a war. So, the main risk I see is discontent building up again. What about people who can't have a good future because of the industrial decline of Germany?

As long as we don't understand how consciousness works, I don't think it's possible to make claims about what is or isn't conscious. It's all just speculation.

But if others are speculating, I might as well. What if AI consciousness depends not on computation, but on what seems like randomness? When something is running a fully deterministic process, consciousness seems irrelevant. I don't think the meaning that humans see in the process makes it conscious. Even a simple industrial control system using relays senses and responds to meaningful things.

How is this possible? Are phones willing to connect to any cell and blindly trust that text messages from there are genuine and really coming from the numbers they claim to be coming from? Isn't there some cryptographic verification?

What is new here? I thought corona discharges during storms had already been well known for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elmo%27s_fire

The biggest problem is that Canada shares a long land border with the US but is isolated by oceans from other countries. Having alternatives is good, but conflict with the US is dangerous. The US could do a huge amount of damage just by blocking trade with Canada. They're also capable of blocking trade between Canada and other countries, and occupying Canada. It is probably unwise to escalate conflict when the other side can escalate a lot more.

Maybe motivation needs to be considered separately from intelligence. Pure intelligence is more like a tool. Something needs to motivate use of that tool toward a specific purpose. In humans, motivation seems related to emotions. I'm not sure what would motivate an artificial intelligence.

Right now the biggest risk isn't what artificial intelligence might do on its own, but how humans may use it as a tool.

Being accessible over the internet from a country can't be the same as having a physical presence there. Otherwise, anyone putting any content on the internet needs to comply with the laws of every single country.

How is one country able to fine businesses in other countries? What legal authority or ability do they have to do anything?

The real problem is that society teaches people to suppress negative emotions. Then someone can harness those suppressed emotions and focus them on something.

If you want a custom resolution in Linux drm.edid_firmware= works well with the right EDID.

For me, the worst things about the Linux graphical console are lack of scrollback and horrible performance. Linux still has scrollback in VGA text mode, and of course it is super fast because each character is only 2 bytes. In graphics mode you can only fix this by running a program that provides its own graphical terminal, like kmscon or fbterm.

The best thing about the graphical console is ability to use bigger fonts, so your characters can be smooth and not pixelated. I like the Terminus fonts. As long as performance isn't a problem it's better to increase font size than to decrease the resolution.

What's the point of taking your own highly detailed photos of the moon? You can find much higher resolution images elsewhere. I usually only want to take a photo of the moon as part of a moonlit scene.

It is about accomplishment, but about accomplishing what is truly meaningful to you and what makes you happy.

It seems like there is a continuum between being oblivious and delusional. You need to notice things, recognize their meaning, make connections and then make conclusions. Being oblivious can mean missing important signs and making bad choices due to not realizing what is happening. Being delusional can mean jumping to conclusions by "connecting the dots" in one particular way that leads to one conclusion even though that may not be the truth. A sane perspective would mean evaluating different hypotheses to come to a reasonable conclusion. Someone who is paranoid may be right about some things much earlier than others, but they may also be wrong about many other things.

I think there is a fundamental difference between such social phenomena and the seemingly solitary delusions that happen in recognized mental illness such as schizophrenia.

This is a good article, but I dislike how the start defines delusions as "fixed, false beliefs that cannot be changed by evidence". Many delusions seem wrong to others without any solid evidence that can conclusively prove that they're wrong. For example, if someone says they're the second coming of Jesus, or if someone believes the CIA has mind control satellites, that seems obviously ridiculous, but you cannot disprove that.

I don't think apps running in a web browser are very efficient. Calling something like that "ultra-fast" doesn't seem right.

I think a big part of the problem is use of cool white LED lights, which produce more light on the blue part of the spectrum. That light scatters more in the atmosphere, like how the sky is blue during the day.

Around here, the LED lights do not seem brighter like the article claims.

Also, they are all full cutoff. In the past, almost all high pressure sodium streetlights meant to send light downwards had a glass globe below, which sent some light upwards. LED streetlights have flat panels instead, so none of the light fixture itself can directly send light into the sky. Only light reflected from illuminated objects and scattered by the air can light up the sky.

I see no evidence that the amazing increase in data transfer rates has increased people's happiness. That is because happiness is a measure of something else, more like how well you're using the opportunities available at the time.

So, how do they lubricate it?

I'm not convinced that destroying the flash chip makes it more secure. Erasing the chip should be secure and fast enough. Damaging it with overvoltage might leave the data recoverable.

It's small, does the job I need, it can be made to look good, and extended via plugins. What else do I need? VLC seems like overkill for music.

Winamp is highly modular. Most functionality is in plugins, and you could only install the plugins you want. For example you could exclude the media library, modern skins, and video playback. So, 5.x doesn't have to be bloated.

It is possible to make a knife out of lignum vitae: https://www.solidsmack.com/fabrication/lignum-vitae-ironwood...

So I guess the achievement here is that commonly available inexpensive wood can be made as hard as rare expensive wood.

Why wouldn't the power supply shut down due to overcurrent protection?

I'm guessing that some virus signatures detect packers instead of unpacking the code and detecting malware code there.