leroy-is-here

No, cats have souls. But they certainly have thinking machines.

We are not our thoughts. We are not the thinking machines in our heads. We control our thoughts, so we are more than them.

These machines are merely thinking machines.

Indulgence doesn’t necessarily have to mean abuse.

A crucial aspect of ritual is preparation. I prepare to drive by adjusting all of my mirrors. A ritual is more than just a habit, it is a preparation for a specific habit. Again, I guarantee you do some kind of ritual in your day-to-day that, once understood, can be formalized for you.

I cannot know what that ritual looks like for you. But do you wanna know how I know you have one? Because I read a lot of old books that told me I had one too. How did someone 1500 years ago who couldn’t have even imagined me know these things about me and be right about them?

It isn’t the recommendation algorithms themselves which are insidious, it is that they are coupled directly with a single human. They are like mental parasites which watch every single interaction one makes and adjusts, ever so slightly, to the negative just to keep you watching.

I guarantee that you do rituals every single day because you prepare for them just like a ritual. A habit? Sure. A ritual, of course.

Of course Google et. al can build a chat bot that chats like you. But _is_ you? No, how can Google build something that knows unless you’ve stated it?

We’re going to have to disagree. Habits are merely unformalized rituals. If you examine your day-to-day you may find many rituals you do to prepare your self for the coming moment. Adjusting your volume on your music before a coding session. I obviously don’t know you, but a lot of people like to prepare snacks before watching Youtube. There are a lot of things we think of as habit, but we prepared them literally like a ritual.

There are rituals with all sorts of meaning, individually and collectively. But if it can work individually then it can certainly work negatively too, such as with addictions. Many habits are rituals with no meaning, which is one of the reasons why people get depressed.

Humans are just the total sum of their actions. Actions beget being and so rituals beget a practiced being. Humans practice rituals every day without even thinking about it. Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one?

That’s a real shame. Sometimes people need a reason, other than friendship, to be friends.

When I made my comment, I knew nothing about a “g-factor”.

Damn, that should’ve been obvious because of where we are. I even have friends like this — I was thinking about not knowing a name, period.

What other general intelligence have we seen other than human? We know, of course, that animals have intelligence, but they do not appear to talk. How are we measuring general intelligence now? By IQ, a human test through words and symbols.

Here’s a trick: allow yourself to notice things and then comment on them. That’s what people want. A few examples:

* Damn, she made these biscuits big as hell. Love these biscuits.

* Not sure what 36 is doing on the sideline like that.

* Hey man, that hat looks baller.

* Yeah, last weekend I saw a dude in stilts

How did you manage to have a phone friend without knowing their name? You’re gonna have to tell that story.

I absolutely agree btw, people are more than just their job. And most hate, or are disinterested, in their work. I’m interested them _them_, not their occupation.

But it’s no secret that many, especially here, make their occupation a fundamental aspect of themselves.

Learning programming language theory and then putting it into practice by writing a compiler will 100%, without a doubt in my mind, make you a better software engineer. This is because you will have to put many complex systems into working and coordinated order to have a working compiler, even if you use something like LLVM. And you will get a better understanding of a fundamental aspect of computer science: modeling ideas into a language and then directly speaking that language.

The ancient Greeks held sight itself as holy. We have now showed other people’s experiences and have become addicted to them. The vision is so strong, people can manage to somehow live inside these addictions.

Back in the old days, I had some sort of arcane chroot setup for FTP for this website. I used a hard link to resolve everything. Well, like a year into it, I forgot that I used a hard link. I needed to update a few things, so I just rm’d the supposed sym link and nuked the entire site.

Learned a hard lesson about backups that day. I did have some, but of course we still lost some data.

Something that may tickle your fancy is considering words as food. Food affects our body in more ways than simply giving us energy. Can words affect the mind in similar fashion?

I'm sure you can find much research about how the body reacts to it as such.

Yes, it took me a long time to realize that pain, and pangs, and feelings aren't minor inconveniences that I must live with, but my body telling me something was wrong or needed adjustment. I've found that fasting helps us stop ignoring what the body is telling us.

I wanted to share this because I feel, in this era of ChatGPT, a sense of existential dread from others. ChatGPT is a thinking machine, but we are more than just our thoughts.

Or perhaps you’re just a better listener. Do you _know_ they _must_ carry snacks or are you imagining that’s how they must be?

The real trick of this is realizing people do the same “imagining” with their own body and their own selves. They do not know.

I don’t know if you are disagreeing with me but see: zero calorie sodas and sugars.

What I’m saying is that perhaps the “cranky” eater doesn’t even know their body’s voice. Or is angry by simply hearing it.

Another way of putting it: you say you have tried but are you even sure that others have tried? People will say they have experienced but in reality have not.

There’s no single experience of thinking yet I can say everyone has thoughts. Thoughts about what? _That_ is what varies. The body is similar, it speaks through signals to the brain. The only way to know your body’s voice is by doing. Dismiss your notion that individual experience has no value.

Modern humans have modern inventions like zero calorie foods. I’ve talked to many who have fasted where their body probably disagreed with that statement.

Russel and Whitehead attempted to formulate such a convention. Much of our computer science derives from this very idea.