marcAKAmarc

Just wanted stop here to say that I find myself lucky to be able to retain employment as a gamedev engineer without using any AI or agent in my daily process. I work remote, so I don't know what the experience of my collegues entails. Am I really slipping into antiquity?

Yes, I would love to participate. There is nothing very impressive about my home studio, other than the fact that it exists. It happily houses my grunge band that I play in with my wife and best friend. Much of the equipment is old/half working as I have been writing and self recording music now for 15 years, but only as a hobby. I also have extensive experience with algorithmic music, developing many tools from scratch. I would be happy talk about any of that stuff. Feel free to send me a DM :).

I'm glad things are progressing, but it bugs me that AI is largely being innovated for the use of... things like this? I know this comment is a bit disparaging and minimizes greater achievements, and I apologize for that, but the closeness of content-consumerism and AI is becoming quite off putting.

I always thought the best way to explain wfc would be: Multidimensional Markov Chain

Only maybe though

I did this and by 100, i was +30, but by 200 i was bqck to 0.

Sure. It is probably hard to parse because I do not have solid knowledge regarding image generation AI stuff.

To restate my previous sentiment, I am quite attached to image generation with GPT-2, which is now legacy. Even though GPT-2 is not as advanced in many ways as more modern alternatives, I am artistically attached to its' shortcomings/artifacts. I really hope older image generation methods like gpt-2 remain available as a service to the general public.

This doesn't strictly have to do with stable diffusion, but I really really hope that someone eventually creates a service that hosts live interfaces for all of the legacy image generation models. The turn around on these things is wild, and I worry that unique image generation techniques will become antiquated and forgotten.

By name

"It tolerates brilliant jerks and has no effective CoC."

That's what she said.

Seems like a really good read, but I only have 30 minutes.

Bummed that a lot of the games I want to play are hidden behind 'Decoders' or special key decoding systems that used to physically ship with the game. Anyone know a way around these kinda things?

I was hoping to see some mention of rule 110

After reading all the comments to this article, I get the weird feeling that some people, though obviously intelligent and convincing in their argument, obtain no consciousness. Further more, for the life of me, I can't decide if that supports or detracts from the idea of panpsychism. Making the argument "consciousness is not special - it simply emerges from data processing" feels so dead, but is really saying that everything is alive to a certain degree. On the other hand, saying "There is something special about consciousness that needs to be explained" almost supports the idea that consciousness is exclusive to certain entities and not others, and therefore needs explaining. That feels so backwards to me for some reason, and I can't put a finger on it.

All good points.

> "They are, but they aren't fundamental. They are just our interpretation of the state of the universe (which is quantitative)."

I see the logic here, but I think I can poke a hole in it with this line of logic:

1.)Everything I experience has both a quantitative reality (state of the universe) and a qualitative reality (interpretation of the state of the universe).

2.)I can't observe a quantitative reality without qualitative reality.

3.)I can't say for sure that quantitative reality gives rise to qualitative reality, because I've never observed a quantitative reality without the qualitative component.

I think you are right that, in the context of classical physics, qualitative experiences are not fundamental. But I also don't think classical physics has a place in the discussion about subjective reality.

>Is "NullPointerException" a thing that exists just because java programs can throw it?

Very interesting comparison of exceptions to qualia, and really illustrates the "chicken or egg" side of the discussion quite well.

To respond to your question, No. In a literal sense it exists to tell the programmer (or in the worst case, a normal computer user) that something in the program went wrong, which is the whole thing actually.

To continue with the discussion from a programming standpoint... Exception messages are our stand in for some type of qualia, and "NullPointerException" is an example of a quantitative representation of a specific quality, and Java as the biological brain and the gateway to the outside world. The consciousness in this metaphor is the programmer (or user) that reads the exceptions as output on the screen, and quality is experienced when the programmer feels (or interprets) the words on the screen that say "NullPointerException".

I could try to posit a few things here that support the existence of consciousness -

1.) the mere existence of error messages or output in general (qualia) supports the case of the existence of users (or consciousness within yourself).

2.) If I can successfully trigger multiple errors, process them, and discern one error message from another, then I am most certainly using a computer (and obtain consciousness).

I think you can definitely observe it in yourself. Try this (copy and pasting from a separate response I made):

Think about experiencing pain and what it feels like to you. Really try to simulate it in your thoughts. Probably sucks. Now think about happiness and what that feels like to you. Probably doesn't suck as much. Without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of quantifiable data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to recall those two feelings and (much more importantly) discern the difference between those two feelings just now. You didn't do this by any type of measurement of quantity, just by quality of experience (qualia). If you were able to identify and discern the separate feelings you have internally assigned to happiness and pain without quantifying them, I would call that proof of consciousness within yourself maybe.

>"There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them."

I understand your standpoint. I feel pretty frustrated with these questions too - especially when people throw large assumptions around like panpsychism. However, I gotta disagree with the idea notion that no qualities exist in the universe. Afterall, isn't every single thing a part of the universe, including thoughts, feelings, and experience?

Here is a thought experiement:

Think about experiencing pain and what it feels like to you. Really try to simulate it in your thoughts. Probably sucks. Now think about happiness and what that feels like to you. Probably doesn't suck as much. Without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of scientific data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to discern the difference between those two feelings just now. You didn't do this by any type of measurement of quantity, just by quality of experience (qualia).

So I would argue that either quality definitely exists, or everyone reading this just experienced something that is extra-universal, which in my opinion is just as fantastic and assumptive as panpsychism.

Also, I am not a theoretical physicist nor do I have half of a firm understanding of even classical physics, but apparently there has been advances in theoretical physics to include consciousness into the same theory as quantum and classical physics. Might be interesting for some readers to check out - The Causal Theory of Views: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338544509_The_Causa...

This article was very enjoyable. The connection between dream state emotions and musical emotions are undoubtable for me. I've always assumed that they felt so similar because the brain was practicing finding meaning in chaos by recognizing patterns in the chaos, then organizing and categorizing those patterns until meaning can be associated (through previous experience maybe).

However, I do have to say that I did disagree with a few assumptions the article made:

>However dreams are never about the strangeness or the alteration of reality.

Many nightmares that I have are actually about the strangeness of the dream itself. I realize that something is not normal, and instead of determining that I am experiencing a dream (and thus start entering a lucid dream state), I start feeling like I must have lost my sanity. This can be a truly terrifying experience when things really go off the rails.

Before I knew very much music theory, I tried building a music generator. I learned TONS of music theory along the way, and the generator project sort of served as a testing ground for new concepts that I've learned, as well as a driving force that compelled me to learn about new aspects of theory in order to make improvements to the generator.

This is definitely not the most efficient way to learn music theory, but for me it always helps to have a project running alongside whatever I'm studying in order to immediately reap the benefits of new knowledge.

"smoother than a vanilla BM."

By "gatekeeping", I'm referring to the efforts made to exclude certain content. By this definition (which I probably should have defined earlier), I would say that SO is founded on gatekeeping and that gatekeeping even makes SO the great resource that it is. After all, the quality of content on SO would surely go down if low quality content wasn't downvoted.

So I'm not "blaming the group", but instead I'm trying to make the point that when the current SO system is paired with a homogeneous user base will, it probably naturally become more an more homogeneous for the reasons stated above, unless an outside force enters the system.

I would argue that this isn't about fault or blame or guilt, but instead about deciding whether or not to take action to make SO a more inclusive place, especially for those who may be predisposed to feel exclusion in the context of SO.

While I do think it is true that you can only find "hints" of group bias when examining individual stackoverflow users, stackoverflow in general is known to have:

1. overwhelmingly dominant gender of population (92.9% of SO population)

2. overwhelmingly dominant race and ethnicity categorization (74.2% of SO population)

3. overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation (93.2% of SO population).

(I left this ambiguous on purpose to ensure that my point is about the homogeneity of the population and not the specifically dominant demographic group. If you want more information, you can look for yourself for specifics about which way the numbers fall here - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/).

My point is that the stackoverflow population in general is very homogeneous by certain categories.

Instead of looking for evidence of victimization, imagine how easy it would be for someone belonging to a StackOverflow minority category to get discouraged by StackOverflows fierce gatekeeping, especially with the knowledge that stack overflow is so demographically unlike this person. From the point of view of the marginalized, evidence of group categorization isn't needed beyond that fact that "StackOverflow is very very X, and I know that I'm Y." Any sort of gatekeeping from this point on can feel very discouraging, even if this isn't the intention of those who are gatekeeping.

[edit for format]

I think you are right that minority status rarely has to do with the mocking, but I also think this might be beside the point. I think really the concern is that people who might already feel like outsiders are easily discouraged and made to feel even more like an outsider. And as it turns out, it isn't even hard to identify as an outsider on stackoverflow, even if you are a great coder! I just checked out the stack overflow public survey for 2018 [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018] - 92% of users are male, and 74.2% is white or European decent. Seems significantly homogeneous.

Similar to your first point, I like to find parts of my life that I'm CURIOUS about, and automate them or make a model/simulation of them. This technique has the added bonus of deepening your understanding of that aspect of your life.

For example, I've been a hobbyist songwriter / composer for a good part of my life. Recently I've taken up creating a procedural musical composition generator, and boy have I learned more about music theory in the past few months than I have in the past few years. Additionally, I've gained significant insight into my own musical tendencies. Not to mention, a programming product that I'm both proud of and interested in using/improving.