yawpitch

As Mel Brooks would say, “It’s good to be the king”.

Of course, in context, Mel was about to be seized by the angry rabble and sent to meet the guillotine.

It’s not as interesting as it sounds, I wrote a lot of code and moved a lot of assets around for the compositing of all the glow on the suits on to the live action and CG elements… basically I was doing a lot of logistics work making sure outsourced work from around the world was arriving in the right places at the right times and with some amount of QC having been done ahead of time.

So I got to look at Tron: Legacy mainly from within a tcsh session, but could look over the shoulder of the artists and leads doing the actually pretty stuff.

I worked on this movie, mainly from a CentOS shell, and I approve this nitpick.

Technically that depends on how much water you and the gold displace.

We all arrive atheists, most of us are then inducted by others into their cults, some of us escape.

One does not lose faith, one re-discovers one’s own agency.

> More realistic than god.

No argument there, but “in nature everything has an opposite” is just as illogical; many things have no opposite, thus it’s not “at least two” it’s zero asshole gods in a nihilistic atheistic universe, one asshole god in a true monotheistic universe, one neutered god and one not-quite god representing the bit that’s been neutered off in a false monotheistic universe, one good god and one bad god in a morally balanced duotheistic universe (looks identical to the zero god(s) option), or a variable number of variably asshole gods in a polytheistic universe.

I said show me, not point me at a hypothetical entity with no known pathway to reified existence.

That entire post, run through ChatGPT, gets summarized as “WOO!!!!”.

Not sure the fourth big bang was necessary.

Show me the opposite, or the opponent, of a black hole.

By that argument zero is sufficient.

Loaded (and begging) questions are a fundamental part of circular reasoning.

Ahh, as in “om namah Shivaya” then?

Almost every human being started believing in god(s) because they were introduced to the idea by their parents or other family members or teachers in stories and rituals and songs, usually long before they had the capacity to focus on objects more than two feet away. Every human society I’ve ever visited is saturated with the trappings of some religion or another, often many, and the messages and symbols of history’s many mythologies resonate in everything from the architecture to the money.

Those who don’t believe are usually the ones who have changed their minds, not the other way around. It’s not surprising that some number of those change their minds again.

First, that’s because you want to keep your weapon, which implies you don’t really want to kill the killee. I’m assuming a half inch drill, and I’m leaving it powered up and spinning.

Second, note that what you don’t do when trying to hit the heart is aim left.

Genes don’t favor (or not favor), but if a natural selection bias for precise dexterity exists AND heart lateral orientation affects dexterity precision THEN those with flipped lateral orientation should exhibit more dexterity in the left hand, thus they should be naturally selected for because of the same bias.

Now, I’d seriously doubt there’s any evidence whatsoever for the assumed selection bias in the first place, never mind any causal relationship between fine motor control and heart asymmetry, but the selection bias should apply to both flips of the anatomical mirror.

Why are you assuming situs inversus, which occurs in species with no handedness (or, indeed, hands) came after handedness?

The argument is that the selection bias was towards precision and the hypothesis was that precision is influenced by heart position (which is, still, in the middle in humans)… individuals with situs inversus would be more precise in the left hand, thus if the causal hypothesis is correct AND the argument holds then there should be a selection bias that would result in a correlation between situs inversus presence and left-handedness.

In the end I don’t believe either the argument or the hypothesis hold even as much water as I can in either hand.

The heart is asymmetrical, but it’s in roughly the center of the chest. The left auricle and ventricle are larger muscles because they’re pumping through the descending aorta to the extremities, that’s the systemic circulatory branch, the plumbing for which is also largely to the right, while the right are pumping into the lungs alone as part of the pulmonary circulatory branch. The left lung (right on those with situs inversus) has two lobes and basically accommodates the extra muscle mass on its side of the heart, but if you really want to kill someone you stab them through the sternum, kind of dead center, not where they hold their hand when performing patriotism.

In my experience as one of nature’s designated drivers, in any well-organized pub crawl only one person is fit to determine the number of stars after the first pub, and everyone else is too drunk to notice they’re wrong.

Here’s my multiple years of anatomy classes response: the heart isn’t on the left. The aorta is, sure, but the vena cava is on the right. Also people with situs inversus (essentially all organs flipped laterally from “normal”) aren’t obviously more prone to left-handedness.

One of many articles out there debunking the pop-psych mythology around brain lateralization: https://themindcompany.com/blog/left-brain-right-brain-myth

So the law is not an instrument of justice then, right… and thus enforcing the law will do nothing to fix the problem of capitalism, since those with capital have already purchased the law?

This situation brought to you by the billionaires behind Chief “Justice” John Roberts.

“Behold, He is coming with the cloud”… Hallelujah.

If you’re reading this, you didn’t get Raptured. If you can read this, you’re closer to Hell than you’d like to think.

Sorry for any inconvenience to your journey, and mind the gap.

I don’t think this does much to address the question of LLMs being conscious, but it does seem to put at least a small nail in the coffin of LLMs being divine.

Somewhat ironic that you think it would be easier to do nothing when that section is specifically asking people to consider doing nothing when doing something unnecessary with computing resources would necessarily be harmful.

Now, I might also be doing redundant work here, and maybe it’s not worth doing so, but I should think that anyone on any part of the political spectrum could find some pretty egregious examples of waste and inefficiency in the military / industrial complex.

I appreciate the opsec advice. Honestly would have preferred to be able to reply here, for the public benefit of others, but I think you just came in under the artificial verbosity limit and there were a lot of interesting threads I didn’t want to butcher or not respond to thoughtfully.

Shame these sort of forums haven’t figured out a better means of handling the kind of longer form back and forth required to find common ground, especially where political philosophy gets involved.

Speaking of a form of filibustering, this forum rejects any reasonable response I write as too long. Email me at michael at yawpitchroll d’aught com and I’d be happy to give this another round.

They didn’t assert it as if it were significant, they asserted it as if it were fact. Which, let’s be clear, it is. And no sufficiently informed person could argue otherwise, given that the historical development of computing was driven, in its entirety, by the needs of, and investments made by, businesses and militaries. The early development of computing cannot be anything but intertwined with the nature of its early developers, which form the foundation upon which all further historical (and political) development of computing must stand. You’re supplying the idea that recognizing this basic, ground truth, and really ludicrously obvious fact is also casting those foundations as “inherently bad”.

Also capitalism is not comprised exclusively of capitalists, any more than militarism is composed exclusively of military supporters. Capitalism is a political framework centered on economic power, militarism is a political framework centered on martial power, both of them are ways of understanding the cultural and political and economic and rational systems we all live within, whether we support them or not.

Nothing on the linked page says anything particularly supportive or pejorative about those frameworks, it just acknowledges them as foundational to computing. It arguably makes a very (if not inherently) capitalist argument for environmental-conserving usage of computing resources, but that, really, is about it.

Anything else you’re supplying, from your perspective… my point is that such a perspective is, itself, already polarized.

You truly do have an impressive imagination. Again, there’s no insult, there’s simply an observation. Nothing on that page is particularly political from any position but a substantially polarized one. It’s not entirely apolitical, sure, but it’s pretty milquetoast for a manifesto. If you see polarization there it’s because you’re looking through a polarized filter, in the literal photographic sense as much as the political one: you’ve rotated your filter frame to minimize reflections of what you do like and maximize visibility of what you don’t like. If you’re offended by it, you’re looking at it from such an orthogonal direction that you really should check if you’re the one whose biases are on display.

Everyone should engage their critical thinking and develop their capacity for metacognition; no one starts with either of those skill sets, and thus I assume neither in anyone (and everyone, including myself) until I see evidence of either or both. I, very gently, pointed in the direction of engaging those skills and you see violence where violence isn’t, just like you imagine excessive pride where there cannot be any at all.

Perhaps you’ve also been primed to see violence where none exists? To feel as extreme what isn’t extreme because you’ve moved (or been moved) towards the extreme?

Again, not an ad hominem… just a question we should all be asking ourselves all the time.

There’s no accusation, just like there’s nothing particularly political or polarized in that piece. One can imagine an accusation, precisely as one can imagine the particularly political where it doesn’t actually exist.

As for how to discern the difference, well that’s the purpose of critical thinking and metacognition.