• 0 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 14th, 2023

help-circle
  • I understand the complaints because I hated it when Pixel dropped the jack. But it can be a smoother process than jacks.

    I get in my car and no longer fumble to pull my phone out and plug it in. Pairing is quicker than plugging in a cable.

    When doing yardwork I used to have to fish my cord through my shirt or it would get caught and yanked out by a tree branch. Even then it was cumbersome because of too much slack or too little slack causing disconnects or snags.

    It’s not perfect. A downside that still might exist (I bypassed the problem years ago so I don’t know if they ever fixed it.) was Google’s auto pairing that wasn’t able to be turned off. When I walked close to the house from outside, my phone would decide on its own to pair with speakers in the house. But that’s a Google problem, not Bluetooth. It didn’t exist with Nexus because you could manually control pairing.

    EWaste is a problem.





  • I’ve always hated recursion. It’s always seemed like a cutesy programming trick that’s not reliable in all conditions.

    You could blow the stack in an edge case that you didn’t think of. So it should never be a standard pattern. It’s only good if you need to rewrite something for optimization and recursion is appropriate. But in many cases recursion is slower.

    “Look at what I can do in 5 lines of code!” is for programming contests, not for anything important.


  • “that electrical stimuli passed between neighboring electrodes can also affect non-neighboring electrodes. Known as non-locality, this discovery is a crucial milestone”

    That’s not quantum non locality. The journalist didn’t know how to interpret the actual data.

    "Quantum nonlocality does not allow for faster-than-light communication,[6] "

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality

    Quantum non locality is like taking two playing cards, sealing them in envelopes, mailing one to your friend across the country and then asking him to open it. You will know faster than light which card is in your envelope. But that doesn’t allow information transfer.


  • Because flatworm neurons can be exactly modeled without adding anything extra.

    It’s like if you said, “And we know a falling ball isn’t caused by radiation because?” If you can model a ball dropping in a vacuum without adding any extra variables to your equations, why claim something extra? It doesn’t mean radiation couldn’t affect a falling ball. But adding radiation isn’t needed to explain a falling ball.

    The neurons in a flatworm can be modeled without adding quantum effects. So why bother adding in other effects?

    And a minor correction, “non local” means faster than light. Quantum effects do not allow faster than light information transfer. Consciousness by definition is information. So even if quantum processes affected neurons macroscopically, there still couldn’t be non local consciousness.


  • “Why” is a valid question until and only until you get to the edge of knowledge. At that point it’s “physical laws”.

    For example, “Why is the sky blue?” is a valid question and has answers.

    "Even seemingly impossible questions like, “Why is there magnetism.” can be answered by applying special relativity to electric fields. (Feynman answered this question poorly in the Horizon interview which might be where you got the idea that why is a bad question.)

    You end up at, “Why are there photons?” which can’t be answered. (Or maybe can’t be answered yet.)

    My interpretation of the question was why so many elements in the periodic table are metal and that does have an answer. It relates to the number of electrons on the outer shell that are mobile because the more electrons in an atom, the “farther” away they are and therefore are mobile. That electron mobility gives the element properties that we call “metal”.





  • does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it.

    He not only wrote it but made it open source so if anyone doesn’t like what he’s doing they can take all of his work and make their own project.

    The author of NixOS couldn’t have been more generous. If anyone doesn’t like it, they can take all his work that he did for free and make it their own project.

    Threatening the creator is wrong.





  • "I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. "

    I get it’s a joke but that’s a bad joke. That’s a convergent series. It’s not infinite. Any 1st year calculus student would know that.

    "it’s that in theory analog carries infinite information. "

    But in reality it can’t. The universe isn’t continous, it’s discrete. That’s why we have quantum mechanics. It is the math to handle non contiguous transitions between states.

    How much of that fidelity can you lose before it’s not your consciousness?

    That can be tested with c elegans. You can measure changes until a difference is propagated.




  • I read that and the summary is, “Here are current physical models that don’t explain everything. Therefore, because science doesn’t have an answer it could be magic.”

    We know consciousness is attached to the brain because physical changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness. Physical damage can cause complete personality changes. We also have a complete spectrum of observed consciousness from the flatworm with 300 neurons, to the chimpanzee with 28 billion. Chimps have emotions, self reflection and everything but full language. We can step backwards from chimps to simpler animals and it’s a continuous spectrum of consciousness. There isn’t a hard divide, it’s only less. Humans aren’t magical.