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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • In my experience, very, but it’s also not magic. Being able to package an application with its environment and ship it to any machine that can run Docker is great but it doesn’t solve the fact that modern deployment architecture can become extremely complicated, and Docker adds another component that needs configuration and debugging to an already complicated stack.





  • Hey, I’ve actually done that! It was almost a year ago now, so I can’t remember my exact strats for those missions, but I might be able to help.

    First of all, those two missions are brutal–I had to retry them a lot before I got the S. It seems like you’ve got the right basic idea for both: move fast and play the objective above all else.

    For builds, I had the most success running Zimmerman in the right hand and laser lance + pile bunker on the left hand/shoulder. You can swap lance/bunker to basically always have a melee available to one shot any MTs that are in your optimal path. For the real fights, building up poise damage with Zimmerman and then staggering with lance before finishing with charged bunker is an insanely fast kill that only costs Zimmerman ammo. It takes some skill and a little luck to land it on Iguazu (he’s one slippery bastard) but if you can lance him into a corner then he’s toast. The same basic principle applies to the refueling base fight, but you have to do it twice. The biggest thing to know is how much poise damage you need to build up before lance will stagger --it’s crucial that the lance induces stagger to set up the bunker.

    Good luck!

    Edit: I see you got it–congrats! That’s a tough achievement.




  • At a super rough gloss:

    Pure Marxism encompasses two basic theories: Marx’s critique of capitalist economics, which he argues are predicated on unjust material distributions which are employed by the owning class to steal value from the working class by controlling the means of production; and his proposed alternative, wherein the workers own the means of production and exist in a stateless, classless worker’s paradise (“communism”).

    Notably lacking in Marx’s work is a compelling plan for how to move from capitalism to communism. Enter Leninism: to transition, the so-called “vanguard party” will seize control and establish a total dictatorship to wholly quash capitalism and bring the society into alignment towards communism; when this is achieved, the vanguard party is supposed to relinquish control and the worker’s utopia may commence.

    This school of thought, deemed Marxism-Leninism, is the nominal philosophy underpinning many modern states that bill themselves as communist, including the USSR and the CCP. While on paper it provides a feasible path to the worker’s utopia, critics argue that in practice the vanguard party fails to relinquish control, establish themselves as the new owning class, and operate a fundamentally capitalist regime under the trappings of communism.



    • Cross-device integration/the Apple ecosystem. I use a Mac for my userland computing, and the ease with which it works together with my phone is a killer feature. Also in this category is integration with my family’s Apple devices.
    • The software ecosystem. Apple’s first party apps and services are really nice across the board, and once again the ecosystem integration is the single biggest reason I use an iPhone. (the user facing apps, at least–Xcode and everything related to it are hot trash).
    • Purely subjective, but Android is ugly to me. The hardware, the OS(es), and the apps just look bad to my eye. The iPhone looks and feels nice in a way that I haven’t experienced in an Android product.
    • I don’t trust Google and I can’t be bothered to spend any time configuring my phone. I spend too much of my life installing shit and tinkering with config already; I want a phone that just works out of the box.


  • People being convinced that something is conscious is a long, long way from a compelling argument that something is conscious. People naturally anthropomorphize, and a reasonably accurate human speech predictor is a prime example of something that can be very easily anthropomorphized. It is also unsurprising that LLMs have developed such conceptual nodes; these concepts are fundamental to the human experience, thus undergird most human speech, and it is therefore not only unsurprising but expected that a system built to detect statistical patterns in human speech would identify these foundational concepts.

    “So rocks are conscious” isn’t, at least in my opinion, the classic counter to panpsychism; it’s an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, but not a very good one, as the panpsychist can very easily fall back on the credible argument that consciousness comes in degrees, perhaps informed by systematic complexity, and so the consciousness of a rock is to the consciousness of a person as the mass of an atom is to the mass of a brain.

    The problem with panpsychism is, and has always been, that there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s true. It’s a pleasingly neat solution to Chalmers’ “hard problem” of neuroscience, but ultimately just as baseless as positing the existence of an all-powerful God through whose grace we are granted consciousness; that is, it rests on a premise that, while sufficiently explanatory, is neither provable nor disprovable.

    We ultimately have absolutely no idea how consciousness arises from physical matter. It is possible that we cannot know, and that the mechanism is hidden in facets of reality that the human experience is not equipped to parse. It is also possible that, given sufficiently advanced neuroscience, we will be able to offer a compelling account of how human consciousness arises. Then—and only then—will we be in a position to credibly offer arguments about machine intelligence. Until then, it is simply a matter of faith. The believers will see a sufficiently advanced language model and convince themselves that there is no way such a thing is not conscious, and the disbelievers will repeat the same tired arguments resting on the notion that a lack of proof is tantamount to a disproof.







  • OK so… demonstrate it? Explain how, with absolutely 0 maintenance for 20 years (or whatever you consider a reasonable time to bring every single road up to bicycle and pedestrian usability standards), the roads would be able to support the flow of commuters, emergency vehicles, and deliveries. You can appeal to your own authority all you want, but it’s worth just about jack if you don’t back it up.