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missingrib

Re:It's still OK to enjoy programming on Monday October 19, 2026 @08:52PM (#50159987)
If you can't get it to output good code I'm afraid it's probably a skill or prompting issue. There are programmers that are almost certainly better than you that are using LLMs regularly to produce good code. Do you think the Linus is a bad programmer?
Re:Could AIs Become Conscious? on Thursday August 20, 2026 @04:48PM (#49380084)
Considering it's the only thing I'm directly aware of I think I can safely reject that it's a made up concept.
Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @12:30PM (#48820116)
Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.
Re:Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang on Thursday June 04, 2026 @12:59AM (#48394107)
Right, it's an illusion of understanding. There is some sort of symbolic understanding, but that is completely due to the fact that the training data was made by humans who actually do understand, can interact with the world, and can write their thoughts down so that the LLM can insert some sort of reference to "basketball" and "Michael Jordan" in their embeddings or whatever.
Re:Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang on Thursday June 04, 2026 @12:53AM (#48394055)
I think Searle's Chinese Room argument refutes this. LLMs are simply manipulating symbols, they do not have semantic understanding. This is why hallucinations exist. And Searle's argument extends even further than LLMs.

You are basically arguing for a functional account of consciousness, but things like this have been debated for literally decades/centuries in philosophy.

You have first-person knowledge of qualia. I'm not really sure how you could deny that without claiming that qualia doesn't exist. You're claiming some middle ground here that I think almost all philosophers and neuroscientists would reject (on both sides).

> "couldn't something be H2O without being water?," "what if the universe was created last Thursday with false memories?," or "what if only I'm real?" These are dead-end questions. Like 14-year-old-stoner philosophy: "what if your red is ackshuallly my blue?!"

These are all legitimate philosophical problems, Kripke definitively solved the first one in the 1970s in Naming and Necessity. You should try to be more humble about subjects which you clearly haven't read enough about. Read the Mary's room argument.

That is not what a p-zombie is. The p-zombie does not have any qualia at all. If you want to deny the existence of qualia, that's one way a few philosophers have gone (Dennett), but that seems pretty ridiculous to most people.
Why haven't zero knowledge proofs shined in this area? Can anyone explain?
Re:Social anxiety isn't about being liked on Sunday October 05, 2025 @12:32AM (#45478858)
This is relatable, mine is somewhat similar. It feels like a very specific version of performance anxiety that unfortunately affects the most banal social interactions. It is obviously multiplied tenfold when I'm in a situation where there are actual stakes (an interview, a first date, etc), but it still applies if I am just talking to a friend of a friend at a party that I don't know very well. The stakes feel very high to me because it's our first time talking.

It's less that I need them to like me or fear being disliked and more that I am just way too conscious of the stakes and the social interaction that's happening, which causes my brain to sort of freeze up. It feels like when I used to play tennis in high school. I'd do great at practice, then freeze up and barely remember how to hit the ball in games because the stakes on each point felt so high.

If I'm around some good friends it completely goes away. If I have hung around the person enough (even without directly talking to them), it goes away. I've also had random days where I don't feel the performance anxiety and performed really well in those situations (and coincidentally some of those days I'd meet a new group of friends or a girlfriend). It's extremely frustrating. Xanax makes the performance anxiety go away completely but slows me down cognitively so I become much less witty and interesting to talk to.

That is only true if consciousness is physical and the result of some physics going on in the human brain. We have no idea if that's true.
>Isn't consciousness an emergent property of brains?

Probably not.

Yes, they can't have understanding or intentionality.
Pretty easy to fix:

[2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer books or the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes, the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If no, the record date is the close of business on the next day when either the books or systems are open.

Re:LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday on Friday October 04, 2024 @10:40PM (#41747338)
Is this really verbal reasoning? It's just a logic problem.
It correlates, which could also explain a link in the opposite direction. Secondary sex characteristics sometimes have nothing to do with overall fitness. You can see this most clearly in animal species where the females value elaborate ornamentation, like peacocks.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_son_hypothesis.

Re:The Deaths of Effective Altruism on Saturday April 06, 2024 @02:04AM (#39950368)
It's just people coping with guilt about not giving to charity honestly. That, and ad hominem attacks on the people involved. You see people giving kidneys away and there are still articles talking about how its selfish or misguided.
Re:The Deaths of Effective Altruism on Saturday April 06, 2024 @02:01AM (#39950355)
I cannot think of a reason to prefer to help a neighbor over someone who is vastly more in need who is further away. I think that's the main thrust of the argument.
Re:Simpson's Paradox on Tuesday March 12, 2024 @12:01PM (#39681100)
I don't think Zeno's paradoxes have truly been proven false.
It was probably used in the Silk Road investigation.
Re:K-Means Clustering on Friday January 12, 2024 @10:52PM (#38977200)
I've used it for identifying dominant colors in images.
Using the words "black dresser" or "brown dresser" maybe?
Re:Has the 'Sexlessness Epidemic' Been Overstated? on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @10:44AM (#38842747)
I meant the opposite. It seems like even amongst the relatively normal group of people I know, the rate of sexlessness seems higher than these stats suggest.
Re:Has the 'Sexlessness Epidemic' Been Overstated? on Monday January 01, 2024 @10:46PM (#38837856)
These numbers seem kind of low to me, even when I think of people in my life anecdotally. I wonder what is going on there.
Re:Anselm's Ontological Argument: A Guide for the Perplexed on Monday December 25, 2023 @04:01AM (#38760974)
You can just claim that omniscience and omnipotence do not require that you can do logically impossible things. For instance, God couldn't will that 2+2=5, or that he could create something so heavy that he could not move it.
Re:You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It on Sunday November 12, 2023 @09:39PM (#38246264)
It's true though. Not us in particular, but 99% of smartphone users
Re:Encrypted Client Hello – the last puzzle piece to privacy on Friday September 29, 2023 @11:03PM (#37712467)
Algorithms have been developed for quantum computers that could be potentially effective at breaking public key cryptosystems whose security relies on the difficulty of solving certain math problems on classical computers. In particular, the discrete logarithm problem and integer factorization of very large numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm.

There are no quantum computers large enough to even come close to attempting this, and there's a question about whether it's ever going to be physically possible to build a quantum computer large enough to actually attack something like a TLS key exchange in real time. Classical computers are equally as fast/faster at other tasks.

Can someone explain to me what "Is Associated" means in this context? I know there are always comments about correlation/causation here, but I genuinely don't have enough of a stats background to actually understand what they are claiming.

If they have tried to control for confounding variables (people who skip breakfast are generally more unhealthy/more likely to be drug users/more likely to smoke, etc), what are the methods they use? Are they reliable?

I find myself thinking about making serious lifestyle changes in response to these articles, but many of them contradict each other.

This is ultimately why I left. I felt as though they kept releasing new features and services every month without a focus on improving their existing ones.
Re:TPM provides zero practical security on Friday September 08, 2023 @02:58PM (#37437867)
>I know I could bypass normal password-based FDE with physical access to a machine without any special hardware or software

How?

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