devishard

9 ms·

31.
by devishard 10y ago
> To me, free will is the lack of external forces controlling my decisions and actions. That is, I can decide things for myself, even if those decisions are a deterministic product of my current state. Without some place in the sequence
32.
by devishard 10y ago
> I don't think that is evident at all. Clear writing will resonate with the reader far more than hackneyed, pretentious constructions. Then why are all the most popular news sources full of clickbait, inflammatory headlines, and cl
33.
by devishard 10y ago
Right, mine too, but it's highly dangerous to assume that your experience is the majority experience. Look at which news sources are popular, and you won't find a single one that writes in a direct style. Also, realize that people
34.
by devishard 10y ago
> I would likely not use it as a main source of truth for any application but for a lot of things, it's a good database. I really don't understand this. In what case is it every acceptable for a data store to lose data? And tha
35.
by devishard 10y ago
I'm usually against absolutes, but I'm really in agreement here. It's almost always better to use a relational database, and in the rare cases where you wouldn't want a relational database, MongoDB is the worst of the
36.
by devishard 10y ago
That's not what superdeterminism would indicate at all. "Conspiracy" indicates free will on a large number of actors. And a superdeterministic system could exist which differs from standard ways of approaching quantum mechani
37.
by devishard 10y ago
> I don't see how subjective experience, i.e. consciousness, can come about from purely material interactions as currently understood. That means that a Turing Machine would be able to produce them, which means that a bunch of monks
38.
by devishard 10y ago
We all understand fear and love and curiosity well enough that we can make rudimentary predictions about them. If I point a gun at someone they will experience fear and respond with fight or flight. If I spend a lot of time with someone and
39.
by devishard 10y ago
> With no notion of free will, how do we distinguish between manslaughter and murder? I'd argue that the distinction is not indicative of a phenomenon that exists. I think a much better model would be predictive and preventive rathe
40.
by devishard 10y ago
> It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives. I don't think so. I think determinism makes "punishmen
41.
by devishard 10y ago
> Even if we don't have free will, it's better to pretend we do. There is a difference between a driver that falls asleep at the wheel and causes an accident and a driver that flies into a rage and crashes their car into anothe
42.
by devishard 10y ago
That's the argument I use for not believing in assertions of existence ("God exists", "Pink unicorns exist"), because people basically don't think things exist that can't be proven to exist, but make a spe
43.
by devishard 10y ago
> Many people believe that free will and determinism are not incompatible (compatibilists). Could you explain how that works? I'm unfamiliar with that, but I suspect that they may be using a different definition of "free will&q
44.
by devishard 10y ago
Quantum effects are part of brain activity because they underly all electrochemistry--that's never been in question. The question is whether those quantum effects impart any non-determinism to the brain system, and the link you posted
45.
by devishard 10y ago
Give me a product that works over any of those.
46.
by devishard 10y ago
I'd buy that logic if it produced low defect rates and high uptime, but it doesn't. When we used SilverPop earlier this year it was down about 5% of the time and wrong 5% of the time, and even the basic way the interfaces we had t
47.
by devishard 10y ago
IBM's reputation is utterly nonsensical. I've worked for a company bought by IBM and for companies that used IBM's products/services and they've never been anything other than mediocre, sometimes outright bad, with
48.
by devishard 10y ago
What's frustrating about Orwell's writing advice here is that it doesn't really improve society unless everyone does it. If I write using Orwell's rules and my political opponent doesn't, I'll likely lose. If a
49.
by devishard 10y ago
This headline is offensively stupid. Of course it can be explained, we just haven't explained it yet.
50.
by devishard 10y ago
"Orwellian" is totally a thing, but I don't think that when people say "Orwellian" they are talking about Orwell's ideology--they're usually talking about the kinds of problems that Orwell wrote about in
51.
by devishard 10y ago
The free will conversations drive me insane. People can't shut up about how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves random phenomena (which isn't exactly true) but worse, they insist it indicates that we have free will. But
52.
by devishard 10y ago
Freedoms 1-3 exist with BSD, too, they just aren't protected. There are few cases where freedom 0 exists without the other 3, but one case where that's true is with some of the Microsoft tooling around the CLR. In such cases, I, a
53.
by devishard 10y ago
Do you remember when Internet Explorer was the only kid on the block, and then Firefox came out and was a breath of fresh air? I know a lot of non-programmers who cared about that, and that's a direct result of the ability for anyone t
54.
by devishard 10y ago
> I never quite got why GNU decided to consider the freedom to access the source code and the freedom to modify it as a single bullet point. To me, they're fundamentally distinct concepts, and furthermore the former is VASTLY more i
55.
by devishard 10y ago
Mathematically yes, there's nothing preventing ETC from doing the same thing. But ideologically, the lines have been drawn. At least for the time being, I think it's a safe bet that people who aren't committed to decentraliza
56.
by devishard 10y ago
> It's astounding, considering both chains are basically the same system They aren't at all. Immutable smart contracts are the basis of ETC and not ETH. It's only one difference, but it's a difference as fundamental a
57.
by devishard 10y ago
The way I see the distinction is that obscurity is about hiding the security mechanism, whereas a key is about hiding one part of the mechanism that can be mathematically analyzed to give an estimate of how long it will take to break it. Th
58.
by devishard 10y ago
I'll add this to my list of reasons why I'm not on Facebook.
59.
by devishard 10y ago
Okay, that wasn't at all clear from what you said, because you used a very bad example (sending checks--this is much easier than sending Bitcoin these days). But if your point is that Bitcoin isn't difficult in some general sense,
60.
by devishard 10y ago
If I have to transfer my money into an exchange, wait for it to clear, and then immediately transfer it out into a wallet with a long random address with a random key that I then have to protect, that's not "very little friction&q

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