tgflynn

48 ms·

241.
by tgflynn 4y ago
It isn't about belief and it certainly isn't about behavior (ie. what you say). It is about the actual experience of being. If that means nothing to you, I don't think there's anything I can say that would change your mi
242.
by tgflynn 4y ago
> I suspect, just a theory, that qualia are the result of a process that occurs in the brain. Well, that's just materialism. Do you or do you not accept that it is possible for a materialist to hold the view that qualia are not prod
243.
by tgflynn 4y ago
I think what you say here is at least mostly true. But all it shows is that you can never prove that an entity apart from yourself is conscious. In other words it shows that solipsism cannot be logically refuted. But that is something th
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by tgflynn 4y ago
> Why do you assume that verbal signals can induce any possible change in symbolic state in a brain? OK let's backup. What would it mean to say that "qualia are reducible to a symbolic representation" if they cannot be exp
245.
by tgflynn 4y ago
So fundamentally I agree with the arguments presented in this post, but I find the presentation confusing and somewhat lacking in rigor. In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't a
246.
by tgflynn 4y ago
> Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more. I get the impression that philosophers of mind are slowly coming around to the conclusion that the existence of qualia
247.
by tgflynn 4y ago
If I were freelancing a PM would be the last thing I'd want. I had more than my fill of that kind of thing at BigCo. On the other hand what could be very useful is some kind of marketing/business development person to help with f
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by tgflynn 4y ago
What exactly is Esy ? I hadn't heard of it before and its website doesn't seem to provide an obvious answer to that question. You say it is a package manager. Is it supposed to replace opam ? If so what does it offer that opam d
249.
by tgflynn 4y ago
I agree with the title but he doesn't go nearly far enough. > Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one No, sentience is not a scientific question at all because there is no objective test for sentience, nor w
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by tgflynn 4y ago
I currently use emacs org mode. Before I just kept TODO lists in plain text files.
251.
by tgflynn 4y ago
> I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix Was that Microware OS 9 ? I replaced a control system that was running that with Linux around 2003. I wasn't aware it was ever used on PC's. O
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by tgflynn 4y ago
Yeah, especially once you bought a terminal so you could actually do something with it other than blinking LED's.
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by tgflynn 4y ago
> What I find striking about it was a time from 1979 to 1986 when home computers seemed frozen in midair. It seems like that era was quite vibrant for home computers though. My impression is that many people learned a lot from their Vic
254.
by tgflynn 4y ago
I think the first time I became aware that there was something called a "personal computer" was when I saw an add for the IMSAI 8080 in Scientific American when I was in about the first or second grade. I immediately wanted one,
255.
by tgflynn 4y ago
Could you be a bit more specific ? The original Mac UI looked pretty flat to me.
256.
by tgflynn 4y ago
You didn't address this part of the parent comment: > I imagine it'd pull in electrons from all around itself, but I don't know how the numbers come out. I never thought of it before but it seems like that should work. &q
257.
by tgflynn 4y ago
I'm a bit surprised to see this making it to the front page. It's been available for a long time and is one of the first resources anyone with an interest in OCaml is likely to encounter. It seems a little like posting a link to
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by tgflynn 4y ago
One possibility would be making an internal transition to a new role at the company you currently work for. This worked for me in moving from a systems administrator to SWE position years ago. Of course it can only work if your employer a
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by tgflynn 4y ago
OK, it's been 20 years since I lived there (and they were common in the US long before that).
260.
by tgflynn 4y ago
You may have a raging fire but a well designed concrete building should be able to keep it confined to a single apartment. Non-residential buildings with different layouts are another story.
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by tgflynn 4y ago
I lived in France for 12 years and I never saw a smoke detector or sprinkler system there. I think the difference in death rates (based on your link Western Europe has less than half the death rate of the US) is mostly due to differences i
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by tgflynn 4y ago
> With physical access to a chip the only barrier to accessing that information is analysis time > That said, this tech doesn't look to be sufficient on its own. You probably need to analyze the contents of a chip, not just its s
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by tgflynn 4y ago
> Why innovation prizes fail? Because past performance isn't indicative of future results. That's largely true but not very relevant because most innovation prizes are independent of past performance. Your criticism might be a
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by tgflynn 4y ago
I think your question is too general to answer effectively. In theory just about any data structure can be implemented on disk but in practice access times are likely to be too slow for that to be a usable solution in most cases. As far a
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by tgflynn 5y ago
Well for the things you mentioned, health insurance and broadband, there's often not a lot of competition here, with only a small handful of choices available in any particular area. Also health insurance is usually either through you
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by tgflynn 5y ago
The definition you cite: "application programming aims to produce software which provides services to the user directly (e.g. word processor), whereas systems programming aims to produce software and software platforms which provide se
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by tgflynn 5y ago
The question I am left with, as someone who has a bit of experience with functional languages but much more in imperative/OOP languages, is does it ever make sense to develop something like the GUI applications the author was talking a
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by tgflynn 5y ago
Many forms of spirituality, notably Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, teach that happiness is not something that is produced by things we do or have but is inherent in our true nature. In fact our activities only interfere with our ability to
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by tgflynn 5y ago
Git isn't the only solution but it's very likely the best. > 1. It is not easy to learn. Learning the basics really isn't that hard, especially if you're the only one writing code. It's true that branching and m
270.
by tgflynn 5y ago
I've been using Linux nearly exclusively since 1998. For someone with your background there should be nothing to it, at least once you have the system setup (Debian installers can be a bit finicky). OS internals are another story. No

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