psycotica0

I'm only about 15% sure you yourself aren't an AI bot making a beautifully ironic and satirical play here. But I think we can agree not to argue any longer 🤝

I think it's instead useful to notice how weird it is that we have Open Source desktops and laptops at all.

Basically nothing else in our society works this way. Basically nothing has changeable firmware. It's practically a quirk of history that x86 was cloned and reverse-engineered and had a bunch of competitors spring up making compatible but swappable hardware that was all interoperable. It became an ecosystem, basically because of corporate piracy, rather than anything else. My hardware needed to work like the others or I wasn't in the club, and my next generation hardware needed to be backwards compatible with the club or I was out of the club. And laptops were just desktop parts made smaller, so they ran whatever the club ran.

It's practically a quirk of history that early computers didn't have enough ROM to do anything useful, and so they needed to be coded from scratch every time you booted them. And when we got tired of doing that, we attached external storage like punch cards and tapes and hard drives and floppy disks that we controlled from outside the computer and essentially just programmed the computer for us because the ROM needed input and it was a lot to type. And because we could control it from outside, we could put different disks in on different days and it would do different stuff.

My microwave didn't work that way. My VCR didn't work that way. My digital camera didn't work that way.

So the way phones work is a regression to the mean. The reason open source on phones sucks is because the hardware is specific to my model and manufacturer, but because the components aren't removable or swappable there's no ecosystem. I can't take parts from a Motorola phone and use them in a Samsung phone, so there's no standard. As long as Motorola ships a device that works with its hardware, it doesn't matter that it won't work on LG hardware. And vice-versa. And so long as Motorola's next phone ships with firmware that suits that hardware, it doesn't matter that it's totally different incompatible hardware with last year's model.

So every single phone that comes out has some hardware no one's figured out yet, but it may be unique to that one year and manufacturer and model, and so until it gets reverse engineered your phone just won't work. And then the next year a completely different device gets released, so there's no momentum to keep investigating the old hardware because no new person will ever have it again. It's not a good way to foster a community, with a shifting landscape of small minorities, brought together only by which device they happen to use, and breaking apart every time someone upgrades to a new device.

So long story short, if we want the situation to improve, we need to produce laws that require things to be an ecosystem. We need to force compatibility where it doesn't make financial sense, we need to force things to be swappable, we need to force things to be flashable, we need to force things to be removable, replaceable, and repairable. We can't hope it just happens again like it did for desktops, we need to make sure it does.

That is not the situation. 😛

Analog signals are not digitally irreducible without presuming there's no level of noise floor under which greater detail is irrelevant, Turing's machines are not digital by their construction and predate the concept by a long time, and the first computers we built were analog and we invented digital computers later because they were cheaper and more efficient and easier and more reliable.

Also the halting problem doesn't say "there are things which a computer can't know but a human can", it says "there are some things that cannot be known".

Similarly Gödel proved that there will always be true things about a system that cannot be proven from within the system, that is using its axioms. That was a real bummer for folks trying to prove all of math with a small set of axioms. But that does not mean there are things math can't know that humans magically can, it just means there's other math, outside the axioms, that are true without following from them, in math. He proved it with math, after all. It doesn't claim to give any special abilities to human brains.

And also, again, nothing Gödel or Turing ever said has anything to do with the concept of "digital" anything. I think you're using the term "digital" to mean "rulesy"? Which is not even close to what it means?

Outer Wilds, but only when I want to feel a bittersweet melancholy 😅

Ontario, Canada:

My wife had bad abdominal pains in the evening. She's had period cramps before, and it wasn't this. She's even had ovarian cysts go, which were terrible, but weren't this. So we went to the hospital. We sat in chairs for probably 5 hours, then got a physical exam by a doctor. They sent us for an ultrasound within the hospital to see if it was an ovarian cyst, but nothing showed on that. That took a few hours. Then we went for a CAT I think it was, also within the hospital, and that showed that it was a swollen appendix. Sat in chairs upstairs, not the entryway, for another hour or so, until the doctor came by and told us that she should probably have that out, but that it wasn't an imminent emergency and so they'll keep her overnight in case something happens, give some pain meds, and then have surgery the next morning when the OR opens again proper, because by now it was probably 2am.

So she got a bed upatairs, I went home and slept at home, then met her the next morning back in her room. She did have a roommate in her room, and that roomie sucked, so that's unfortunate. Then she went for surgery while I watched TV in the waiting room, then she was rolled out and stayed in a recovery room for a few hours while the anaesthesia wore off. The nurse came by and gave us medication to take, along with a prescription for some other meds, and some instructions, and we went on our way. The surgery was laparoscopic, so it only took a week or so to heal, and she was up and shuffling by the end of that first day.

All told, it was probably about 18 hours beginning to end, but that included some sleep in the middle. And, importantly, she didn't die at any point in that process.

At no point in this process did my money leave my pocket. Money was simply not discussed. When weighing the options of going to the hospital versus staying home, or staying in the hospital overnight versus going home, or having the surgery versus not, or having a laparoscopic surgery versus not, money was never a factor. At all times our collective concern was on the health of my wife.

Her surprise appendicitis didn't impact our life in any way, besides the one day we spent hanging out at the hospital.

There are two ways to get a doctor faster.

The first is to increase the supply of doctors: more doctors, more nurses, more beds in hospitals, more clinics, more MRI machines. Any government with a public healthcare system can do this at any time by allocating more funds to the public healthcare system, either increasing the taxes people pay, or diverting tax money from something else. If a country isn't bankrupt and isn't doing this, it's a choice.

The second way is to have private clinics that use money as a way to skip triage. To allow wealthy people to pay their way ahead of poor people to the same small supply of doctors. This is the way most people who rail against public healthcare see the solution going, but the part they don't say out loud is "I want poor people to suffer more so I can suffer less". Because that's what that solution is, it's what it boils down to, but for some reason saying "I want to sell my suffering to the desperate" makes it feel less fun.

You're going to have to do a lot more to justify the leap from Godel's Incompleteness and the Halting Problem to "digital is limited, analog is not", because neither of those things have anything to do with digital processes at all, and in fact both came about before we'd invented digital computers.

To me this comment sounds like when popsci gets ahold of a few sciency words and suddenly decides everything is crystal vibrations universal harmonics string theory quantum tunneling aligning resonance with those around you.

Right, your own thoughts. So I can be sure I'm conscious, but you commenting "I know I'm conscious" on here doesn't tell me anything about your consciousness. The robot can do that, and does.

I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding who you're replying to, or if I'm misunderstanding you in this reply, but I don't think they're saying "all gamers are incels who don't like girls", I think they're saying "all the shitty people reacting poorly are the remaining socially inept incel guys"

I don't remember this chapter of the Obra Dinn...

Right, but what I'm saying is that git doesn't store authorship information or line-by-line history, no matter how it's done. Figuring out which line came from where is an algorithm the git blame command does every time you request it, and that algorithm can give different results depending on which options you give the blame command. And so what you've found here is a collection of commits that produces a situation the default blame algorithm can follow, without any optional flags, which is neat! Maybe not great for git history, but neat!

I am not aware of this setup, and so I'm musing and winging it, but I think what they're saying is that if you point at the paper and say "is this a sheet of paper" they'd say yes. And then you point to the crease and say "is this a crease" and they'd say yes, so it has identity, separate from the paper (as in creases and papers are not synonymous), but given that it's not counted when listing things in the room, it's also not a thing.

But I think for me it's not that tricky, because it's a feature of the paper. Like if there was a coat in the room with buttons, and you asked me what was in the room I wouldn't say a coat and three buttons, I'd say just a coat. And the coat has three buttons, but those are properties of the coat, not the room. And buttons are something that can stand-alone!

But if I had a sheet of paper with a button placed in the middle of it, but not attached, I wonder would most people say it was a sheet of paper and a button, or a sheet of paper with a button?