Unless your goal is to just get laid, don’t pretend to be anybody but who you are. If your date isn’t happy hanging out with your real self, there’s no future in that relationship.

Probably Hercules the Liger. Terrifyingly enormous animal–pictures do not do justice to how intimidating a predator of that mass is.

It tests whether your mouse movement looks human–we’re really bad at things like moving in straight lines, so it’s pretty evident from a mouse movement log whether you’re a human or a simple bot. It also takes a bunch of auxiliary browser/environment data into account. It’s not perfect, but it’s complicated enough to defeat to provide fine protection against cheap spam.

• 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.

Not a huge beach guy, but I live for the summer. 80F is the ideal temperature; anything up to 100 is great too, as long as I don’t need to perform prolonged manual labor outside. Long sunny days make my lizard soul happy, and all of my best clothes are summer clothes.

That looks fairly tightly bonded to me–you’d probably be better off trying to cover it than remove it. There’s maybe a solvent, but without knowing which compounds are used for the lettering and the case, it’s a shot in the dark–always worth trying isopropyl alcohol for this sort of thing imo, but it also might damage the case.

Unrelated, but the random blue “AI” slapped haphazardly on top is a beautiful piece of accidental comedy given That Company’s rollout of AI

Eh, depends on the language and the context. I still use 80 for C, but I’ve found 120 to be a much more reasonable number for Java.

I had absolutely no luck trying. I went on dates, swiped apps, talked to every girl I thought was cute, and none of it went anywhere beyond some weird halfhearted relationships. About two weeks after I gave up altogether, I met a girl on my way to the water fountain and we just clicked. Six years down the line and we couldn’t be happier.

I guess my best advice is just don’t sweat it. Be yourself, do what makes you happy, put yourself in situations where you’ll meet new people, and sooner or later somebody will come along.

I guess so lmao

Where tf do you live that a banana is $10?

Quality follows where consistency leads

It depends which calendar you use! Every calendar picks a basically arbitrary system to uniquely identify each year, and in some of them “year 0” doesn’t refer to any year.

The Gregorian, for example, goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD, since 1 BC is “the first year before Christ” and 1 AD is “the first in the years of our lord.” This doesn’t make much mathematical sense, but it’s not like there was a year that didn’t happen–they just called one year 1 BC, and the next year 1 AD.

ISO 8601 is based on the Gregorian calendar, but it includes a year 0. 1 BC is the same year as +0000; thus 2 BC is -0001, and all earlier years are likewise offset by 1 between the two calendars.

Blind Willie McTell

I got suspended once because someone “punched” me as a joke. By the letter of the regulation it counted as a fist fight even though (a) we weren’t fighting and (b) I didn’t do the punching. Good times.

It’s an album, but: The Fabulous Steel Guitar Sound of Pete Drake. It’s instrumental, upbeat, and just the right amount of interesting to just jam out to and get 'er done.

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My car gets about 250 miles on a charge, so I’m only ever at a public charger if I’m taking a trip longer than that. At that point my day is pretty much fucked by traveling, and it’s actually really nice get off the road for an hour. Usually I find a nearby coffee shop and work on the same stuff I would at home, and when I get back on the road I can feel that I’m alert and focused.

This little bronze orc:

It was a gift from my father, who in turn received it from its sculptor, Sterling Lanier. Lanier was a family friend and an editor at Chilton Books, where he insisted that a book he had read in Analog Magazine be published despite it having been turned down by a score of other publishing companies. The book was initially such a commercial failure that Lanier was ousted from Chilton–a grievous injustice, as the book in question is Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Because cross-platform apps inevitably feel out of step with the OS they run on. Native apps can use system components and behaviors and will almost always run better because they don’t need to be wrapped in a cross-platform framework. Admittedly a platform-locked app isn’t going to be a universally perfect Lemmy app, but it can certainly be a platform-specific perfect Lemmy app.

With no disrespect to Voyager, its devs, or its users, this is why I can’t use that app despite its impressive feature set and high level of polish–the ui feels fundamentally wrong on iOS, and the fact that it’s a very direct Apollo clone but not written in native swift makes it feel like a knockoff.