Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

  • 0 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle




  • When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way

    being able to consistently and reliably operate the thing without taking your eyes off the road

    Considering they’d just spent the previous few questions discussing the visual-first aspect of touchscreens and accessibility issues for the visually impaired, I think that’s exactly what they were talking about.

    The generalizations are about completely different devices. They talk about CT machines & automatic defibrillators later.



  • Technically yes, but I don’t mean technology as phones/laptops/tablets/etc. Imho, the biggest factor in social isolation is atomization due to bad urban planning. When everything and anything is only accessible by car, you lose any connection with your local neighbourhood and local stores/cafes/etc.

    In environments where people walk around the neighbourhood, doing small daily shops, going to local businesses and taking mass transit to work/school/restaurants/bars, then you’re much more likely to interact with people rather than driving around in your social isolation-mobile.

    Urban planning can be considered a form of technology, which is why I said technically yes.

    EDIT: Oh, another big factor here is the loss of the third place. It still exists in some places (local pubs in British towns, local coffee shop in Portugal, etc), but in places without a socially normal “hangout spot” that is separated from both home and work/school, it’s much harder to meet acquaintances which may in time become friends.



  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.worldYoutube has fully blocked Invidious
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    An advantage of funding things via a collective like Nebula as opposed to each individual creator managing their own patrons is that new creators can start making bigger, more expensive projects quicker. Even established creators have this advantage, they can take bigger risks on bigger projects with the safety net of a share of the nebula pie.

    I don’t think a project like The Prince would exist without Nebula, for example.





  • At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals

    This is absolutely the right approach, even if you were planning to quit from the start (not the case with you, but still). “This is my last ever cigarette” just caused me to delay and delay and delay. The only realistic way to do it for me was one craving at a time (“I’m not smoking for the next hour”), then a day at a time. Handling the hours and days was hard, but once you do that the weeks and months take care of themselves.

    Vaping for me was a major misstep. Just caused me to consume more nicotine than when I was smoking.


  • There’s two separate addictions going on with smoking: habit and chemical. What patches, nicotine gum, etc are trying to help people do is tackle them separately.

    This means you can focus on getting out of the habit of lighting up after a coffee, or after a meal, or whatever triggers you had, while delaying the chemical withdrawal which seriously messes with your head until later. Tackling the two seperately is easier for many people.

    With that said, patches don’t work for everyone, and I hope you find the cessation aid (if any) that works for you. Quitting smoking is an absolute bitch.

    For me personally, the most helpful aid was nicotine gum, and then swapping out the nicotine gum for normal gum once I was confident I’d kicked the habit part and could focus on the chemical withdrawal.




  • Probably most countries think so of themselves.

    Funnily enough, Romanians are the exact opposite in this regard. Romanians tend to think that Romania is terrible, backwards, and filled with awful people. That isn’t exactly the case (like any country, it has it’s pros and cons, and there’s a lot we need to work on) but it is how they tend to see it.



  • So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

    The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

    Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

    While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

    Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

    There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

    To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.