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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yes, but this is assuming an objective, universal frame of reference, and that’s not really a thing.

    Not really. Nothing I said has any dependence on a universal clock.

    It’s true that there could be some alien halfway across the observable universe that could observe the stars that have exited our observable universe. But, we could not observe the alien observing them, because information still can’t travel faster than the speed of light.

    Right and this is my point. Any philosophical theory that has anything to do with the observable universe is inherently self-centered. Not even Earth centered. Not even conscious-being centered. Literally self-centered. The observable universe is subjective. And so that puts it in the class of philosophies that insist that the universe arises from your own consciousness.

    Which is not to invalidate it, but it’s not objective, and it has nothing to do with science.





  • Definitely depends on the person. There are definitely people who are getting 90% of their coding done with AI. I’m one of them. I have over a decade of experience and I consider coding to be the easiest but most laborious part of my job so it’s a welcome change.

    One thing that’s really changed the game recently is RAG and tools with very good access to our company’s data. Good context makes a huge difference in the quality of the output. For my latest project, I’ve been using 3 internal tools. An LLM browser plugin which has access to our internal data and let’s you pin pages (and docs) you’re reading for extra focus. A coding assistant, which also has access to internal data and repos but is trained for coding. Unfortunately, it’s not integrated into our IDE. The IDE agent has RAG where you can pin specific files but without broader access to our internal data, its output is a lot poorer.

    So my workflow is something like this: My company is already pretty diligent about documenting things so the first step is to write design documentation. The LLM plugin helps with research of some high level questions and helps delve into some of the details. Once that’s all reviewed and approved by everyone involved, we move into task breakdown and implementation.

    First, I ask the LLM plugin to write a guide for how to implement a task, given the design documentation. I’m not interested in code, just a translation of design ideas and requirements into actionable steps (even if you don’t have the same setup as me, give this a try. Asking an LLM to reason its way through a guide helps it handle a lot more complicated tasks). Then, I pass that to the coding assistant for code creation, including any relevant files as context. That code gets copied to the IDE. The whole process takes a couple minutes at most and that gets you like 90% there.

    Next is to get things compiling. This is either manual or in iteration with the coding assistant. Then before I worry about correctness, I focus on the tests. Get a good test suite up and it’ll catch any problems and let you reflector without causing regressions. Again, this may be partially manual and partially iteration with LLMs. Once the tests look good, then it’s time to get them passing. And this is the point where I start really reading through the code and getting things from 90% to 100%.

    All in all, I’m still applying a lot of professional judgement throughout the whole process. But I get to focus on the parts where that judgement is actually needed and not the more mundane and toilsome parts of coding.


  • The chance you’ll survive a half life is exactly the same whether MWI is real or not. It doesn’t give you any useful information. You have no way of distinguishing between being just that lucky or MWI being true.

    That’s not the case with other experiments. If you assume your hypothesis is correct, the chance of the experiment being successful is higher than the chance of it happening by random chance if your hypothesis is not. That’s a key difference.



  • Collect data, and show how it’s unlilely unless your hypothesis is true.

    The quantum immortality experiment doesn’t do that, though. The outcome, by definition, always occurs within the realm of random chance. Your environment needs to create an outcome that is extremely unlikely to occur by random chance. The experiment is not repeatable. It makes no predictions about what’s going to happen if you try again. It doesn’t do anything useful to bolster the many worlds theory.



  • My way of thinking differs by saying if from my individuals perspective I experience the perfect coin (quantum particle) to flip tales a million times in a row there must be a highly likelihood that many worlds indeed exist since I died in the ones it said heads.

    It doesn’t make that highly likely, though. It’s about equally likely that there’s a fairy controlling your coin flips. The experiment hasn’t proven anything about the cause of the unlikely outcome. You’ve just measured that it happened and then declared that your preferred explanation is the reason.


  • The language model isn’t teaching anything it is changing the wording of something and spitting it back out. And in some cases, not changing the wording at all, just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source.

    You could honestly say the same about most “teaching” that a student without a real comprehension of the subject does for another student. But ultimately, that’s beside the point. Because changing the wording, structure, and presentation is all that is necessary to avoid copyright violation. You cannot copyright the information. Only a specific expression of it.

    There’s no special exception for AI here. That’s how copyright works for you, me, the student, and the AI. And if you’re hoping that copyright is going to save you from the outcomes you’re worried about, it won’t.



  • If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)

    A student can absolutely buy a text book and then teach the other students the information in it for free. That’s not redistribution. Redistribution would mean making copies of the book to hand out. That’s illegal for people and companies.


  • VoterFrog@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 months ago

    It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.

    Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.

    You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.

    You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.



  • I think the problem that you’re going to imagine a good analogy for this is that orbital dynamics works in sort of (but not really) an unintuitive way.

    An object in an elliptical orbit around earth is moving slowest at its furthest point from the earth. Like a thrown ball that slows when it reaches the top of its trajectory. That object is moving fastest at the point that it’s closest to earth.

    So you have this dynamic where if you decelerate it changes your orbit such that you’re increasing the speed you’ll be moving on opposite point of your orbit. E.g. if you decelerate at your slowest (furthest) point, it brings your closest approach point closer to earth and you’ll be moving even faster when you get there.

    You can decelerate at your closest approach point but eventually it brings the opposite end of your orbit closer to earth than you are, and then you’ll fall and of course speed up again. There’s no real way around this. You’re going to be moving fast when you approach earth unless you’re doing a lot of very active deceleration.


  • KSP player here. So, you know, ignore me.

    But let’s consider how you’d rendezvous two objects. You’d want your asteroid to have an orbit around the Sun that is very nearly the same orbit as Earth’s. A perigee that just kisses the Earth’s orbital ellipse and an apogee that’s slightly further from the sun. You’d want the asteroid to approach its perigee at the same time as Earth approaches that same point in space. Then they’d have very close to 0 relative velocity, with the asteroid moving slightly faster around the Sun than the Earth. So you just bleed off some of the asteroid’s velocity through whatever magical explanation you want… such that your asteroid has 0 relative velocity with Earth, giving it the exact same orbit as Earth. I.e. from Earth’s perspective it’s just floating there motionless in space.

    Problem is that this only works for a rendezvous between two very light objects with very small gravitational effects between them. The Earth is massive enough that the effects from Earth’s gravitation would overtake the Sun’s as the asteroid approaches Earth. Then, yeah, the asteroid becomes a falling rock with a lot of energy so I don’t think any of this works.




  • Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we’d already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.

    There’s no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.