WTF Bites
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@dkf while interesting, this wasn’t really the problem.
Whetherthoughts and memories actually correspond to anything in reality.
is not a scientific question but a philosophical one, and the fact is we can’t really know anything about reality itself (other than what Descartes told us).
Which lead him (djls45) to the absolutely wrong conclusion that any arbitrarily stupid theory is for all intents and purposes just as good as any other non-stupid theory.
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Microsoft Solitaire: statistics are hard!
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is not a scientific question but a philosophical one
All of science is a branch of philosophy, Natural Philosophy, the branch that feels that the way to learn about the world is to interact with it, see what happens, and to try to learn to predict the outcomes of future interactions. The outrageous success of doing this (especially in relation to attracting funding and fame) has really annoyed the rest of philosophy…
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For fuck's sake… I started writing a reply to a different thread in another Chrome tab, then switched here to post that Git WTF ↑. After I submitted it,
posted it as a reply to the other thread (SuperMicro compromise).That's actually a feature. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the
Replying to "..."title on the post composer doesn't change when you switch topics. The post that you're writing will be posted in the topic that it says you're replying in, even if you navigate to a different topic in the meatime.Pressing Back returned me to this thread, kept the Composer open, and this happened:
Wait, so the composer reappeared for the post that you'd already posted? There might be a bug with the way that Back works.
NodeBB has built-in support for having multiple composers open, as you found. If you start writing both a new post and a new topic, they'll each open a composer, and you'll be double-boobing it like you were there. (Also, clicking "Reply" on a post just activates the current composer and inserts any quoted text there, but clicking "Reply" on a topic will open another composer with a reply to that topic, which means that you can have as many red boobs lined up on the bottom of your window as you want -- or at least 3+; if there's a limit, I didn't try to reach it.)
If you hover over one of the boobs, you'll be able to see the composer's title, so you can tell which boob belongs to which without having to touch them and see what comes up.
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@anotherusername I did find a bug in the process of writing that post, though: I was in a different topic when I posted it (actually I may have been in the recent topics list... I'm not sure now), and when I posted it, it still took me to the new post, even though I have this option deselected:
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Wolves and dogs are of the same kind of animal, though. Darwin's finches were all still finches. There are no evidences of any sort of "intermediate" between any of the myriad kinds of animals, whether extant or historical.
Yes, there are, tons of them. It's just that whenever you say "these are the same, but A and B are different and there's no intermediates between them" and someone comes along and actually finds (A+B)/2 you'll
and say "but these are different, where's (3A+B)/4?". Ad infinitum.Are elephants and giraffes the same? No.
Is there a direct link between them? No.
Is there a chain of evolution that can be traced back to a common ancestor?Yes.No. Depending on how well exactly these two are studied, thelinkssets of similar physical structures might be smaller or larger.- How can one tell whether similar physical structures (besides sub-/speciation) are a result of common ancestry or convergent evolution?
- Do similar physical structures always indicate similar genetics (besides sub-/speciation)?
- At what point are similar structures considered too different to have come from a common ancestor?
- Can you point me to any such common ancestor/"transitional" creature? I will accept anything that bridges the gap between kinds of animals. To help clarify, a "kind" is approximately (though not exactly the same) as the genus or sometimes family level of the standard taxonomy.
But you're going to repeat that argument until you get "that's a brown labrador, this is a black labrador. They're not related."
No. You're trying to make an ad absurdum argument out of a strawman. I already said that dogs (which includes Labrador retrievers, whether brown or black) are of the same kind. To be clear, I have no problems with variations within the same kind. I have no problems with natural selection, per se. I just don't see how mutations even built up over time can change the creature enough to form a distinct kind without making it unviable at a point long before it even comes close to being a different kind.
Because you’ve reached that conclusion beforehand and looking for support afterwards.
Hypothesis testing involves forming a conclusion and then looking for support afterwards in the form of absence of disproof. I'm asking for disproof. I asked for counterexamples because it seems that those should be the easiest to come by. I would accept other forms as well if you have them, though you might have to explain how they qualify.
No matter what links a biologist will point you at, they’ll either be close enough that you’ll say those are the same kind anyway or far enough apart that you’ll say there’s a missing link in between.
And do you think I can't recognize anything in between those two classifications? I would accept a demonstration of an actual (not theoretical) transition from one type of creature to two (or more) separate kinds.
Or is it that you yourself can't recognize or find a range between those two categories?
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
The post that you're writing will be posted in the topic that it says you're replying in, even if you navigate to a different topic in the meatime.
My typical workflow is to open
/recentand middle-click each interesting topic into its own tab. In this case, I had two separate tabs open for the two topics, and I guess when the state gets updated, it leaks between tabs through localstorage or something similar. A lot of webapps have problems with multiple tabs.
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Then you have no reasonable basis to conclude that your thoughts and memories actually correspond to anything in reality.
Exactly!
Fake edit: Oh, you meant something different. :)
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
The post that you're writing will be posted in the topic that it says you're replying in, even if you navigate to a different topic in the meatime.
My typical workflow is to open
/recentand middle-click each interesting topic into its own tab. In this case, I had two separate tabs open for the two topics, and I guess when the state gets updated, it leaks between tabs through localstorage or something similar. A lot of webapps have problems with multiple tabs.IIRC, that was hacked in by someone (Ben maybe?) so that partially-composed posts wouldn't be lost if you closed the tab (
). If the tab is closed without submitting the post, it is supposed to appear on the next tab you load.I also seem to remember a bug with it remembering the post but forgetting the in-reply-to PID (so it wouldn't appear in "Replies" or have the link to the parent) or something like that. I don't know if that was fixed or not. I guess I can find out -- I closed the tab and opened a new one in the process of typing this post. The post that I'd been typing was preserved; I'll have to see whether the reply link was preserved or not. edit: it wasn't preserved -- this post didn't get linked to its parent properly.
Apparently the bug you found is one where you submitted the post in one tab but it was erroneously still kept as an incomplete post in the
localStorageso it reappeared in the next tab you opened.
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The Debian installer says "it looks like there may be existing operating systems installed using BIOS compatibility mode"
...even though it booted on an entirely blank disk (with partitions just created by the installer itself)
...in a system that does not have BIOS compatibility mode.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
partially-composed posts wouldn't be lost if you closed the tab
Most webapps just use an
onbeforeunloadhandler to solve that.
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how it’s almost impossible to write actually reliable shell scripts
It's possible, but it's hellishly difficult. You're better off using a different programming language when you want reliable behaviour; a few of them are written with sufficient paranoia that they're actually safe. It's rather uncommon though, and vulnerabilities abound when someone blindly trusts something they shouldn't. (If a language wraps
popen(), that's usually highly vulnerable to shenanigans because of the extra parsing step involved that most people forget about. But Windows users shouldn't get cocky about this: launching programs on Windows is rather hard precisely because it is up to the receiving process to parse the command line rather than the caller, and there's no truly standard routine for doing so and no truly accepted standard quoting scheme… and once-only passing of structured objects after the process has launched — e.g., via COM — is a workaround and not a solution.)Unless you are using PowerShell.
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Hypothesis testing involves forming a conclusion and then looking for support afterwards in the form of absence of disproof.
But since we're all stupid humans, couldn't it actually be a disproof and you just don't realize it?
Just going off of your own logic here, which may or may not be valid because we're all stupid humans.
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Wolves and dogs are of the same kind of animal, though. Darwin's finches were all still finches. There are no evidences of any sort of "intermediate" between any of the myriad kinds of animals, whether extant or historical.
Yes, there are, tons of them. It's just that whenever you say "these are the same, but A and B are different and there's no intermediates between them" and someone comes along and actually finds (A+B)/2 you'll
and say "but these are different, where's (3A+B)/4?". Ad infinitum.Are elephants and giraffes the same? No.
Is there a direct link between them? No.
Is there a chain of evolution that can be traced back to a common ancestor?Yes.No. Depending on how well exactly these two are studied, thelinkssets of similar physical structures might be smaller or larger.- How can one tell whether similar physical structures (besides sub-/speciation) are a result of common ancestry or convergent evolution?
- Do similar physical structures always indicate similar genetics (besides sub-/speciation)?
- At what point are similar structures considered too different to have come from a common ancestor?
- Can you point me to any such common ancestor/"transitional" creature? I will accept anything that bridges the gap between kinds of animals. To help clarify, a "kind" is approximately (though not exactly the same) as the genus or sometimes family level of the standard taxonomy.
But you're going to repeat that argument until you get "that's a brown labrador, this is a black labrador. They're not related."
No. You're trying to make an ad absurdum argument out of a strawman. I already said that dogs (which includes Labrador retrievers, whether brown or black) are of the same kind. To be clear, I have no problems with variations within the same kind. I have no problems with natural selection, per se. I just don't see how mutations even built up over time can change the creature enough to form a distinct kind without making it unviable at a point long before it even comes close to being a different kind.
Because you’ve reached that conclusion beforehand and looking for support afterwards.
Hypothesis testing involves forming a conclusion and then looking for support afterwards in the form of absence of disproof. I'm asking for disproof. I asked for counterexamples because it seems that those should be the easiest to come by. I would accept other forms as well if you have them, though you might have to explain how they qualify.
You form a conclusion from the data you have, then see if it gets supported by further data.
In your case the conclusion “god did it” will be defended against anything no matter what. If god himself told you he doesn’t exist, you still wouldn’t believe it no matter how paradoxical that is.
No matter what links a biologist will point you at, they’ll either be close enough that you’ll say those are the same kind anyway or far enough apart that you’ll say there’s a missing link in between.
And do you think I can't recognize anything in between those two classifications? I would accept a demonstration of an actual (not theoretical) transition from one type of creature to two (or more) separate kinds.
Or is it that you yourself can't recognize or find a range between those two categories?I’m just going to link to something easily googlable, I’m sure you’ll tell me how obviously wrong this is.
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I really don't understand Task Manager sometimes.
https://i.imgur.com/BLY7YMi.png
How can the CPU be under 100% load if the only user that's more than 1% is at 6%?
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Unless you are using PowerShell.
You are full of shit. You literally could not be more wrong if you tried.
Powershell must communicate with subprocesses by either setting arguments, writing strings over pipes, or using one of the other IPC mechanisms available (of which COM is an example). Arguments are broken by long-standing misdesign on Windows. Pipes work, but require an agreed serialization format for doing structured information passing. Which leaves the other IPC mechanisms, some of which are pretty well understood and could support rich message passing, but that's definitely again a thing that controlled apps have to buy into. There are NO general mechanisms. If you think that some user-level library makes that untrue, you're completely wrong as there are still lots of apps out there that won't follow that library's rules and you're stuck with needing to control them anyway.
Bringing a DLL into the current process and working by direct function calls is a whole different approach, of course, but has its own set of downsides, some potentially catastrophic. (It's also good in many ways too; if you don't want security but do want speed, it's a great way of getting functionality.)
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
How can the CPU be under 100% load if the only user that's more than 1% is at 6%?
Are you seeing processes from all users and how much load is required in the kernel? (Also, is this a laptop? I've seen odd things happen on laptops when they get a bit warm…)
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@pie_flavor IIRC the latest Windows 10 update has a known issue with Task Manager reporting CPU usage incorrectly
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Unless you are using PowerShell.
You are full of shit. You literally could not be more wrong if you tried.
Watch me.
Powershell must communicate with subprocesses by either setting arguments, writing strings over pipes, or using one of the other IPC mechanisms available (of which COM is an example). Arguments are broken by long-standing misdesign on Windows. Pipes work, but require an agreed serialization format for doing structured information passing.
Perhaps there was a level of misunderstanding. Are you referring to programs that already exist, or programs that would be written specifically for the use case? Because in the case of cmdlets, PowerShell handles all the quoting, parsing, argument management, etc. The cmdlet class just says 'gimme a FileInfo named Path' and PS resolves
-Path .\foo.txtinto a FileInfo, or accepts a variable of typestringorFileInfo. Pipes pass .NET objects.Bringing a DLL into the current process and working by direct function calls is a whole different approach, of course, but has its own set of downsides, some potentially catastrophic. (It's also good in many ways too; if you don't want security but do want speed, it's a great way of getting functionality.)
Unless that's a .NET DLL in which case you have both.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor IIRC the latest Windows 10 update has a known issue with Task Manager reporting CPU usage incorrectly
No, this has happened before.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
How can the CPU be under 100% load if the only user that's more than 1% is at 6%?
Are you seeing processes from all users and how much load is required in the kernel? (Also, is this a laptop? I've seen odd things happen on laptops when they get a bit warm…)
Yes, this is a laptop. I'm the only user. I think Windows reports kernel load in task manager, not sure.
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@pie_flavor Do you have that "show processes from all users" checkbox enabled? Otherwise processes running under system account won't be displayed.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Because in the case of cmdlets,
Which are actually scripts specially formulated for PowerShell. But do continue to demonstrate that what he said is still true for everything he said.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor IIRC the latest Windows 10 update has a known issue with Task Manager reporting CPU usage incorrectly
No, this has happened before.
thenedit: although it doesn't rule out that being the issue now
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Because in the case of cmdlets,
Which are actually scripts specially formulated for PowerShell. But do continue to demonstrate that what he said is still true for everything he said.
False.
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Boy, Chrome really behaves weirdly under serious load.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Boy, Chrome really behaves weirdly under serious load.
Your file can't be played by my Chrome, so I suppose you're correct.
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@Tsaukpaetra did you push that big Play button in the center?
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra did you push that big Play button in the center?
That's why there's a swirling circle behind it. I can record some video of you'd like.
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@pie_flavor There could be 927 processes using 0.1% CPU each!
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor There could be 927 processes using 0.1% CPU each!
Only 927?
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I found a nice relaxation topic to detox with for a while...
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@dkf To explain what I meant by the “wat” image, the state of neuroscience is that it has a fairly good idea what memories are made of (patterns of synapses and the strengths of activation of those synapses, both of which are resolutely physical) at least for basic memories, and work is ongoing to understand more about what higher-level memories are like. Probably more of the same if you ask me, but the details are tricky (e.g., are there specialized neurons involved or are we just talking general patterns throughout). Thoughts are trickier — in large part because we're not really sure what they are — but betting that they are non-physical would seem odd. I predict that there won't be a single neuron for anything in particular, but the interplay of different patterns of neurons and synapses will be important. (There have been found neural patterns that act as attention selectors, patterns that act as spatial and temporal pattern detectors, and other patterns that act as phase locked loops of various descriptions. How these things fit together in hierarchies that predict possible futures and plan responses to them, that's one of the absolute total frontiers of science right now.)
This stuff is fun, and really needs interdisciplinary approaches; something that looks utterly confusing to one person is very clear to someone else with a different background. And you'll never understand it by a purely full-neuron-model first approach (just like you'd never understand a Google search by starting at the level of electron movement in CMOS gates); there's too many higher levels of organisation.
This is really cool science, and I'd love to learn more about it, but even so, it fails to address the issue I'm raising. To take your Google search analogy, there may be tons of really interesting and complex operations going on behind a search across the internet, and ultimately they come down to a bunch of electrons flowing through conductors and semiconductors in highly patterned and extremely complex ways on very complicated hardware. But, even though Google's servers are sitting there indexing the internet, a search isn't actually triggered until someone from outside that system inputs a query.
That's what I'm suggesting happens with our minds. The wetware is sitting there running its background processes and listeners, recording sensations, and offering automatic responses to certain environmental inputs; and then the metaphysical part of a person inputs a command or query, and away it goes responding to that new event.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another; if there is no metaphysical aspect to our existence, then thinking itself becomes utterly meaningless, and the fact that we think otherwise is just one of those quirks of our "thoughts." There is therefore basically no difference then between sanity and insanity; no one really knows (nor can know) how the universe actually works. And actually, the fact that we think we're making logical arguments or saying real things about reality falls under the same guillotine.
In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things. And if anything is to mean something, then that's patently ludicrous. Therefore, by non-contradiction, we must conclude that there is a non-physical/metaphysical part of our minds that can introduce new events into the "processing stream" of our physical existence.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Because in the case of cmdlets,
Which are actually scripts specially formulated for PowerShell. But do continue to demonstrate that what he said is still true for everything he said.
Don't you understand? This programming language has a type system, therefore my entire computer is using that one type system within that one process for all of its processes.'
Gosh.
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@ben_lubar what?
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@djls45 Why is the quality of being metaphysical any help in giving a process meaning? Presumably, this non-physical entity evolves as it thinks, remembers, and takes in new information through the pineal gland. This evolution will either be deterministic or non-deterministic, a.k.a., random [1]. Deterministic evolution falls prey to your criticism of being the meaningless. Non-deterministic evolution can hardly count as intelligence as random state changes never become correlated with anything (unless a repeatedly flipped coin constitutes a thinking being). You haven't shown how this metaphysical entity avoids the problems that plague physical brains.
[1] There's some subtly here in that there can be a division between pure randomness where state transitions are totally uncaused and when prior states constrain the possible subsequent states (Markov chains for a discrete example). I don't think this matters for my argument.
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@dkf while interesting, this wasn’t really the problem.
Whetherthoughts and memories actually correspond to anything in reality.
is not a scientific question but a philosophical one, and the fact is we can’t really know anything about reality itself (other than what Descartes told us).
Which lead him (djls45) to the absolutely wrong conclusion that any arbitrarily stupid theory is for all intents and purposes just as good as any other non-stupid theory.You're so close, but you've got it switched around to be actually almost exactly the opposite to what I'm saying. I'm concluding that the only way to be actually able to ponder philosophy or science or the universe at all is to allow at least a slight bit of the metaphysical ("supernatural" or "spiritual" if you will) in our ability to contemplate. Refusing that point gives the inescapable conclusion that we have no grounds to attach a real, veridical meaning to any of our thoughts, and in this case, any arbitrary stupid theory is for all intents and purposes just as good as any other stupid or non-stupid theory. (And actually, we wouldn't even be able to distinguish stupid from non-stupid in any meaningful way.)
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is not a scientific question but a philosophical one
All of science is a branch of philosophy, Natural Philosophy, the branch that feels that the way to learn about the world is to interact with it, see what happens, and to try to learn to predict the outcomes of future interactions. The outrageous success of doing this (especially in relation to attracting funding and fame) has really annoyed the rest of philosophy…
Natural Philosophy produces "flashy" and easily described results, but it depends on other branches for its legitimacy, validity, verity, and veridicality.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
I found a nice relaxation topic to detox with for a while...
I've been seeing quite a few of those in the suggested videos list. Many of them include duplicate clips from other such videos.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@dkf said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Unless you are using PowerShell.You are full of shit. You literally could not be more wrong if you tried.
Watch me.
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pineal gland
Unless by "pineal gland" you mean "third eye" and even then only metaphorically to refer to the connection between the metaphysical/"supernatural"/"spiritual" being and the physical brain/CNS, then no.
@djls45 Why is the quality of being metaphysical any help in giving a process meaning? Presumably, this non-physical entity evolves as it thinks, remembers, and takes in new information through the pineal gland. This evolution will either be deterministic or non-deterministic, a.k.a., random [1]. Deterministic evolution falls prey to your criticism of being the meaningless. Non-deterministic evolution can hardly count as intelligence as random state changes never become correlated with anything (unless a repeatedly flipped coin constitutes a thinking being). You haven't shown how this metaphysical entity avoids the problems that plague physical brains.
[1] There's some subtlety here in that there can be a division between pure randomness where state transitions are totally uncaused and when prior states constrain the possible subsequent states (Markov chains for a discrete example). I don't think this matters for my argument.
Regardless of its growth-evolution being deterministic or not, a metaphysical being is not necessarily subject to the same problem of meaninglessness. At worst, it might be but we don't have the right faculties to be able to tell†. But since we know that a purely physical process is necessarily subject to the problem, we must conclude that having this meaning requires a non-physical source.
† More realistically, we can infer that we must be metaphysical beings that are able to ascribe, derive, or discover meaning by the facts that we think we can do so, that we base our logic and argumentation on being able to do so, and that any purely physical/non-metaphysical explanation necessitates an inability to do so.
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?
Who?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?
Who?
Owh?
2018-10-06_13-35-27.mp4
