[-] wols@lemm.ee 7 points 4 months ago

Absolutely. This game had so much more potential than was realized.

[-] wols@lemm.ee 5 points 5 months ago

Me every time I see one of these pretty much.
Feels like these are from another timeline. Guess the name is fitting.

If I had to guess, I think this might be poking fun at overprotective parents who unwittingly do more harm than good by controlling their kids' environment to an unhealthy degree.
Trying to read more into it, perhaps it's also pointing at the propagation of bad childrearing practices across generations - parent cows grew up on a farm, constrained by an electric fence. Though presumably more independent now, this is what they knew growing up, so they apply (a bizarre perversion of) these same practices to their own children.

I'm probably way off though, because that interpretation barely elicits a half smile from me.
Curious for an explanation from someone who actually gets it too.

[-] wols@lemm.ee 5 points 6 months ago

TLDR:
Nature can't simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn't waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.

The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.

I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn't be able to fill.

I don't think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it "wants". It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there's enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there's no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)

[-] wols@lemm.ee 7 points 9 months ago

The point is not the difference between a fake memory and a real one (let's grant for now that they are undistinguishable) but the fact that positive experiences are worth a lot more than just the memories they leave you with.

I may not know the difference between a memory of an event that I experienced and a memory of an event I didn't experience. Looking back on the past, they're the same.
But each moment of pleasure that I only remember, without having experienced it, was essentially stolen from me. Pleasure is a state of consciousness and only exists in the present.

[-] wols@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

Honestly, their comment reads like copy pasta. That first paragraph is chef's kiss.
I initially thought they weren't being sincere, something something Poe's law...

(' v ')/

[-] wols@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

El psy kongroo

[-] wols@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

"They have all the guns" is a metaphor in the context of class warfare.

I mean that they have the means to employ force (usually through police, but not exclusively) in their interest as well as having the entire power of the state behind them (disproportionate wealth means they have disproportionate political influence which means they can lobby for laws to be adjusted in their favor. Even when the law seems just, it is rarely applied in the same way to wealthy people in practice).

Not to mention that they can and do buy influence over the media apparatus, controlling narratives and tricking the working class into acting against their own interests.

Within the framework of class conflict, those are the "guns".

[-] wols@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

That's true. However.

The owning class has interests directly opposed to the working class, which makes that "natural" trait toxic to the working class. In addition, the owning class has a lot more power.

Your landlord wants to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. (fair enough right?) The problem is that for that to happen

  • demand needs to stay high or go higher which means that
  • supply needs to stay low which means that (at the level of class interests, not personal belief)
    Your landlord doesn't want new affordable housing to be built in your area. They want you to never own a house, never have any cheaper rent options. They don't want to have to keep renting to you at the price you are paying now.
    They don't want to have to invest money in making your apartment/house safe or comfortable.

The problem is not that people will put their own wellbeing above yours, it's that their wellbeing is in conflict with yours. A conflict of interests between classes... class conflict... class warfare. And they have all the guns.
It doesn't have to be this way.

[-] wols@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

I can't for the life of me figure out how your proposed method helps in the described scenario.

Maybe I misunderstood it, can you elaborate?

[-] wols@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

Actually fruits are pretty great for us, if they aren't highly processed.
Better to eat an apple than drink apple juice, also better to eat an apple than just about anything from the supermarket that isn't fresh.
Of course, you still need a balanced diet, and you can't get nearly all the necessary nutrients from just apples. Still, assuming an otherwise nutrient-complete diet, it's a lot less healthy to eat a slice of frozen pizza than an apple or a banana. (the apple might even contain less available sugar than the pizza slice - people often overestimate how much sugar fruits really contain)

The "stuff removed" bit is more important than you seem to give it credit for. Take out all the fiber and water and sure it's still the same sugars that are left over, but we didn't evolve to consume large quantities of pure sugar, so it spikes our insulin and gets stored as excess fat.

Fruit juice is pretty unhealthy, because all the sugar is more available due to all the fiber being stripped out and you can consume a dozen apples' worth in a few minutes, which you wouldn't do with actual apples.

Sure, there's not that much fiber left in raisins either. But in the context of musli they can be combined with whole grains and nuts, so you get enough fiber back to make the sugar less quickly digested and thus more healthy.

A third of the entire cereal mix being sugar is definitely worse than musli with raisins (which comes to about 10g of sugar per 100g), especially considering that a good portion of the rest of the mass in the case of musli is made up of fiber, proteins and healthy fats.

Adding sugar isn't just "another big issue", it's the big issue. Eating fresh fruits is a non-issue, and usually so is eating dried fruits in moderation.

[-] wols@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Many of the programming languages that are regularly the butt of everyone's jokes don't just allow you to use them badly, they make it easy to do so, sometimes easier than using them well.
This is not a good thing. A good language should

  • be well suited to the task at hand
  • be easy to use correctly
  • be hard to use incorrectly

The reality is that the average software developer barely knows best practices, much less how to apply them effectively.
This fact, combined with languages that make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot leads to lots of bad code in the wild.

Tangentially related rant
We should attack this problem from both directions: improve developers but also improve languages.
Sometimes that means replacing them with new languages that are designed on top of years of knowledge that we didn't have when these old languages were being designed.

There seems to be a certain cynicism (especially from some more senior developers) about new languages.
I've heard stuff like: every other day a new programming language is invented, it's all just a fad, they add nothing new, all the existing languages could already do all the things the new ones can, etc.
To me this misses the point. New languages have the advantage of years of knowledge accrued in the industry along with general technological advancements, allowing them to be safer, more ergonomic, and more efficient.
Sure, we can also improve existing languages (and should, and do) but often times for one reason or another (backwards compatibility, implementation effort, the wider technological ecosystem, dogma, politics, etc.) old quirks and deficiencies stay.

Even for experienced developers who know how to use their language of choice well, there can be unnecessary cognitive burden caused by poor language design. The more your language helps you automatically avoid mistakes, the more you can focus on actually developing software.

We should embrace new languages when they lead to more good code and less bad code.

[-] wols@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

Oh neat, a real whoosh in the wild, on Lemmy!

On a more serious note, vim is one of the most initially unintuitive commonly used pieces of software I've encountered.

Sure, if you put in a little time and learn it, it's not rocket science. But that seems like a weird standard for an essential tool used for one of the most common computing tasks of today.

In response to your initial question, obviously it's a meme. But like most good memes, it's born out of a common* human experience. What do you think is the most common reaction when someone is thrown into vim for the first time? My guess is "what's this?" or something similar, followed very soon by "how do I exit this?". And the answer is, by modern computer users' standards, quite arcane.

IF you are somewhat familiar with the Linux terminal, you'll try CTRL+C and IF you're paying close attention you will notice that vim is giving you a hint. But if it's your first time interacting with vim, chances are at least one of those conditions is not met. So now you're stuck. And after an optional small moment of panic/disorientation, you google "how to exit vim" (provided you were at least lucky enough to notice/remember what program you're in) => a meme is born.

Exiting vim is almost like a right of passage for fresh Linux enjoyers. It's not a hard task but it can seem daunting at first encounter, which is humorous given that quitting a program is normally such an easy thing to do.

One more note, there is a group of people who will encounter vim quite unexpectedly and unintentionally: Windows users performing their first commit using git bash. They won't even know they're in vim, they're dropped directly into edit mode and there's no instructions for confirming the commit message, much less how to exit/cancel the operation.

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wols

joined 1 year ago