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.

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 guess so lmao

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

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.

I read that one, he literally described himself as mediocre programmer and is excited about gpt as a way for mediocre programmers to be competitive again. I’m sure he’s in for a really fun time when he has to find a bug in 12k lines of AI spaghetti he bolted together.

I presumed it to be a standin for just directly using Math.max, since there’s no nice way to show that in a valid code snippet

Not using thief is professional incompetence unless you’re doing something deeply cursed

Fair enough, though I contend that for a common-case application like a database-backed REST API where the architecture is basically standardized there is no meaningful time difference between writing crappy code in a clean architecture and writing a crappy pile of spaghetti.

I’ve been tasked with updating some code a senior programmer (15+ years experience, internally awarded, widely considered fantastic) who recently left the company wrote.

It’s supposed to be a REST service. None of the API endpoints obey restful principles, the controller layer houses all of the business logic, and repositories are all labeled as services–and that’s before we even get into the code itself. Genuinely astounding what passes for senior-level programming expertise.

That’s what’s really irks me be about JS–you can do just about whatever but you’re not supposed to.

It’s an imperative language, but best practices are to use it functionally.

You can omit semicolons, but best practices are to use them.

You can use sloppy equality, but best practices are to always use strict.

Bro over here malding over a meme

Free and Open-Source Software

It’s come leaps and bounds since it launched–I’ve been stalking the GitHub and the current dev build is nice. The App Store version is still a little rough but they’ve got an update in beta that smooths it out a lot

Off the top of my head I know that Mlem, Memmy, and Jerboa are FOSS. Most of the others probably are too, but those are the ones I have ready to hand

Reboot

Clean your build folder

I’m doing my part!

It’s admittedly quite good at what it was originally supposed to be: a voice chat service for playing games that’s easy to join, use, and share. The troubles began when they started trying to pivot to be a general-purpose public internet space provider, because the platform was never supposed to be that and they’ve done absolutely nothing to support it.

Only the ones who don’t grow up to be total code monkeys

Smex ftw