• 0 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 26th, 2024

help-circle

  • You have free will, but you also have chains that bound you.

    Starting from the social order, you need money and other social relations (friends, family, bosses) to literally survive in the modern world - you’re not omnipotent.

    Then you have the cognitive chains - stuff you know and understand, as well stuff you can invent (or reinvent) from your current knowledge - you are not omnipresent.

    Then, as a consequence, without these two, you cannot be (omni)benevolent - you’ll always fuck something up (and even if you didn’t, most actions positive towards something will have a negative impact towards something else).

    All these are pretty much categorically impossible to exist - you’re not some god-damn deity.

    But does this mean free will doesn’t exist?

    Hardly. It’s just not as ultimate a power or virtue as some may put it. Flies or pigs also have free will - they’re free to roll in mud or lick a turd - except for when they’re not because they do it to survive (cool themselves or eat respectively).

    We humans similarily eat and shit, and we go to work so we have something to eat and someplace to shit. Otherwise you die without the former or get fined without the latter.

    So that’s what free will is - the ability of an organism to guide what it’s doing, how, when (and, to some extent, even why) it’s doing it, according to its senses and sensibilities. It’s the process with which we put our own, unique spin on the things in our lives.

    Being an omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent would in fact remove the essence of what free will (with all its limits) is, because our actions wouldn’t have any meaningful consequences. It’d all just be an effective (what I’ll call negative) chaos - a mishmush of everything only understandable to the diety.

    So in fact, the essence of “free” will is that it’s free within some bounds - some we’ve set ourselves, some we’re forced with (disabilities, cognitive abilities, physical limits, etc.). Percisely in the alternative scenario would “free” will cease to be free - because someone already knows it all - past, present future, local and global, from each atom on up. There’s perfect causality - as perfect as a movie. You can’t change it meaningfully - any changes become a remix or remaster - they lose their originality.

    With the limits on our thinking which cause us to be less-than-perfect, they cause a kind of positive chaos, one where one tries to do their best with what they have on their disposal - as they say, you get to know people best at their lowest. Similarily, everyone gets corrupted at a high enough power level - some just do it sooner than others. So surely, at an infinite power level, not even someone omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent all at once would be able to curb this flaw.


  • It’s a Linux subsystem for Windows. As in, you run Windows and within it run Linux. Thus Linux is the sub-system, while Windows is the “overarching” system. Therefore, it’s Linux running as a subsystem on a Windows machine. Therefore, a Linux subsystem on/for Windows.

    <edit>

    That was just setting the two viewpoints equal.

    Now, to add why this one is more “correct”: when talking about Windows (or Linux or anything else fir that matter) subsystems, you don’t call the Windows file system the Windows subsystem for Files or the Windows subsystem for Networking or Linux subsystem for RNG - You call them the filesystem, the networking system or the RNG system. And since none of them get the “for host” suffix, it seems natural to assume it’s the guest system that’s the “sub” system, with the other one being the whole.

    </edit>



  • Fair. Although, I consider Microsoft’s market “Most laptops” since Apple kind of does its own thing and Chromebooks are ultra-low end laptops. Thus Microsoft gets ~95% of the market for themselves.

    Personally, I’d say that’s a clear case of monopoly since MS controls this entire segment of “non-Apple, non-ultra low power laptop, PCs”, but you’re right - there are other players. The thing is, they have relatively tiny niches in which they thrive and in fact pose no threat to the monopolist.

    But I now I see how you see it as an oligopoly, which is quite valid.







  • The brain is, basically, a think-machine, even though it’s “just” a lump of meat. The brain tries to make sense of stuff and piece everything together “logically”.

    Oftentimes the braim makes stuff up - your brain is very good at lying. Take for example vision - the eyes contain a relatively hole in the retina, yet you see a perfectly clear image. This is the “intended” purpose, but the core mechanism bywhich this is done is much more deeply rooted into the brain’s main “function” - it’s one of the core things the brain does. Its “thinking” is very malleable.

    This can cause smaller “misinterpretations” of reality: Here’s a personal example: when my grandfather died, I periodically saw his reflection in the front door of his house. It would be visible only for a second, and then disaopear almost immidiately. I had to be moving relatively fast for it to appear, and couldn’t cause it to appear at will. 15 years later, I noticed it was actually my reflection, but since it was only visible in the exact same spot, from a certain angle, only in the evenings, with the porch lamp on and on a wood-textured PVC door, it took me that much time to piece all the puzlle pieces together and deduce the root cause. Me not having to visit his house all that often certsinly didn’t help the situation.

    The other is plain hallucination: Take arthritis. You have pain which is proven not to be caused by anything external. Your nerves just send the “pain signals”, and you feel pain.

    Additionally, sinesthesia isn’t just something someone either has or doesn’t, but it’s a spectrum, and, all the senses are in fact connected on a quite deep level.

    What you describe definately falls somewhere on this “misinterpretarion-hallucination” spectrum. Maybe there was nothing to smell, yet you felt you smelled something, caused fully by your unconscious influenced by past experiences. Or maybe there was a totally different smell that got turned into this smell, but you couldn’t pick it out - as is the case with my grandfather and I.

    This spectum can also be taken as the “physical-psychological” (cause) spectrum.

    Maybe it’s a one-off thing for you, or maybe it’s a chain of conditions that’ll get fullfilled again every now and then. There’s most likely a logical explanation since the brain is inherently a logical machine, but chances are it’s not. There are just too many variables at play as far as outside factors go.




  • The thing with the Control panel (speaking as a former Windows user up until a year ago) was its consistency. Since the Aero era things have remained in more-or-less the same place. Sure, some things got added, some renamed and some deleted, but the basics I needed (mouse sensitivity, battery settings on the laptop, the Add/remove software page, search indexing, printers) has all stayed in more or less the same place.

    Then 10 happened. And sure, Settings was great for a lot of stuff. But when Settings didn’t have the option (or I lost my nerves trying to find it), Control Panel was the way to go. I’d find what I needed pretty much instantly, since was always one of the same 20-odd things I need.

    Even then, everything just seemed faster in Control panel. Was it more responsive? Were there less animations? Were more things crammed into one screen so less clicking and scrolling was involved? Is it just my imagination?

    Honestly, I don’t know.

    By the time I got used to the new Settings app, one of the big Windows 10 makeovers happened and jumbled up about 10% of Settings. Objectively not much, but just enough to irritate.

    And now with 11, they not only made Settings unrecognizable, they also cranked the spyware up to, well, 11. And there’s no Control Panel to default on when in doubt (or fuming with rage).

    All in all, while Control Panel wan’t what kept me on Windows, 11 losing it did ease the transition, since it meant having to learn a new way of doing things either way. Might as well make it a way that hopefully won’t change once a random design exec decides “this is ugly and it has to go”.

    Honestly, KDE Plasma’s Settings are where it’s at. It’s right between the functional and informstional density of Control panel and the simplicity, visual appeal and saner structure of Settings. Shame it uses Qt, which from what I hear, is god-awful as far as UI toolchains go.






  • Yeah. Tbh, I always wondered why programming languages weren’t translated.

    I know CS is all about english, but at least the default builtin functions of programming languages could get translated (as well as APIs that care about themselves).

    Like, I can’t say I don’t like it this way (since I’m a native english speaker), but I still wonder what if you could translate code.

    Variables could cause problems (more work with translation or hard to understand if not translated). But still - programming languages have no declentions and syntax is simpler so it shouldn’t even compare to “real” languages with regards to difficulty of implementation.