sylver_dragon

The big ones for me were a frequent, sudden, urgent need to pee and getting up multiple times a night to pee. I also drank a copious amount of water. Like, the whole “eight glasses a day” thing which used to be popular was confusing to me, as I’d drink that much in the first couple hours of the day. I finally went in to the doctor and got a blood test and my A1Cs were well over the “welcome to Diabetes Land” number. With diet, exercise and drugs I’m well controlled now and caught it early enough that I still have good feeling in my feet. Given my family history, and all the shit I ate in my younger days, it’s not really a surprise. I just have to be more careful now, but I have discovered an enjoyment of climbing because of it.

Really, if you have any family history of diabetes, start visiting your doctor on an annual basis and getting a blood test. It’s simple, and catching it earlier is good for preventing problems with neuropathy in your feet.

Wait, I’m conscious enough to have questions? So, now what?

The one argument for a multi-magazine setup would be ammo versatility. E.g. One magazine holds FMJ or the like for soft targets while the second holds armor piercing for hard targets or explosive/incendiary for anti-material. It’s not a great argument for it, and it’s probably why we don’t see it all that often. But, the good idea fairy is a regular visitor to the arms manufacturing industry.

For the ones they own or have a contract with, probably. However, there are two problems with that.

1. It will do fuck all for the AI models which are just scraping the internet and which have no contractual agreements with the blog (e.g. all the big ones).
2. It’s a fixing a problem the blog hosting platform created. They likely have a data sharing agreement with some organizations to make the scraping easy for those organizations (e.g. direct content database access). So, they are like the mob, offering you “protection” so long as you pay them not to break your shit.

The main thing I have from that time is several large boxes hanging about taking up shelf space and a burning hatred of MMOs. My wife and I got into WoW during late Vanilla. We stood in line at midnight to get the collector’s edition box for WotLK and later again for Cataclysm (we weren’t that far gone when The Burning Crusade released). Shortly after Cataclysm released, there was the Midsummer Fire Festival and as we were playing through it, we hit that wall where any more quests became locked behind “Do these daily quests 10,000 times to progress” and the whole suspension of disbelief just came crashing down. I had already hated daily quests and the grindy elements of the game, but at that moment I just said, “fuck this” and walked away from the game.

I do look back fondly on some of the good times we had in the game. Certainly in Vanilla there was some amazing writing and world crafting. We met some good people and had a lot of fun over the years and I don’t regret the time or money spent. However, one thing it taught me is just how pointless MMOs are. They are specifically designed to be endless treadmills. And this can be OK, so long as the treadmill itself is well designed and fun. But, so many of the elements exist just to eat time. Instead of being fun, they suck the fun out of the game and turn it into a job.

We even tried a few other MMOs after that point (e.g. Star Wars) just because we wanted something to fill that niche in our gaming time. But invariably, there would be the grind mechanics which ruined the game for us. Or worse yet, pay to win mechanics where the game would literally dangle offers of “pay $X to shortcut this pointless grind” (ESO pops to mind for this). If the game is offering me ways to pay money to not play the game, then I’ll take the easier route and not play the game at all, thank you very much.

So ya, WoW taught me to hate MMOs and grinding in games. And that’s good, I guess.

Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada

As others mentioned, this would be an interesting data point to validate. I’m not familiar with the server side of Lemmy, but does the server provide any logs which could be used with GeoIP to get a sense of the relative number of connections from different countries? While there is likely to be some misreporting due to VPN usage and the like, it’s likely to be a low enough number of connections to be ignored as “noise” in the data. Depending on the VPNs in question, it may also be possible to run down many of the IP addresses which are VPNs in the connections logs and report “VPN user” as a distinct category. This would also be interesting to see broken out by instance (e.g. what countries are hitting lemmy.world versus lemmy.ml versus lemmy.ca etc.).

All that said, thank you for sharing. These sorts of exercises can be interesting to understand what a population looks like.

Well,

An economy is really just a way to distribute finite resources in a world with infinite wants. Even the most egalitarian of systems is going to require deciding who gets something and who doesn’t (winner and losers). It’s perfectly valid to be frustrated by being on the “doesn’t” end of that equation. And we (US and other Western Democracies) could certainly do a lot more to shift some of the resources away from the few who are hording a lot of them, even without a radical “tear the system down” approach. The difficulty is the political will to do so.

Unfortunately, mustering political will for a collective good, which may come with some individual losses can be a tough sell. Especially when large parts of a population are comfortable. Not only do you have to convince people that the collective good is an overall good for them, you also have to convince them that the individual losses either won’t effect them or will be mitigated by the upsides of the collective good. And given peoples’ tendency to over emphasize the short term risks over the long term risks, this can be especially hard. But, that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to sharpen your arguments and find ways to convince more people that things can be better for them, if they are willing to take that step.

If everyone bought the dip, the dip would end. Stock prices are only loosely tied to reality. They are more strongly tied to the perception that a stock’s price will increase. So, if people started pouring money into stocks (or other assets) the price of those stocks would naturally rise as they become more scarce and sellers demand a higher price for them. Assuming the reasons for the dip remain, it would just result in the inflation of another bubble.

Take a look back at the whole GameStop (GME) rollercoster. Large investors expected the stock to crater and began taking short positions. Retail investors saw the dip this was causing and bought the stock in droves, forcing the price up beyond anything it had any business being. Eventually, that bubble popped and the stock has settled to a more reasonable (if still higher) level.

Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can “fix” the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

Why can’t the U.S do the same, if Donald Trump is so bad?

We don’t have a legal mechanism for it. In the US Constitution, the people do not have a direct power of impeachment. As a Federalist system, the US Federal Government was designed as a government of governments. So, the power to impeaching the US President is given to Congress, not the people.

Impeachment is a two step process in the US. The House of Representatives (the larger of the two houses) is required to pass Articles of Impeachment which list the reasons for removal. Those are then taken up by the Senate (the smaller house) which tries the President and requires a 2/3 majority to convict the President.

While it’s easy to get a sense that everyone hates the US President, especially here on Lemmy, his popularity isn’t all that far behind previous US Presidents. Yes, he is net unpopular, but not so much that his removal is politically possible. His own party (Republicans) still supports him, and they hold majorities in both houses. As such, they are neither going to pass Articles of Impeachment, nor would they convict him (and most certainly not at the 2/3 level needed in the Senate).

Why are some Americans even supporting him?

The US is rather starkly divided, politically speaking, at the moment. And people will overlook a lot from the leaders of their own party, if it means keeping the other party out of power. Trump is the latest, and one of the more extreme examples of this. His claims that he could shoot someone and not lose any votes may be close to true. There was a special election in 2017 where the Republican candidate had credible allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor. This was for a Senate seat from Alabama, which one would normally expect to vote overwhelmingly Republican. Moore did end up losing, but is was closer than one would expect, when one of the candidates is likely a pedophile.

Again, if your only source of information about US politics comes from Lemmy, you’re getting a very skewed view. Yes, he’s not popular at the moment, but there is a large segment of the US population which agrees with him. And that means we’re kinda stuck with him until 2018.

immediately lost my $20, never entered a casino again.

You didn’t lose it, you paid $20 for an education in why gambling in a casino is a bad idea. It could have been much, much worse.

As a species, homo sapiens have managed to adapt to every environment on Earth. We are the first species to have any measure of control over the natural forces which have wiped out countless other species. Diseases which once ravaged our populations are now gone or minor inconveniences and we continue to find new ways to mitigate the worst effect of many diseases. Should a large asteroid be heading our way, we are the only species which may stand any chance of diverting it or mitigating the long term impacts when it does hit us. While it was certainly not a “choice”, the evolution of higher cognition, problem solving and intra-species communications has put our species in a unique position of having a high degree of control over out fate. Sure, it has its downsides (we are the only species which might be able to end all life on Earth), but it’s been a pretty amazing run for us. On the balance, I think we’re in a much better position to keep going as a species than our ancestors or cousins (homo erectus, homo hablis, neanderthal, great apes, chimpanzees, etc).

So, was it a “mistake”, I think the current state of evidence is against that. While it may result in a really shit deal for individuals of the species from time to time, as a species I think it would be silly to consider it a mistake.

Short answer, no.

Long answer: We are a long way off from having anything close to the movie villain level of AI. Maybe we’re getting close to the paperclip manufacturing AI problem, but I’d argue that even that is often way overblown. The reason I say this is that such arguments are quite hand-wavy about leaps in capability which would be required for those things to become a problem. The most obvious of which is making the leap from controlling the devices an AI is intentionally hooked up to, to devices it’s not. And it also needs to make that jump without anyone noticing and asking, “hey, what’s all this then?” As someone who works in cybersecurity for a company which does physical manufacturing, I can see how it would get missed for a while (companies love to under-spend on cybersecurity). But eventually enough odd behavior gets picked up. And the routers and firewalls between manufacturing and anything else do tend to be the one place companies actually spend on cybersecurity. When your manufacturing downtime losses are measured in millions per hour, getting a few million a year for NDR tends to go over much better. And no, I don’t expect the AI to hack the cybersecurity, it first needs to develop that capability. AI training processes require a lot of time failing at doing something, that training is going to get noticed. AI isn’t magically good at anything, and while the learning process can be much faster, that speed is going to lead to a shit-ton of noise on the network. And guess what, we have AI and automation running on our behalf as well. And those are trained to shutdown rogue devices attacking the cybersecurity infrastructure.

“Oh wait, but the AI would be sneaky, slow and stealty!” Why would it? What would it have in it’s currently existing model which would say “be slow and sneaky”? It wouldn’t, you don’t train AI models to do things which you don’t need them to do. A paperclip optimizing AI wouldn’t be trained on using network penetration tools. That’s so far outside the need of the model that the only thing it could introduce is more hallucinations and problems. And given all the Frankenstein’s Monster stories we have built and are going to build around AI, as soon as we see anything resembling an AI reaching out for abilities we consider dangerous, it’s going to get turned off. And that will happen long before it has a chance to learn about alternative power sources. It’s much like zombie outbreaks in movies, for them to move much beyond patient zero requires either something really, really special about the “disease” or comically bad management of the outbreak. Sure, we’re going to have problems as we learn what guardrails to put around AI, but the doom and gloom version of only needing one mistake is way overblown. There are so many stopping points along the way from single function AI to world dominating AI that it’s kinda funny. And many of those stopping points are the same, “the attacker (humans) only need to get lucky once” situation. So no, I don’t believe that the paperclip optimizer AI problem is all that real.

That does take us to the question of a real general purpose AI being let loose on the internet to consume all human knowledge and become good at everything, which then decides to control everything. And maybe this might be a problem, if we ever get there. Right now, that sort of thing is so firmly in the realm of sci-fi that I don’t think we can meaningfully analyze it. What we have today, fancy neural networks, LLMs and classifiers, puts us in the same ballpark as Jules Verne writing about space travel. Sure, he might have nailed one or two of the details; but, the whole this was so much more fantastically complex and difficult than he had any ability to conceive. Once we are closer to it, I expect we’re going to see that it’s not anything like we currently expect it to be. The computing power requirements may also limit it’s early deployment to only large universities and government projects, keeping it’s processing power well centralized. General purpose AI may well have the same decapitation problems humans do. They can have fantastical abilities, but they need really powerful data centers to run it. And those bring all the power, cooling and not getting blown the fuck up with a JDAM problems of current AI data centers. Again, we could go back and forth making up ways for AI to techno-magic it’s way around those problems, but it’s all just baseless speculation at this point. And that speculation will also inform the guardrails we build in at the time. It would boil down to the same game children play where they shoot each other with imaginary guns, and have imaginary shields. And they each keep re-imagining their guns and shields to defeat the other’s. So ya, it might be fun for a while, but it’s ultimately pointless.

For someone who spends a lot of time alone and on a computer this will seem anathema, but go find some sort of physical activity (sport) and start engaging in it a few times a week. Not only does this get you out of the house, it creates opportunities to engage with people socially and it is good for your health.

I am very much a stay at home, be in front of my computer type hermit. I was this way most of my life and even being married didn’t help much as my wife is the same. A good Friday night for us currently involves playing Baldur’s Gate 3 until much too late. We have a very small circle of friends and don’t get out much at all. However, now in my late 40’s I am having some health issues and that finally gave me the push to get out of my gaming chair and get my body moving. I took up climbing at an indoor rock climbing gym and I really enjoy it. The regularly changing routes on the walls mean that I get to engage the puzzle solving part of my brain, and I am pushed physically as I try to get better. In between climbs I’m near other people with an obvious shared interest and can practice talking to other people by discussing the routes (social skills are like all skills, they take practice). And the exercise has made my doctor visits a lot less “you’re going to die horribly” and more “we’ve got things pretty well controlled”. I also just feel better.

So ya, go out and find some sort of physical activity you enjoy. Don’t be afraid to try new things, you’ll suck at them but that’s to be expected. The first step in being good at anything is sucking at it. Use that suckage to engage with other people and learn how to suck less. This will help you suck less at socializing. I won’t say that any of this is easy, it’s not. I know there is the hermit piece if me which always wants to fall back into just hiding out in my basement (literally, my office is in my basement). But, I’ve also made a habit of climbing 2-3 times a week and 3 years into doing that I am now looking forward to that time. I get excited when I walk into the gym and see one of the walls changed and now get to solve a new set of climbing routes. I still kinda suck, but not anywhere near as much as I did on my first day.

I started self hosting in the days well before containers (early 2000’s). Having been though that hell, I’m very happy to have containers.
I like to tinker with new things and with bare metal installs this has a way of adding cruft to servers and slowly causing the system to get into an unstable state. That’s my own fault, but I’m a simple person who likes simple solutions. There are also the classic issues with dependency hell and just flat out incompatible software. While these issues have gotten much better over the years, isolating applications avoids this problem completely. It also makes OS and hardware upgrades less likely to break stuff.

These days, I run everything in containers. My wife and I play games like Valheim together and I have a Dockerfile template I use to build self-hosted serves in a container. The Dockerfile usually just requires a few tweaks for AppId, exposed ports and mount points for save data. That paired with a docker-compose.yaml (also built off a template) means I usually have a container up and running in fairly short order. The update process could probably be better, I currently just rebuild the image, but it gets the job done.

But, but, docker, kubernetes, hyper-scale convergence and other buzzwords from the 2010’s! These fancy words can’t just mean resource and namespace isolation!

In all seriousness, the isolation provided by containers is significant enough that administration of containers is different from running everything in the same OS. That’s different in a good way though, I don’t miss the bad old days of everything on a single server in the same space. Anyone else remember the joys of Windows Small Business Server? Let’s run Active Directory, Exchange and MSSQL on the same box. No way that will lead to prob… oh shit, the RAM is on fire.

It’s caused by the speaker not liking what another person is doing, but being unable to articulate a real argument against the behavior. So, they call it “childish” as a way to express that dislike in a socially acceptable fashion.

Harm was going to happen no matter what you do in the trolley problem. There is no situation where harm does not happen, but there is a situation where you directly are causing harm.

Yes, exactly. By taking no action some amount of harm occurs, had you taken action that harm would not have occurred but other harm would have. Ultimately, this is analyzing the extent to which a person is willing to allow harm via inaction versus cause harm through direct action.

Almost none of them actually having a real world application…

Like many thought experiments, the Trolley Problem is an artificial situation intended to isolate certain decision making points so that they can be analyzed. Yes, reality is messy and we often have more than two options. But having this sort of analysis ahead of time can make the real problems less complex to consider. It is also useful for looking at our philosophical frameworks and where they break down.

Personally, if I could go the rest of my life without hearing about the trolley problem that’d be great actually.

The Trolley Problem is a tool for examining our beliefs. Throwing it away because it is imperfect and uncomfortable only leads to a blindness of self.