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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The thing with cognitive dissonance is also a bit more subtle than just the duality of conflicting beliefs. It can often arise from unidentified conflicts that are outside of your conscious self awareness.

    One that I am familiar with is religion. I knew a whole lot about the bible and christianity growing up. From an early age I halfway knew things like how, when I looked at road cuts through bedrock, those layers hinted at deep time and held a story that wasn’t well alined with my beliefs. Then there was my love of dinosaurs as a kid and that too did not mesh with my religious narrative. Each little element of conflict was present on some subconscious like level, and my life became partitioned between this narrative belief system and evidence based reality. I had lots of peripheral consequences in life due to this building conflict, but I never allowed the core issue to come to a head in an attempt to rectify the disparity until I was around 30 years old.

    Cognitive dissonance can also be dangerous and is a contributing factor in many crimes and heinous acts humans commit. Alternative expressions of individuality may also have an origin in cognitive dissonance. Identification of these underlying conflicts is reflective of a person’s self awareness and can help one improve one’s mental health by taking productive action to resolve inner conflicts after identification.


  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.devConfused about linux as always
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    2 days ago
    You can technically do anything with anything. My saying that is dumb though. I'm not telling you the scope of intelligence involved.

    Linux is the kernel. The kernel is something most users rarely interact with or understand. The kernel is basically interfacing with your hardware specifically and then creating an applications interface that all software can interact with.

    So let’s say your computer has a small auxiliary board inside that your USB ports are connected with. Your mouse is plugged into that USB port. The auxiliary board has this random Infinion chip that creates the USB hub. The kernel’s job is to figure out how to use that Infinion chip and make a connection that is the same for all software to interface with. Your office suite or internet browser never needs to know how to interface with that infinion chip or any other specific hardware.

    Windows has a micro kernel architecture. They publish a static spec for hardware manufacturers to write their own drivers for and the user must find and add them manually.

    Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture. All kernel modules (drivers-ish) are included in the kernel itself and maintained by the community. The vast majority of hardware issues that happen in Linux are due to undocumented hardware; meaning there are no datasheets describing how the device works or how to program it. Undocumented hardware is due to seedy companies stealing IP and trying to hide it, and manipulating the market in an attempt to steal ownership from the end consumer while profiting from stagnation by selling old products while they lack engineering innovation and competitiveness in an open market. Soapbox over. The wonderful folks over at Debian are the ones that reverse engineer a lot of this stuff and make it work with Linux regardless of documentation.

    Anyways, the Linux kernel is just part of the puzzle here. You can configure and compile your own custom kernel. Gentoo makes that quite easy to do for advanced users. Fedora has a nice guide I saw recently as well.

    All CS students learn how operating systems work using Linux. There are lots of people who make their career in parts of Linux.

    By itself Linux is basically just a terminal/command line. All the pretty graphics stuff requires other stuff like a DE.

    The issue of initial scope complexity that you’re facing is really common. All of the distros have a purpose. They are not just branding or team sports. All of these distros are made by packagers that each have their own methodologies and preferences. Most of these differences can create compatibility issues, especially if you do not understand them. However, all of the packagers are building on top of a similar base of software.

    When some one says you can just swap this or that outside of the packages configured by the distro maintainers, they are implying you have the same experience and understanding about the distro configuration and packages as the maintainer and a full understanding of a POSIX system, or they are just a fool, or happened to have success after following someone’s tutorial one time in a virtual machine. Few general users keep updating stuff like this over time. They just switch to a prepackaged distro that has the DE they want. The exception to this rule are savant types or people with no life or peripheral interests. Most of these people gravitate to Arch (and talk about it too if they are trolls), or use Gentoo where everything you do is configurable and made to compile yourself easily. The epic route is to do a Linux From Scratch build.

    The best beginner’s route is to give up our ancient old mod a civic to pretend-street-race culture and just use the vanilla experience. Ubuntu is a lot less popular now. Fedora is the new Ubuntu, while Mint is the goto if you want a Debian derivative or to game. Fedora is pretty well dialed and handles secure boot well. SB is outside of the kernel, so is a thing that distro packagers either provide or don’t.

    KDE is kinda like Windows. Mint has KDE and Fedora ships a KDE version too. I recommend just doing gnome, it seems a little funny at first, but it is well designed and intuitive. There are some headaches in the learning curve but it is not hard IMO.


  • Comes up and puts a paw on my arm or leg, but only when she feels the problem is serious. It could be water, food, liter box, or just a notion that I need to give attention due to hours working on some project or something; usually when I’m seriously hurting or sleep deprived. I’m always present, only ever leaving for doctors or a physical therapy routine. I’m accessible for both cats most of the time. The older seems to intuit not to abuse the gesture or use it often. When she does put her paw on me like that, I always look into the issue, so we’ve developed it as a form of direct communication that seems to work. I didn’t train her to do this, I did however train her to be quiet using positive reinforcement. We got the older cat about 6 months after I was disabled, so we’ve been through a lot together in the last 10 years.


  • You're asking the wrong questions IMO. No one loves capitalism. Capitalism is an acknowledgment that humans are inherently corrupt and the concentration of power is a primary corrupting force. If anything the capitalist countries are failing at capitalism in the present.

    Capitalism is also an acknowledgement of the true complexity of the world. No overarching human authority can encompass the true complexity of human enterprises. We simply lack the cognitive scope to manage at all scales without some forms of natural selection in play. Real competition drives people like no other force.

    It is a terrible system, but there is no chance that a concentration of power in an alternative system will be better for the average person. Broad scale and scope altruism is not a long term successful form of governance. It is like the best form of governance, altruistic monarchy. However it suffers the same fatal flaw of a succession crisis. The naïveté of idealist is a recipe for authoritarianism.

    No one loves capitalism. If they are intelligent, capitalism is the lesser of evils in the big picture. The alternative is a return to monarchy or feudalism in our conflict strewn past… IMO

    I hate capitalism BTW. I don’t think we are there yet, but I think AGI is our best chance at a broad scale idealist future alternative. An entity that can never die and can plan long term with scalable and nearly infinite attention is the kind of manager that can achieve what we are empirically incapable of achieving. The systems it will take to institute and protect such an AGI are enormous, critical, and unlikely to get it right the first time, but the outcome is inevitable IMO. We will likely never see such a future in our lifetimes, but it will happen eventually. It will start by politicians either publicly or secretly deferring their policy and decisions to an AGI entity. Corporate offices will do the same. Humans can not compete with a true AGI when such a system emerges. We simply lack the cognitive scope and persistence. At present, AI is still orders of magnitude away from AGI. At the present the building blocks required are already in play. We can build a stacked stone wall and a house, but we need a palatial fortress, and that is still a big ask.

    Capitalism sucks for all but a small elite. However, capitalism has an effective hook for people to oust bad actors through a entirely separate government. Such separation and protection does not exist when the government is expected to play some major management role in the market. If the government is such an authority, it will devolve into authoritarianism because nearly all humans are corruptible. There is nothing more dangerous than trust in others to do the right thing. Someone will always take advantage of the opportunity to exploit and pillage their neighbors when they can get away with it. Capitalism is hated by everyone but fools. It is just hated slightly less than succession crises and authoritarianism.



  • Multi threading is parallelism and is poised to scale to a similar factor, the primary issue is simply getting tensors in and out of the ALU. Good enough is the engineering game. Having massive chunks of silicon laying around without use are a mach more serious problem. At the present, the choke point is not the parallelism of the math but actually the L2 to L1 bus width and cycle timing. The ALU can handle the issue. The AVX instruction set is capable of loading 512 bit wide words in a single instruction, the problem is just getting these in and out in larger volume.

    I speculate that the only reason this has not been done already is because pretty much because of the marketability of single thread speeds. Present thread speeds are insane and well into the radio realm of black magic bearded nude virgins wizardry. I don’t think it is possible to make these bus widths wider and maintain the thread speeds because it has too many LCR consequences. I mean, at around 5 GHz the concept of wire connections and gaps as insulators is a fallacy when capacitive coupling can make connections across all small gaps.

    Personally, I think this is a problem that will take on a whole new architectural solution. It is anyone’s game unlike any other time since the late 1970’s. It will likely be the beginning of the real RISC-V age and the death of x86. We are presently at the age of the 20+ thread CPU. If a redesign can make a 50-500 logical core CPU slower for single thread speeds but capable of all workloads, I think it will dominate easily. Choosing the appropriate CPU model will become much more relevant.


  • Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

    Nvidia is just playing conservative because it was massively overvalued by the market. The GPU use for AI is a stopover hack until hardware can be developed from scratch. The real life cycle of hardware is 10 years from initial idea to first consumer availability. The issue with the CPU in AI is quite simple. It will be solved in a future iteration, and this means the GPU will get relegated back to graphics or it might even become redundant entirely. Once upon a time the CPU needed a math coprocessor to handle floating point precision. That experiment failed. It proved that a general monolithic solution is far more successful. No data center operator wants two types of processors for dedicated workloads when one type can accomplish nearly the same task. The CPU must be restructured for a wider bandwidth memory cache. This will likely require slower thread speeds overall, but it is the most likely solution in the long term. Solving this issue is likely to accompany more threading parallelism and therefore has the potential to render the GPU redundant in favor of a broader range of CPU scaling.

    Human persistence of vision is not capable of matching higher speeds that are ultimately only marketing. The hardware will likely never support this stuff because no billionaire is putting up the funding to back up the marketing with tangible hardware investments. … IMO.

    Neo Feudalism is well worth abandoning. Most of us are entirely uninterested in this business model. I have zero faith in the present market. I have AAA capable hardware for AI. I play and mod open source games. I could easily be a customer in this space, but there are no game manufacturers. I do not make compromises in ownership. If I buy a product, my terms of purchase are full ownership with no strings attached whatsoever. I don’t care about what everyone else does. I am not for sale and I will not sell myself for anyone’s legalise nonsense or pay ownership costs to rent from some neo feudal overlord.







  • Yeah this has been my experience too. LLMs don’t handle project specific code styles too well either. Or when there are several ways of doing things.

    Actually, earlier today I was asking a mixtral 8x7b about some bash ideas. I kept getting suggestions to use find and sed commands which I find unreadable and inflexible for my evolving scripts. They are fine for some specific task need, but I’ll move to Python before I want to fuss with either.

    Anyways, I changed the starting prompt to something like ‘Common sense questions and answers with Richard Stallman’s AI assistant.’ The results were remarkable and interesting on many levels. From the way the answers always terminated without continuing with another question/answer, to a short footnote about the static nature of LLM learning and capabilities, along with much better quality responses in general, the LLM knew how to respond on a much higher level than normal in this specific context. I think it is the combination of Stallman’s AI background and bash scripting that are powerful momentum builders here. I tried it on a whim, but it paid dividends and is a keeper of a prompting strategy.

    Overall, the way my scripts are collecting relationships in the source code would probably result in a productive chunking strategy for a RAG agent. I don’t think an AI would be good at what I’m doing at this stage, but it could use that info. It might even be possible to integrate the scripts as a pseudo database in the LLM model loader code for further prompting.




  • Human byte was used in a conference awhile back to refer to the amount of information one can process at any given point in time. Someone that has total recall has a much larger human byte. The term makes clear intuitive sense to me, but I’m a highly abstracted person in the first place. My abstraction seems to limit how much complexity I can manage with a project and code. I’m largely exploring the implications and contrasting personalities to better understand how people are able to manage so many details in some projects.

    I’m messing around with trying to understand the game Cataclysm DDA at the moment, and reading into everything that is happening as it is scattered all over the project is a struggle. When I see all the pull requests and the daily release cycle of the game, I’m baffled by the way someone is able to manage this kind of project and maintain an overall vision and consistency in the game and code. I feel like I must be missing some critical element of methodology.

    I exist in a vacuum, and live under a rock. I was an advanced fabricator, got disabled, and now largely stuck finding myself while exploring the digital world. I’m learning entirely on my own and without any background or mentors. In abstract, I might spend forever trying to invent the wheel if I fail to ask the right questions.