• 8 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 19th, 2024

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  • The typical therapist advice about focusing only on the things you can personally change does not work well on macro issues. Issues that were created by lots of people working together like climate change require a bunch of people working together to fix. A bunch of people who don’t individually have the power to make any significant impact.

    Moral philosophers get bogged down trying to figure out how to do a calculus that would reasonably obligate each individual to join the cause via our normal feelings of responsibility but these generally feel unintuitive and lack the kind of motivating responsibility most people feel towards things they had more control in creating or causing. I like Pinkert’s early work to help get my head around issues of collective responsibility and individual motivation.

    Fact is that a whole lot of people need to take a leap of commitment to solve collective problems because if everyone acts rationally (in terms of their proportional responsibility to the problem and capacity to fix it) there is not nearly enough capacity to make a dent in issues like environmental pollution.

    On the level of day to day life it depends on how you’re applying the advice but I personally don’t find it comforting to be told there’s nothing I can do to intervene—in this case too I feel better trying -something- and failing frequently vs forcing myself to be zen about my friend turning to drugs or my boss being a jerk all the time because my rational brain says my efforts won’t make a difference anyway.



  • The communist manifesto was written for a different historical moment but so much of it is still spot on.

    I mean come on, it opens basically like “Everyone in the current status quo has already painted communism as their biggest most powerful enemy, may as well unite and make it become that.”

    Feels pretty topical given that multiple countries are thinking about naming antifa, which isn’t an organization, a terrorist group.









  • I’m not nervous about LLMs in that regard. I think sentience will have to be a biological phenomenon. I think people who were hopeful that consciousness happens spontaneously with enough processing power were wrong. Currently we can clone biological things quite well but we haven’t managed to give something the spark of life without biological input.

    I also think humans are more than happy to anthropomorphize everything. There’s the famous example of telling someone the name of a pencil then snapping it in half. This makes me worried that people will be more than willing to treat LLMs as conscious regardless of their lack of mind.





  • I’ve really enjoyed Busuu (created by Chegg, a US company) for learning eng—> spanish and eng —>german. Their free version has annoying ads but it does give you a chance to test the interface. The yearly subscription fee isn’t bad for the premium version that gets rid of ads. I’ve taken traditional classes and also used various apps like duolingo. Busuu strikes a happy medium between immersion and clear, digestible grammar explanation. I also like their review area (for vocab and grammar topics).

    The platform doesn’t support Vietnamese yet but has chinese, japanese, and spanish of the ones you mentioned.