What about nonhuman animals that pass the mirror test, use tools, form social bonds, communicate, learn from one another, have a cultural memory, and mourn their dead? Would you consider those conscious?
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of humans aren't conscious. The full p-zombie solipsist theory clearly isn't true, because the concept of consciousness wouldn't have arisen if nobody had it. But that doesn't mean everybody has to have it.
Nonhuman animals? No idea. We don't even know how to phrase the question rigorously, let alone how to even conceptualize answering it.
Ha. Well, OK. What do you mean by conscious, though? I think the vast majority of humans understand who they are and what's going on around them, if that's the definition. (The rest are in comas and etc.)
That's the big question. What do we mean by conscious?
I think the key thing is qualia. That is, there's some subjective experience. If you prick us, not only do we bleed, but we feel it.
This is pretty vague, which is the whole problem. But if you feel it when you're pricked, you know what I'm talking about.
This can't be measured or even observed except from the inside. Nobody even has the slightest idea of how it could be measured, even theoretically. The existence of this phenomenon in people other than myself is something I have to take largely on faith. (But, as I mentioned, not entirely, since the existence of this concept shows at least some other people have it.)
I do not mean this in an insulting way whatsoever, but have you ever been evaluated for psychopathy? To me it is profoundly obvious that almost all humans are conscious.
No, and from what I know of the diagnostic criteria, it doesn't fit.
The main reason I think this is because there are people who don't seem to get the concept. These threads often have people arguing that consciousness is no big deal, it's just your brain making decisions based on sensory input, etc. I can't imagine an entity with qualia making that sort of argument. This might just be a failure of imagination on my part, but that's what it looks like.
It's very tempting to apply this idea to e.g. idiots who stand in the middle of a doorway and chat while others struggle to get past them, but I recognize this is just an irrational desire to diminish people who annoy me in the moment.
When you say "almost all," is that just to accommodate people in comas and such? Or does that mean you also think there are people who are walking and talking but don't have consciousness, and you just don't think there are very many?
It doesn't need to kill all humans on its own to be a concern. It just needs to identify your movements, decide you're guilty of a crime, and send armed government thugs to eliminate the problem of your jaywalking.
Flow control is not always necessary. Other times it can be minimized. The point is not to never branch, but to avoid unnecessary ones.
It's not applicable to every situation, but one way to do this is some very basic fuzzy logic. You do a little math and then either choose a single branch at the end, or sometimes avoid a branch altogether. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/artificial-intelligence/fuzzy-...
Another way to avoid some branches is to have specialized routines, maybe with multiple dispatch, rather than more general methods with a bunch of checks within them for slightly different situations.
A classic performance hack for critical sections is loop unrolling.
A (hopefully interesting) aside about avoiding branches is if you don't need an exact answer but need your code to make a decision based on an approximation over some known range, you can employ a basic fuzzy logic method. Serially add, subtract, or multiply to adjust a value by a handful of weighted inputs then use that value instead of branching repeatedly to choose the right action. You might branch once based on the final value where it would have otherwise been a larger tree of decisions. In fortuitous situations, you may avoid branching altogether.
The cultural shift happened largely because investment banking, venture capital, and leveraged buyout raiders didn't really exist before in any meaningful way compared to today. People should be careful by the way, especially here, trashing "private equity" altogether when they mean the leveraged buyout folks. Venture capital is a type of private equity, too.
The Chicago school hadn't yet convinced everyone that fiduciary responsibility to shareholders was the prime concern of the C-suite and the board either. Those were economists, not MBAs. Deregulating the market also played a part.
Leveraged buyouts used to boom when another industry went bust. Companies would save some assets of a company that might otherwise be liquidated altogether, and sometimes rebuilt the company into a healthy one. Think junk bonds, the S&L crisis, the dotcom bust, and such. PE also used to take over lots of family-run businesses with succession issues so the companies could continue.
With relaxation of laws and regulations and more examples set by financiers, more of the acquisitions landscape shifted toward the corporate raider type of LBO.
"The Chicago school hadn't yet convinced everyone that fiduciary responsibility to shareholders was the prime concern of the C-suite and the board either. Those were economists, not MBAs."
Agreed. I think "MBA" is often used as a synonym for "person who views a business as a bunch of numbers that need to exploited for maximum profit"
> The cultural shift happened largely because investment banking, venture capital, and leveraged buyout raiders didn't really exist before in any meaningful way compared to today.
Besides the circularity in saying that a cultural shift happened because something changed, Investment Banking is a thing since at least 1932 when the Glass-Steagall act was passed to enforce separation of concerns between "commercial banks" and "investment banks".
"The first true venture capital firm was American Research and Development (ARD), established in 1946 by MIT President Karl Compton, General Georges F. Doriot"
As for Leveraged Buyouts, I highly recommend this analysis of 2000 cases done in 1993 which is far from any categorical conclusions on LBOs being a straightforward phenomenon that can be explained away in four sentences.
1. Do LBOs create wealth, or do they merely redistribute wealth?
2. Does the debt taken on in LBOs cause problems in periods of economic distress?
My point being essentially: don't hand wave historical analysis away. Get into it, read the papers, and the primary sources. History is fascinating and full of interesting questions about why things have come to be how they are in society. Whenever I feel intrigued by some historical question, and I decide to question the facile explanations that come to mind, I am endlessly fascinated by how complex and nuanced things are, and by how much analysis has been published starting out with the same questions as I asked myself.
Ikea is not high quality compared to most gallery-style furniture. If you're buying flat-pack furniture to assemble at home few brands will serve you better.
Oddly enough, none of my bookcases in my new house are Billy ones though. Yes, I still have loads of physical books. I found a Chinese brand of all-metal bookcases that are lighter weight than Hon or Steelcase but hold a lot more weight than Ikea bookcases of similar price. They don't suffer from the famous bowed shelf problem most MDF shelves get. They're also packed flat. They even disassemble and reassemble neatly for moving or storage. It's Oseillc, which is a brand of Outstar Office Solutions, Ltd. They also make a little institutional, industrial, shop, and retail furniture under the parent company's own brand.
For books an important features is that the shelves have doors and a back, to have to dust off the books less often. Do yours come with that? I'm not finding that brand on any Swedish retailer from a quick search either, so not sure how relevant it is.
I have some older Billy shelves that have been very solid, even when overloaded with books (I too have a lot of physical books, a lot of them older and not available as anything except physical, quite a few even predating the ISBN system).
Mine from that company so far are library-style open shelves. I have a vacuum attachment I like for cleaning shelves and books, so it doesn't require a feather duster. I keep certain books inside doors and backs.
The same company also makes cabinets and enclosed cases. They are available via a handful of retailers in the US. The big one is Amazon. I would have guessed they sell and ship worldwide since they're on Amazon. It appears I would have been wrong. I can't find the brand on the sites for Sweden, UK, or Germany. If I set my delivery to Sweden, I can't even find them on the US site by searching but can still see their store page. They don't seem to be on AliExpress either.
When I last took a serious look at btrfs its RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes could lose a whole lot of data if a single drive crashed or if the system lost power during a write. That's not supposed to happen on a RAID system with a journal.
From what I understand single copy setups, RAID 1, and RAID 10 never had the same problem. It's left a bad taste for a lot of people though.
Very early ext4 versions also had some data loss or data corruption, but I never hear people dismiss it completely for that brief spot of its history. Maybe part of that is because it was around 17 years ago and it's been a reliable default OS for many years now.
The recommendation is still to store metadata on a raid 1 or 1/0 partition and the data on a raid 5/6. Apparently there's still some issues with raid 5/6
Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution protects only U.S. citizens inside U.S.
NSA is allowed to collect any information about non-U.S. citizens outside U.S. and there are some limitations to collection of information about U.S. citizens outside U.S.
I wasn't replying to a question of jurisdiction. It was a statement that surveillance is fine until there's personal gain involved. That is not consistent with the text or intent of the amendment. Other countries also have rights protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. Some even explicitly protect privacy.
The US Constitution applies to people in the US, by the way, not just citizens.
I think that's a fair statment, although I don’t necessarily see the Fourth Amendment as disagreeing with my point. If anything, it reflects the idea that surveillance itself isn't automatically harmful, but that there needs to be a limit on how and when it can be used. My post was certainly too broad, but I was more getting at the idea that the problem comes from what people or institutions choose to do with the power surveillance gives them.
reply