sodium_nitride [she/her, any] @ sodium_nitride @hexbear.net

Posts

8

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104

Joined

2 mo. ago

They only reproduce. They do not metabolize.

Is reproduction not metabolic activity though? The "life cycle" of the virus is utterly dependent on the existence of other organisms, but this goes for any organism other than those which do not feed on anything.

I see viruses as the simplest possible life which lacks all functionality except to participate in the evolutionary process. This is really just a personal view, but I think of evolution as a special phenomena that only a living thing can undergo. It's kind of strange for me to think of a non-living thing evolving by natural selection.

I absolutely do not think LLMs are alive or in any way intelligent any more than a virus is.

It really depends on how you define intelligence, although I do agree.

From the definition of "system with a goal, a memory, an ability to sense its environment and an ability to effect its environment", which is the definition I would use, I also agree that LLMs are lacking true intelligence. Most crucially they lack a goal (they have been designed such that they lack any motives of any kind).

At that point we need to re-assess our definition of "life", otherwise we steer sharply into creating digital slaves.

I might be too pessimistic, but I think human society would much rather place limitations on the intelligence of AI so that a truly sentient AI cannot be made. Making a truly sentient AI and then not exploiting is not something I can see present day human society doing. We already have trouble treating human beings as humans

I don't know if my degree counts as a special interest, but electrical engineering is full of wild things.

My favorite part about electrical engineering history is something I found when I was writing a paper on electromagnetic coils.

Predicting the inductance (the characteristic we use the coils for) and self capacitance of such coils as it turns is a very complicated topic. The math for calculating the field in the coils is very difficult, so many engineers have come up with formulas for approximately predicting the inductance.

Now it turns out that one of these formulas (for the self capacitance of coils), which is still used relatively often, was created by a guy called J. Palmero. His formula is simple and elegant. Unfortunately, if you dig through the data he used to provide evidence that his formula worked, it turns out he SEVERELY "massaged" the experimental data he had gotten from a well respected engineer (Feiedrich Grover) at the NIST. He used this to build reputation for his formula. Throughout my entire research,I only saw basically 2 people (Medhurst* and David Knight) who even seemed to know about this.

The only way I ended up finding about any of this is because I dug through obscure research papers and data published in the early 20th century.

Now imagine being a 16 year old doing a school project about coils and then uncovering decades old obscure scientific fraud. I felt like Indiana Jones finding abandoned ruins.

*the autocorrect seems to have beef with this guy, since it keeps changing his name to "Midhurst" for some reason.

I would consider viruses alive because they can replicate and evolve. I think it's unfair for us to put unnecessary standards on them. They are trying their best.

Also, being able to go dormant for thousands of years and waking up to cause havoc in the right circumstances is literally final boss behaviour. We gotta give em credit for that at least.

I'm a bit more into music than many of my friends. So i guess it might count as a "special interest".

I found this really cool type of music called "microtonal" music, which uses different (and more) notes than traditional western tonal systems. A lot of middle Eastern and Indian music is "microtonal" as well, although that term seems kind of eurocentric when you put it that way.

Either way, microtonal music can get really wierd and cool. I especially like sevish (on youtube) who makes nice and odd melodies. You can even make microtonal music with as many as 313 distinct tones (although I've never seen anyone use all of them in one song)

I just checked. What the fuck. How???????. Why???????

Oh, the feeling like a fraud thing. It really hits hard for me. There seems to be some kind of expectation about what growing up as trans, or being trans is supposed to be like. Not in this community, but at least in media, where if it comes up, it seems like everyone figures out that they are trans in their teens and immediately starts dressing like their opposite gender (and usually pass pretty well).

I also never particularly had the kinds of experiences where it feels like I have to transition no matter what, or that in my teens I'd figured everything out. Because let's be real, who has their life figured out before they are 20-25? And how is someone like me (idk if this applies to you), who was raised to "fit in" so harshly that I have nightmares about missing homework assignments supposed to all of a sudden completely change how I present myself to others?

And yeah, pretty much everything that you are saying also applies to me to a lesser extent. I've also rationalised it as gender fluidity, or at least being non-binary. I think if you want "evidence" of not being cis (I also had this problem), just know that typically cisgendered individuals just don't really have these kinds of thoughts. It's not something that most can relate to.

But that's the thing, do I just WANT to be seen as someone else, or NEED to be? What's the difference? I feel like I would NEED to take hormones, or want/need surgery to really ACTUALLY be who I feel I am...Especially since I've had more and more thoughts that feel cis??? Is the only way I can describe it. I feel like my identity is not much more than a choice of pronoun, and I just feel like I'm cosplaying or something

I'm not sure how helpful this might be to you, but back when I took a deep dive into egoist philosophy*, it really helped fix a lot of self esteem issues because I was able to unlearn, or at least identify many of the all pervasive phantasms that haunted my mind, and the minds of everyone socialised in modern society.

Obviously it took a lot more than reading philosophy to get to the point where I decided to take hormones (not saying that you have to, you just need to get to a point where you can make a decision about what you are going to do, because I know just how agonising the indecisiveness is). However, a lot of the problems that we face come from what we have been taught, and how we have been socialised. Reflecting on this can be valuable, even if you disagree.

Also, I don't think that learning some cool philosophy will really be such a bad thing

*it could be other types of similar philosophies