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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Like consciousness being greater than the sum of its parts and there being spiritual aspects to the universe. Like emotions existing as non localized complex energy frequencies, and karma existing.

    I used to be a hardcore scientific determinist athiest. The scientific method, mathematical logic, and unfalsifiablility were collectively my God. My version of the universe was a mechanical box our fates predetermined by an uncaring system. There was no room for magical thinking or maybe invisible unicorns. Thing either existed or they didn’t, yes or no, 1 or 0. Everything not absolute verifyable truth was worthless.

    Then I had a psychedelics phase, astral projected, experienced ego death, had telepathic communications with divine / cosmicbconsciousnesses using plants as mediums, looked at myself from third person with nonexistent eyeballs, ect, ect.

    I will never be able to prove to anyone my experiences are real, but what I experienced was real to me from my subjective reference frame in every way that matters.







  • Trust is a tough problem when you go deep enough down the IT security rabbit hole. I personally trust software more when it has a public github you can look at and see exactly whats being worked on or added to code base. Generally forks of browsers like Firefox or Chromium like to stay up to date and so are updated within a few days of the new browser release if not shorter. There are some older browsers like palemoon that do their own thing independent of current firefox releases but in general most forks you would want to use are regularly updated and fast.

    I like Librewolf. Their website is pretty clear about the differences in goals. Firefox by default has a lot of its security features disabled so to not break website compatability. Not just in regular settings either but the real nitty gritty stuff in the about:config section. Firefox also has sponsorship stuff activated by default so mozilla makes some money. Librewolf has more of these security features enabled and rips the sponsorship stuff out. It also comes preinstalled with UBO.

    You can go even further beyond with advanced security profiles like arkenfox’s user.js. Remember though theres a trade off you are making between security and convinence. The more locked down your browser the more things are gonna break or more personal inconvinence youll have to deal with. Cookies that last multiple sessions suck for security but damn logging in over and over and over gets annoying. So I’ve been there, i’ve done that. The pain in the ass that comes from a super locked down browser wasn’t worth it for my threat model.





  • Psudo random numbers come from a special set of mathematical equations which act as the basis for natural processes. These are known as nonlinear dynamic equations.

    Their outputs feed back into their inputs. They show areas of high initial sensitivity where any tiny change in input totally changes the output over time. Finally, they often show areas of different cycling behavior. The branch of math which studies them is holomorphic dynamics.

    The psudo-randomness of slightly different seed values generating wildly different outputs has to do sensitivity to initial conditions. This is a property of the paramater space structures in which those random number sequences cycles through. The ‘path’ of numbers that will be cycled through is determined by starting position and the geometric topology in the complex plane which the equation generates.

    By graphing and iterating psudo random equations in the conplex plane, it generates infinitely complex geometric structures called julia sets which govern how algebraic numbers cycle through pseudorandom walks depending on initial seed values and equation used. These julia sets often are fractals with infinite complexity at its borders at all scales of precision.

    Julia sets have a “stuff goes everywhere” property which is the the real magic of where sensitivity to initial conditions comes from. But now were getting deep into the weeds of math nerd territory.

    Simply put, you put a random number in and it spits a more-or-less random number out, thanks to wierd properties that the higher dimensional fractal hyper structures generated by the equation in the complex plane have. Those lower dimensional random number cycles are embedded into the julia set structurally.

    A big issue with psudo randoms is they will always give the same series numbers if you begin the equation with the same computationally finite seed values. You could the generated sequence of numbers to work back and find the seed values and equation used to generate them. This is a serious security concern when using them for cryptography. The amount of computational work it takes to work back is massive but its doable with modern quantum super computers.

    The mechanics of pseudo random numbers comes from statistical combinatorics, nonlinear algebra,fractals, chaos theory, and sensitivity to initial conditions.

    True random numbers come from directly measuring physical phenomenon with sufficient randomness in their mechanics.

    Things like the decay of a radioactive isotope or lava lamp turbulence have built in randomness. There is no seed or way to generate the same sequence of motions or predicting when isotopes decay.

    Turbulance for example has fractal properties in its energy distribution as well as random brownian motion adding up on the atomic scale. Radioactive half life has uncertainty principal built into it. These universal operations have true uncalculatable randomness thanks to entropy, the uncertainty principle, fractals, brownian motion, chaos theory, and sensitivitiy to initial conditions.

    The physical universe is the most powerful computer there will ever be. It calculates with infinite decimal precision in its mixed mathematical, statistical, and physical operations. It uses real trancendental like pi numbers with infinite non-repeating decimals, and does its calculations at the speed of causality/light.

    Our best super computers will never be infinitely powerful. Our numbers need to be finite and computable to work with them and understand them. The universe could not care less if its values are finitely computable or usable for human work.

    So theres fundamental limits to how random we can get through artificial computer algorithm generation using computable numbers. True randomness through physical processes leverages the universes in built infinite precision and mechanical algorithms as a black box and just measures the output result.



  • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldIt do be like that
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    1 month ago

    Photoshop cs2 is free to download and probably works well on wine as its old as hell.

    Edit: Correction. You used to o be able to download cs2 from adobe website. This is no longer the case.

    GIMP has always been able to do what I needed more or less. Its got a learning curve and sometimes I still dont 100% how something works but for basic photo editing, meme making, and converting photos to different file types (why is .webp not universally supported yet?) Its pretty good.

    When theres a problem doing something in GIMP it always felt like the issue was my own understanding of the toolset conbined with not-great documentation being given. I never felt like I encountered the limits of the program itself.

    I’m sure if you are a professional graphics person who needs advanced tools theres things only PS can provide and its user interface is probably more friendly. But for me, the average joe schmo, GIMP gets the job done 95% of the time with little to no headache.



  • Yeah, I know better than to get involved in debating someone more interested in spitting out five paragraph essays trying to deconstruct and invalidate others views one by one, than bothering to double check if they’re still talking to the same person.

    I believe you aren’t interested in exchanging ideas and different viewpoints. You want to win an argument and validate that your view is the right one. Sorry, im not that kind of person who enjoys arguing back and forth over the internet or in general. Look elsewhere for a debate opponent to sharpen your rhetoric on.

    I wish you well in life whoever you are but there is no point in us talking. We will just have to see how the future goes in the next 10 years.


  • A tool is a tool. It has no say in how it’s used. AI is no different than the computer software you use browse the internet or do other digital task.

    When its used badly as an outlet for escapism or substitute for social connection it can lead to bad consequences for your personal life.

    When it’s best used is as a tool to help reason through a tough task, or as a step in a creative process. As on demand assistance to aid the disabled. Or to support the neurodivergent and emotionally traumatized to open up to as a non judgemental conversational partner. Or help a super genius rubber duck their novel ideas and work through complex thought processes. It can improve peoples lives for the better if applied to the right use cases.

    Its about how you choose to interact with it in your personal life, and how society, buisnesses and your governing bodies choose to use it in their own processes. And believe me, they will find ways to use it.

    I think comparing llms to computers in 90s is accurate. Right now only nerds, professionals, and industry/business/military see their potential. As the tech gets figured out, utility improves, and llm desktops start getting sold as consumer grade appliances the attitude will change maybe?


  • It delivers on what it promises to do for many people who use LLMs. They can be used for coding assistance, Setting up automated customer support, tutoring, processing documents, structuring lots of complex information, a good generally accurate knowledge on many topics, acting as an editor for your writings, lots more too.

    Its a rapidly advancing pioneer technology like computers were in the 90s so every 6 months to a year is a new breakthrough in over all intelligence or a new ability. Now the new llm models can process images or audio as well as text.

    The problem for openAI is they have serious competitors who will absolutely show up to eat their lunch if they sink as a company. Facebook/Meta with their llama models, Mistral AI with all their models, Alibaba with Qwen. Some other good smaller competiiton too like the openhermes team. All of these big tech companies have open sourced some models so you can tinker and finetune them at home while openai remains closed sourced which is ironic for the company name… Most of these ai companies offer their cloud access to models at very competitive pricing especially mistral.

    The people who say AI is a trendy useless fad don’t know what they are talking about or are upset at AI. I am a part of the local llm community and have been playing around with open models for months pushing my computers hardware to its limits. Its very cool seeing just how smart they really are, what a computer that simulates human thought processes and knows a little bit of everything can actually do to help me in daily life.

    Terrence Tao superstar genius mathematician describes the newest high end model from openAI as improving from a “incompentent graduate” to a “mediocre graduate” which essentially means AI are now generally smarter than the average person in many regards.

    This month several comptetor llm models released which while being much smaller in size compared to openai o-1 somehow beat or equaled that big openai model in many benchmarks.

    Neural networks are here and they are only going to get better. Were in for a wild ride.


  • Its not just AI code but AI stuff in general.

    It boils down to lemmy having a disproportionate amount of leftist liberal arts college student types. Thats just the reality of this platform.

    Those types tend to see AI as a threat to their creative independent business. As well as feeling slighted that their data may have been used to train a model.

    Its understandable why lots of people denounce AI out of fear, spite, or ignorance. Its hard to remain fair and open to new technology when its threatening your livelihood and its early foundations may have scraped your data non-consentually for training.

    So you’ll see AI hate circle jerk post every couple days from angry people who want to poison models and cheer for the idea that its just trendy nonesense. Dont debate them. Dont argue. Just let them vent and move on with your day.