And know how to use an existing btrfs partition. And always [at least have an option to] show exactly what the automatic installer is going to do before I run anything. There's gotta be a middle ground between "we'll just surprise you" and "here, do everything yourself".
teawrecks
joined 1 year ago
I was initially interested in the idea of Gemini, but when looking for a client, I happened upon this blog post by the creator of one of the clients about why they were abandoning it.
After a lot of thinking, I’ve realized there is one main reason I don’t keep coming back to Gemini: it offers no advantage over how I already use the Web.
In practice, the Web already has all the Gemini content I’m interested in from various people, and then of course everything else. Having everything in one place (whether my web browser or feed reader) makes for a much nicer experience.
Gemini is a reaction to bloated modern websites, but in fact I don’t actually visit that many gross websites like that. When I do, my ad blocker and paywall bypasser usually make them decent again. Otherwise, I spend the majority of my non-work Internet time on lightweight sites like my feed reader and Hacker News, and some time on sites that Gemini can’t emulate: YouTube, Reddit, Discord. The reality is that Gemini just wouldn’t actually improve this experience for me.
These are exactly the reservations I had about the concept, so to have someone so invested in it reach this exact conclusion and leave it made me decide to forego it. I think it's a neat toy, and if it becomes relevant I'll definitely take another look, but I think it's a bit of putting the cart before the horse. I don't want to use a protocol for the sake of using a protocol, I want it to serve a purpose and solve an actual problem I have.
Yeah, didn't want to dig deep in the interest of brevity, but I didn't want to say that specific applications use those ports, even though I already said that ports in general are for applications. You can use whatever ftp, ssh, or http server you want as long as they "speak" the expected protocol.
From the airline's point of view, having the next person right there ready to get in their seat is preferable to having everyone come up one at a time. This is why they have boarding groups. You usually see between 3 and 5 boarding groups because it's a reasonable number between 1 and N (N being the total number of passengers). I'm curious how ~10 boarding groups would fare, but presumably there's a reason airlines don't do that.
If IP addresses are for finding the specific computer on a network you're wanting to talk to, Ports are for finding the specific application you want to talk to on that computer. So kinda like a phone extension. When an application "opens" a port, they're just telling the OS "hey, if any packets come in on this port, send the data my way, I'll know what to do with it".
A firewall is a special program the OS uses to control access to its ports. It says what programs are allowed to access what ports, effectively controlling the ability for all apps to access the network.
The only other thing to know is that the first 1024 port values are usually heavily controlled by the OS because there are specific protocols that are traditionally used on those specific ports, so you usually don't want just any application claiming one of those ports willy-nilly.
Oh, and you may have had to deal with "port forwarding" on your router. This is because, if some computer outside your network sends a packet to your router targeting a specific port number, the router doesn't know which computer it should go to. So by default, it just ignores it (which is usually the safest thing to do). Port forwarding tells your router, "if any packets come in on this port, send them to the computer at this IP, they'll know what to do with it."
Hah, tbh, I didn't realize it was originally formulated to argue against consciousness in the room. When I originally heard it it was presented as a proper thought problem with no "right" answer. So I honestly remembered it as a sort of illustration of the illusion that is consciousness. But it's been a while since I've discussed it with others, mostly I've just thought about it in the context of recent AI advancements.
For this part:
think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.
I agree 100% (except for the part where the list of competitors was WAY larger, but that's neither here nor there). Yeah, obviously luck is always a factor for everyone, and opportunities don't present themselves to everyone, but for those who do have the opportunity, the person willing to be the most unethical will have the largest advantage, and thus is most likely to beat out the rest.
I agree that I don't think we can take the discussion further than this. Good talk. I'm just glad I found someone on here that didn't call me a proto-captialist nazi for calling the original post oversimplified.
Have a good one!
Afaik, an actual neuron is computationally more powerful than a perceptron, so in theory yeah, for sure.
If you're a subscriber to the Chinese Room thought problem, we are already just a bunch of really good "LLMs".
Same strategies. Same exploitation. Same formula. What makes Facebook different isn't that they did those things better. It's that they did them in the right place at the right time to corner the market.
This is effectively my "battle royale" analogy. Agreed.
I think there's a good analogy to the music industry. The most popular/famous/wealthy musicians aren't that way because they are more talented, or ruthless, or have the "winningest" music strategy.
Not the musicians, the record labels. But yes, record labels have been ruthless in the music industry since, afaik, around the 1950s. As I mentioned before, I'm not well versed in the music industry, but I know of numerous examples of corporations cornering the music industry. There's a reason radio stations are always playing the same 30 songs, and why the vast majority of musicians end their careers in debt to their labels (at least 20+ years ago).
And there's a reason people call them "starving artists". It is a supremely rare occurrence for the actual musician to see much of the profits from their work. That's something the internet is changing (in both directions. No one's looking forward to those fractions of a cent per play on Spotify, but now you don't need to sign with a label to get a reasonable audience).
the most they could end the day with is, let's say, 10 million apples. But we know that some people have 200 billion apples. So how do we reconcile that?
Sorry, I don't follow where these values came from or are supposed to represent. How do we know the max number of apples in this under-defined analogy I've come up with? It sounds like you're envisioning 10 million apples out on trees, and 200 billion stashed away to be found, while I'm picturing the vast majority (200 billion I guess) to be out on the trees needing picking.
But how this ties back to reality...you're saying that you believe the primary way to reach an unreasonable amount of wealth is in bulk, via pure luck? That's where we disagree. Going back to the top of your post, and my "battle royale" example, luck can get you a lot, but to amass an unreasonable amount X, you need a pattern/strategy, that keeps wealth coming towards you and away from competitors. And in order to amass an unreasonable amount, you need to use unethical means.
Hm, I'm not sure it's possible to say which of our worldviews is right here without a large amount of data that...which I don't know if is available.
Notch isn't a good example to bring up because, like the other lottery winners, they're the exception, not the rule. And again, Zuckerberg didn't become a billionaire from his initial rollout, that took years of deliberate decision making. Can we agree on that?
Regardless of their goals, they executed a strategy that directly resulted in them being billionaires. It wasn't random, it was years of decisions they actively made.
My counter to that is, "sure they can, by winning an X+1 dollar lottery." And I don't think you've made any sort of counter to that point
My counter was the apple picking example. When discussing the viability of various apple picking strategies, it subverts the discussion to say "but if the strategy results in them randomly finding a trove of apples, then that strategy could possibly win out". In that case, it's not their strategy that earned them those apples, is it?
this is once again you moving the goalposts.
I still maintain that I didn't set the original goalposts, but yeah, I hoped I had made my edit in time for you to read it. I'm enjoying the respectful discussion, regardless.
no one has ever had a winning strategy to becoming a billionaire.
If that were true, wouldn't there not exist any billionaires?
If there was an implementable strategy that anyone could do if they were unethical enough, there would be a hell of a lot more than 3000 of them in the world.
Not if the game is zero-sum, the initial conditions for each participant are randomized, and some execute the strategy better than others. You can take the 100 best battle royale players in the world, all of them execute their strategy perfectly, but at the end of the day they can't all be winners as defined by the parameters of the game. In the real world the parameters aren't clearly delineated, I'd say the limit on the number of excessively rich people possible is emergent based on various factors (laws, how unethical parties are willing to be, amount of value being generated, etc.).
(And to head off the "how can you say zero-sum, but also wealth is being generated?". If the volume of exchanges of value between parties exceeds the amount of value being generated, then there is effectively always a cap that parties have to operate within, thus it is effectively a zero-sum system for those parties despite total value in the system increasing.)
The apple gathering metaphor was intended to convey my point about the difference between a wealth gain attributed strategy vs good fortune. We would need to extend it quite a bit to talk in terms of ethical apple picking, at which point I think we would just be talking about actual dollars.
No current billionaire strategized their way into that position. They all found the apple lotto pile.
And we've circled back to where we disagree. "Billion" (or rather, X) doesn't happen purely by chance. There exists a value over-which you cannot get purely by chance, it takes unethical exploitation, and there are people beyond that value.
What does it mean to “maintain that level of wealth”? Stay the richest for 5 years? 10? 20? 100? Your whole life?
This seems like a red herring. The rate of change that employing a certain strategy gets you is the more relevant quantity. An unethical strategy will diverge into unreasonable amounts of wealth territory, whereas an ethical one won't ever (and I have to keep saying, in this late-stage capitalist society.)
An application can know that a file represents a soft link, but they don't need to do anything differently to follow it. If the program just opens it, reads it, writes to it, etc, as though it were the original file, it will just work^tm^ without them needing to do anything differently.
It is possible for the software to not follow a soft symlink intentionally, yes (if they don't follow it unintentionally, that might be a bug).
As for hard links, I'm not as certain, but I think these need to be supported at the filesystem level (which is why they often have specific restrictions), and the application can't tell the difference.