Eh, I don’t think it’s fair to erase all nuance between spirituality and religion.

Heaven/Hell are these ordered places where some sentient divine being is supposed to judge you at death and sort you into. Whether it’s Anubis or God or whatever. It places a sort of human sense of control over the natural world.

Thinking there might be some sort of spiritual something or other, at least on my end, is thinking that well, we’ve got energy in our bodies that dissipates as we die. That energy ends up recycled in some way, first law of thermodynamics and all that. I don’t know if that energy can linger around as ghosts, or act as some new “soul” in some reincarnation cycle, or if it just gets dispersed or what, but you don’t need to believe in religion to consider it.

Though there’s definitely some overlap.

I would suggest the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig. It’s a good overview of the field and has been in circulation since 1995. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach

Here’s a photo, as an example of how this book approaches the topic, in that there’s an entire chapter on it with sections on four approaches, and that essentially even the researchers have been arguing about what intelligence is since the beginning.

But all of this has been under the umbrella of AI. Just because corporations have picked up on it, doesn’t invalidate the decades of work done by scientists in the name of AI.

My favourite way to think of it is this: people have forever argued whether or not animals are intelligent or even conscious. Is a cat intelligent? Mine can manipulate me, even if he can’t do math. Are ants intelligent? They use the same biomechanical constructs as humans, but at a simpler scale. What about bacteria? Are viruses alive?

If we can create an AI that fully simulates a cockroach, down to every firing neuron, does it mean it’s not AI just because it’s not simulating something more complex, like a mouse? Does it need to exceed a human to be considered AI?

I think you’re conflating “intelligence” with “being smart”.

Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are “intelligent” because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and “decide” when to switch the light.

Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it “reads” a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it’s making is much more complex than “stop or go”.

I don’t know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I’m talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they’re talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don’t. That’s essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it’s got context for a bunch of things. It doesn’t care if it’s right and it doesn’t look things up before it says something.

But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That’s incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it’s been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it’s impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

That’s odd! I had no issues with the stock Ubuntu install. Installing CUDA on a Windows machine requires WSL2 now, but I didn’t really use it for anything more than that, so I could’ve just not used it enough to find problems. As soon as I finished the semester that required proprietary software, I got rid of Windows entirely though.

IMO, as long as you get comfortable with the basics like navigating directories and moving files, installing and updating software (first through something like apt, compiling stuff manually isn’t necessary at first), and managing some basic bash settings like aliases, you’re pretty much set. At least, from a programmer’s standpoint.

I dunno how well versed OP is in computers overall is the thing. The above is a good baseline, but you need a general understanding of how operating systems work in general to be really comfortable with something like Arch. Like you gotta know what a driver is before you can troubleshoot issues with your hardware, or if you’re managing disks it’s good to have an idea of how filesystems work. But that all comes with experience.

I suggest trying Windows Subsystem for Linux. You’ll get a simpler way to get familiar with the command line, which is the important part if you’re interested in development.

That or dual boot, you don’t need to set aside a large partition for messing around.

I think the thing about the word “retard” is that it’s not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it’s said. It’s effective, and it’s really uncomfortable to hear. It’s the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.

And we’ve got this reality where there’s variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of “not smart”. And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that’s medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.

And it’s not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It’s just we’ve also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone’s brain, they’ll go for anything that hurts.

I had to google the word tbh. My first instinct on reading segue was treating it like fugue, which ends on a hard g.

Ask yourself if it’s ego stopping you from accepting generosity. Here’s an extreme example:

I visited my dad in another province (parents separated). We went to a department store, and he forgot his wallet in his car. I offered to help, and he got extremely upset, lectured me in the middle of the store, and left me standing there waiting for him to fetch his money. He wouldn’t even take a “you can pay back me back after we’re out of here.”

It was honestly insulting to me, being shut down like that. I think I hurt his pride? But it soured my opinion of him.

If you’ve got good will and trust, take help gracefully, then offer it back when the time and means are right. People will remember how you react to these things, and if you consistently reject them, they will eventually stop offering, even when the time comes that you really need it.

I imagine this commercial/personal art dichotomy has existed ever since the first time someone paid for art. Like how there’s always been folk music played around campfires in contrast to the operas and orchestras where the local lord’s funding goes.

Nope, I’m playing DOS2, since that’s been sitting in my steam library for way too long!

THEN maybe I’ll BG3. If my laptop can handle it…

I consider computer RPGs to be more in the vein of tactical RPGs rather than Pokemon/Final Fantasy style turn based RPGs tbh. It’s turn based, but positioning is key. Or, at least they scratch the same itch for me.

And Fire Emblem, XCOM, FF Tactics, etc have never exactly had mind blowing sales.

I’m not the original person you replied to, bud. I just wanted to find something peer reviewed for you on getting images from brain scans, since you doubted that’s a thing.

But like, you could also just look at the scene in the computer science field overall, if you’d like something more recent. Like the full journal from the IEEE, or maybe that little journal called Nature.

What do you think computer science departments at universities even do??

Decoding Brain Representations by Multimodal Learning of Neural Activity and Visual Features, DOI 10.1109/TPAMI.2020.2995909

Published in 2020 by the IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9097411

Oh man, I had no idea about that.

I’ve been using Nova for something close to a decade now I think. I just toss it on my new devices and move on, it’s done what I wanted for ages (mostly for the adjustable grid, but I’m sure there’s some features it has that I’ve stuck with that I just feel are default at this point, stock launcher just feels weird).

I don’t think you need to wait years for user friendly Linux tbh! I recommend checking out Linux Mint. It’s basically designed for people used to Windows and handles the technical stuff for you.

You can do almost everything through the GUI rather than the command line, so for things like updates, it’ll show you a little notification in the corner by the clock like you’re used to, you open up the software manager, and click the update button.

And most software nowadays can either be downloaded through an app store like interface, or by downloading an executable file from a website.

And if you’ve ever used a mac, there’s a time machine equivalent built in (timeshift). So you can set up an automatic backup daily/weekly/etc and if you mess up something, in most cases you can revert back to a point when it wasn’t messed up.

I say give it a shot, you can always go back if it’s not for you! But usability has improved so much in the last few years.