juhanima

There seems to be quite a lot of stuff here [1]

Seems legit to me. The oldest news item is from 2021. The domain name is new, but there seems to have been some rebranding lately. The product used to be called Pocket RentalOS and even that seems to be fairly recent rebranding [2]

[1] https://pocketos.ai/ [2] https://pocketos.ai/news/pocket-rebrands-its-luxury-rental-m...

It might be interesting also to consider why people with less money tend to be generous by nature and wave off small debts on account of a culture of mutual support. Bret Deveraux in the series about farming[1] has the insight that ancient and medieval subsistence farming operated at the absolute limit of survival on purpose, for the simple reason that any possible surplus would be taken away anyway by the tax collector and his henchmen to finance the king's endless wars. That's why the area of cultivated land for instance was kept at or near the absolute minimum.

This had the result that a single farmer was not able to cumulate any kind of a buffer of surplus against a lean year. As a countermeasure the subsistence farmers developed a culture of mutual help and solidarity, where it simply was not socially acceptable not to help the neighbor, who had lost their crops. As long as at least some of the members of the community had a decent yield, the whole community survived.

Reading this was very eye opening to me and it at least sounded plausible. ACOUP is often mentioned here, deservedly. This was one of the best gems I have found.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

I suppose there is a concept of sentience from outside and a different concept from internal sentience. The movie "Johny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo discusses a situation where a badly injured soldier in WW1 is considered brain dead by outsiders while he's fully conscious and sentient internally.

I haven't studied neuroscience so I don't know how you define consciousness. I have read Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness..." which in my untrained opinion makes a compelling case that consciousness is a hard term to define.

And of course "temperature" is just an euphemism for the artificial randomness that is mixed in to make the output appear more magical.

I would argue that total anterograde amnesia would be a serious challenge for sentience, yes.

ChatGPT works by cumulating the prompt. You didn't ask the same question three times. In stead you asked question q, then qq and finally qqq. Those are three different questions, which explains why you got different answers.

I'm not sure if ChatGPT also cumulates its previous answers in the context. It might do that as well. In that case the prompts would be q, qaq and qaqaq where 'q' is your question and 'a' the earlier reaction from the LLM.

The illusion of sentience comes from this. The new answers reflected what you said because the prompt was different and included the previous discussion.

This is a feature of the user interface, not the language model. The only reason why the language model would respond differently to the same input is the artificial randomness mixed with the input. Without it it would be totally deterministic and not appear sentient at all. It would still be as knowledgeable as before. Like a parrot trained to be very good at combining key words to key responses.

The only reason why output from a generative LLM appears intelligent or sentient is that it parrots a random sampling of texts written by intelligent and sentient people.

In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a simple formula. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play the game of go very effectively or even infinitely effectively.

A lot of what happens in the world can be modeled in a similar vein by a very simple mathematical model like the game of life. But there is also a lot that cannot. I do believe that eventually also human understanding is just a model of the world that we feed input from perceptions and gain output as opinions, but it is way more complex than the current large language-trained models.

For a very simple example, a LLM would answer a prompt the same way every time unless it wasn't fed some randomness. Can you imagine any sentient being that would respond the same way every time if you asked the same question three times in a row?

I cannot. I would imagine any sentient object would give a different answer every time. The first time it would give you an honest answer based on what it knows about the topic. The second time it would be a little embarrassed that you repeat the question, as if you hadn't heard the first answer. The third time it would be pissed off and think you are a troll.

A LLM does none of this. It doesn't remember you or your previous questions. It just keeps hallucinating.

To only give up that position to functional programming?

Actually PostScript did last, I was just too stupid to realize that one needs to press <enter> for every new page in gv.

Anyway: here is the pdf made by ps2pdf: https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf

Totally agree and thank you for being so perceptive! It was swell to hear someone say aloud "academic culture of sharing and providing for public good". I think that's what humankind would be wise to aim and seek for: equality of all and caring for the welfare of the weakest.

University education does not need to be expensive. On the contrary, it can be free.

Wouldn't claim so - perhaps the ideas were floating in the air. What I know for sure is that my work wasn't used for much.

What's more alarming is that it seems those 32 years old files at ftp.funet.fi are mostly unreadable by now. Back then I thought PostScript would last but alas! that is not the case. Ghostcript can show just about the cover page and that's all.

Libreoffice does a little bit better with the DOC-file but it's still not quite right.

So if there is anything to learn it's about persistent document formats. I wish I had known about LaTeX back then.

32 years ago I had just finished my "erikoistyö" (a pregrad exercise) in CS at the Helsinki Uni about combining object-oriented programming with relational databases and uploaded it to nic.funet.fi for all to see and enjoy - I was that proud of it. Even promised to send a 1.4MB diskette for those who couldn't download it for whatever reason.

Cannot help feeling good of seeing it's still there. https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/

Only curiosity value is left probably, but back then it felt like magic to be able to publish something like this on my own. Half a dozen people even asked for the diskette, which I sent to them.

The article is not quite clear why the contractor had to split the intangible goods cost to the tangible ones, but it does give a hint. Federal accounting is meant to prevent possibly corrupted overspending and that's why charging for intangible services is not allowed or made more difficult than charging for something tangible that can be measured and counted afterwards and compared to market prices.

So to me it sounds like this: you hired me to make a wall of bricks around your garden. I did it and presented you a bill: bricks 100$, mortar 20$, work 300$. Then you say I cannot charge for work as that's intangible and I have to restructure the bill by allocating the cost of work to the tangible objects. So instead of charging for work I split the cost of it by two and charge a bricklaying fee of 150$ divided by the number of bricks for each brick and another 150$ for mixing the mortar. Because I'm pissed off by your awkward and unpractical accounting requirements and not going to start figuring out more complex ways of dividing the cost between the materials, when everybody knows that it's the bricklaying that counts and not the bricks or mortar.

And that's how you get very expensive mortar or 600$ hammers.

Gadolin was Finnish by the same logic Benjamin Franklin was American. Or would you consider him an Englishman? He was born in the British colony, after all.

But he was Finnish

Well. If you treat adults like children, they will start behaving like children. If you treat them like adults, they will be more responsible.

Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture.

Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.

Maybe no manager or director at all? Sometimes things happen in an organization in a self-organizing manner. Like people finding out who is able to help them with their problems and the word getting around.

It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.

It seems to me like a law of nature that every managerial function seeks to increase its influence and headcount by definition. Without a constant and vigilant effort to keep this tendency in check, every managerial organization will keep growing and adding bureaucracy just to justify its own existence and increase its reach and power.

I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy.

Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.

I totally agree with you that providing healthy and affordable meals for the students is a very good idea. So let me tell you how that was and is organized in my alma mater, the Helsinki University.

Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.

Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.

The way she goes about it, using power tools without goggles and gloves is just horrifying. It's a lovely concept, showing what can be done with the materials and tools available. But I wouldn't recommend such a cavalier approach to anyone in real life. This seems very staged to me anyway, with the result not matching to the process shown. Also the structural integrity and endurance of those constructs seems a bit questionable.

"Prioritätsstreit" is just a german word for a priority dispute, i.e. the question who was the first to come up with calculus, not something to indicate that this would be a priority to the German volk. If my memory serves me right, Leibniz didn't much mind about the whole business.

What bothers me in this story is that it makes it sound as if it's easy to spot from the whatsapp chat who cheated. That doesn't make sense to me. Surely the students who cheated the worst were the ones who used the shared answers from the chat. But how do you monitor that? Those who shared the answers obviously got them by other means, so did they really cheat or just be too helpful by academic standards?

Tossing a coin?

Is it really that easy just to overwrite the secure boot key database? I set up recently secure boot on a Lenovo laptop according to these instructions https://nwildner.com/posts/2020-07-04-secure-your-boot-proce...

...and deploying the keys involves setting UEFI in the Setup mode, which is protected by the firmware setup password.

Granted, I didn't verify where the keys are stored and in which format once deployed. But it would be pretty disappointing if they were just copied to another place without any encryption or signing authorized by the password.

Yes, definitely worth checking out. The ship was preserved very well in the oxygen-depleted waters of the Baltic and is almost in a pristine condition.

This is very off-topic, but I cannot resist mentioning that when the ship was recovered from the bottom of the sea in 1961, one of the first things discovered from it was a miniature statue of Finnish olympic winner Paavo Nurmi. One of the best pranks by the student association of the Helsinki University of Technology. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/62jm2z/til_i...

While Gustavus was a brave soldier, he was known to be a bit foolhardy. Besided getting himself killed in the battle of Lützen 1632, the story of the Vasa ship may have been what Oxenstjärna had in mind. Against the advice of his engineers, the king ordered his new flagship to be loaded with so many guns that she capsized and sunk outside of the Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage only having sailed a short while.

Perhaps this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna#Quotation

Axel Oxenstjärna was the Lord High Chancellor of Sweden during king Gustavus Adolphus II, who fought in the 30-year war. Not exactly medieval, but fits the description otherwise.

Thank you, sir, for your honesty. While mother tongue is surely a big part of a person's identity, any language is also just a means to an end. Some linguistics suggest that entire peoples have switched languages in the past in just a few generations for the utility and convenience. Kalevi Wiik for instance.

Not being an avid learner of languages, I have personally always liked the idea of an universal language. English seems to be closest to the spot at the moment. It seems that Esperanto has its most avid supporters in China these days, because they would like the luxury of having to learn just one western language.

Still, every language is also a cultural artifact the loss of which would be a bummer. Today we cannot read the writing of Rapa-Nui, the Easter Island, which is sad.

The recently deceased Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä once talked about the idea of two languages: the language of the heart and the language of trade. The former you speak to express the deepest thoughts and the latter to make deals with all of the people in the world.

Maybe sometimes in the far-away future we will all speak two languages, the heart-language and the trade-language. I don't care if the latter is English or Chinese or anything else as it's just about trade and utility. For poetry and confessing my love I have another language.

According to Wikipedia, in Finland a 1/3L beer bottle is recycled, washed and refilled the average of 33 times before it goes out of circulation.

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpa

Although these days an aluminium can is the more popular container, and they are indeed used only once. Proper bottles are getting rare, which I hate, since the bottle is much more pleasant to drink from in a hot sauna. Doesn't burn your lips.

Thanks for the link! I'm just watching the debate, and it seems both sides kind of got a point for a while. There they are, the sceptics, clowns or rational thinkers on the other side, who I root for instinctively, and the pompous stiffs on the other. But I think the stiffs also had something going on for them with their idea of some awe and humility - and excellent pronounciation. Gotta love the civilized ways of a British debate!

Seems like it was only after John Cleese made a more seriours thrust that the stiffs got scared and went into a hedgehodge defense and it all turned boring and ridiculous.

Vintage!