wise0wl

People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?

Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?

Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?

It's the novelty that you're chasing. Deeply consider what it is that you are enjoying, because it's not very different from doom scrolling or quickly stale bubble gum. Maybe AI produces pop music that supplants the long-standing music industry. I couldn't give a shit if it does. Pop music is nepotism and exploitation with the random artist who sneaks through.

I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy. I love live shows, and I love the passion that the artist brings to a live show. I will never get that from AI, so why would I listen to it? It's the same reason I will not read a book that AI makes. AI may understand the mechanisms of story telling, or what chords sound good to a human ear, but because AI cannot have a lived experience of the world it cannot create. Form without intent. Form without a nature of it's own.

I'm good. I'll pass. I think you see it too, by your commend about being the sort of sucker from 1984 and I hope that you come to realize what you are inviting in.

I've seen proposals for Product Managers to define those conditions themselves by speaking with the LLM. A continuing architectural diagram is constructed and graph is updated until all cases are covered and then the LLM writes the code, writes the validations, pushes to CI environments, runs tests, schedules prod deploy (by looking at company event schedule), gets CAB approval, deploys code, tests in prod, and fixes regressions.

I'm not saying this is the correct thing, but companies are implementing it and it is "working". I don't think keeping our head in the sand is helping.

The outcome of this is, in my opinion, the United States Government classifying and regulating LLMs as something akin to how the ATF classifies weapons, ie. requiring a license to operate an LLM (hosting), with different classifications and determinations on the relative "power" of a particular model and framework, and outright banning most open-source models, like how DIY machine guns or suppressors are banned.

Think of a standard for classifying and regulating the self-hosting of open-source models similar to how an FFL works. You can do it, but you must have all your paperwork lined up, with background checks, a valid business license, and if you forget to dot an "i" or cross a "t" the Cyber version of the ATF shows up and shoots your fucking dog.

That's like accepting burnt coffee is the average, so why try to make a good tasting cup. Nonsense.

So, I don't know if this is AI generated or whether the author is actually unaware, but Atari cartridges and floppies commonly had copy protections. My uncle was active in the scene at the time, and as an electrical engineer came up with a solution. When I inherited his Atari 800 in the 90s there was a physical button wired into the floppy drive which would force a bad sector onto the disk as it was being written. He had notebooks about the timing for these bad sectors per game.

So, yeah. The "article" is incorrect from nearly the get-go about the "wild west" Atari age.

I've tried a few models and some are decent, including Qwens models. I've tried a few harnesses like Roo Code in VSCode to put things together that in theory emulate the experience I get from VSCode + Claude or Copilot, but I generally find the experience extremely limited and frustrating.

How have you set things up to have a good experience?

I have to disagree. LLMs have shown that the only way to participate in the new software ecosystem are through leveraging an extremely powerful position that is create, backed, and maintained through the exploitation of capital, labor, and power (political, legal, corpotate) at levels never really seen before. The model of the Cathedral and the Bazaar was not broken by LLMs but instead the entire ecosystem was changed.

Now the software doesn't matter. The code doesn't matter. The hardware doesn't matter. Anyone can generate anything for anything, as long as they pay the fee. I think it can likely be argued that participation is now gated more than ever and will require usage of an LLM to keep up and maintain some kind of competition or even meager parity. Open weight models are not really a means of crossing the moat; none of the open weight models come close to the functionality, and all of them come from the same types of corporations that are releasing their models for unspecified reasons. The fact remains that the moat created by LLMs for open source software has never been larger.

The OpenTelemetry spec is absolutely what folks have been waiting for for as long as I've been in computing (~20 years). A single standard that is implemented in nearly every popular language with very close feature parity. It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks.

I took it upon myself to write a library for my current employer (4yrs ago now?) that abstracted and standardized the way our Rust services instantiated and utilized the metrics and tracing fundamentals that OpenTelemetry provides. I recently added OTLP logging (technically using tracing events) to allow for forwarding baggage / context / metadata with the log lines. The `tracing` crate in rust also has a macro called `instrument` that allows you to mostly auto-instrument your functions for tracing, allowing the tracing context to be extracted and propagated into your function so the trace / span can be added to subsequent HTTP / gRPC requests.

We did all kinds of other stuff too, like adding a method for attaching the trace-id to our kafka messages so we can see how long the entire lifetime of the request takes (including sitting on the queue). It's been extremely insightful.

Signoz is newer to the game. I'm glad there are more competitors and vendors using OpenTelemetry natively. We originally talked to some of the big vendors and they were going to gladly accept OpenTelemetry, but they marked every metric as a "custom" metric and would charge out the wazoo for each of them, far in excess of whatever was instrumented natively with their APM plugin thingamabob.

The more the better. I love OpenTelemetry, and using it in Rust has been mostly great.

This is your opinion. I do not share your opinion. The occult is a wide range of topics and practices, generally split (but not cleanly) into theurgic and thaumaturgic activities. That is, manifestation of the three common desires (wealth, power, love / sex etc.), and then deification and approaching and sometimes joining with / uniting with God. Occult meaning, hidden.

If you read many of the grimoires, there is very little NLP of any kind. The Papyri Graecae Magicae is one of the oldest explicitly magical documents we have from Greek Egypt, and it does have some manipulation spells (as most magical documents do) but none of this has to do with coersion to join a religion or join in a war, or to "do bad stuff". It's largely "technology" used by a practicing magician (a moonlighting Egyptian priest) to help the laity deal with their daily lives regarding helping their crops grow, animals not get sick, healing sick children, getting revenge on their neighbors and former lovers etc.

Magic is always a tool in the hands of the oppressed as a response to tyrannical hierarchy.

From the very beginning of my tenure at my current "start-up" I wrote a Rust bespoke implementation using the base OpenTelemetry library with lots of opinionated defaults and company specifics. We integrated this early on in our microservice development, and it's been an absolute game changer. All of our services include the library and use a simple boilerplate macro to include metrics and tracing into our Actix and Tonic servers, Tonic client, etc. Logs are slurped off Kubernetes pods using promtail.

It was easy enough that I, as a single SRE (at the time) could write and implement across dozens of services in a few months of part-time work while handling all my other normal duties. OpenTelemetry has proved to be worth the investment, and we have stayed within the Grafana ecosystem, now paying for Grafana Cloud (to save our time on maintaining the stack in our Kubernetes clusters).

I would absolutely recommend it. I would recommend it and hopefully use it at any new future positions.

I adore Justin Sledge, despite putting me to sleep quite a few times. If you want to learn a bit about the religious side of the esoteric (mysticism) I highly recommend Filip Holm https://www.youtube.com/@LetsTalkReligion

There are actually some fairly high quality translations of things nowadays. Much better than even 20 years ago. If you are still inclined to the occult, now is a better time than pretty much ever.

Science doesn't negate an interest in the arcane, esoteric, or occult. You can still find this stuff fascinating, and in fact there are practitioners who are actively involved in scientific circles simultaneously. It is not always mutually exclusive.

I grow heirloom tomatoes in the United States, and they are spectacular. The tomatoes available in the grocery store pale in comparison to anything grown in your own garden.

I have to completely disagree. Application level metrics can also be emitted at the log level, but are much easier to work with as a metric. We have total request count, average request latency per route, and per HTTP response. This is extremely useful for finding performance regressions when new code is released.

I hope that it will work. I loved the forum days---there was a real sense of community there that does not exist on Reddit except for some very small subs.

Yeah, that's not great. The interface seems snappier for me, but I may just be partial. I dunno. There is no perfect solution, but Grafana has been pretty amazing in my experiences.

That has not been my experience whatsoever. At work we run our own self-hosted Grafana open-source and it's been fantastic. I've also run it on my own Raspberry Pi 4B at home and it's worked very well.

Grafana has a self-hosted all-in-one docker compose for Loki, Grafana, and Promtail: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/installation/docker/

I love pretty much everything these folks do.

I have improved my handwriting. It took a few months of consistent journaling with a fountain pen to find the "font" that worked for me. Now, I have different writing styles depending on how much time I can take. I use a broad nib for quick note taking because I don't have time to make it look "good", and a fine flex nib for when I'm journaling which I use to flourish things a bit.

In my next life I think I will do this. I decided to get married and have kids, so this one is mostly spoken for---but next time round I am doing the sabbatical thing.

Once you actually don't need it anymore, throw it far away and do not look back. Benzos and opiates ruin lives because of that little voice. That voice will be strong enough one day that if you have those close by you will take a few, because why not?

That voice is the voice of addiction. Once it starts it never fully goes away. It just gets less frequent.

We use Pulumi at my current workplace and love it. Being able to use a real language (Typescript, in our case) allows us to create data structure abstractions to feed our Infrastructure-as-Code that make sense from a developer interaction point-of-view. Our abstractions are less leaky and more in-line with a well designed interface, ready for use by a team that doesn't need to know all the details. We can have developers write feature code and design services and just plug in simple details for new services in our stacks Yaml.

However there is a gotcha. There are nearly infinite ways to setup your Pulumi codebase and there is no real prescribed structure outside of "create stacks". This can lead to a lot of time spent in architecting / implementing / testing different structures and abstractions which are not really a thing with Terraform. This can take time and can lead to refactors if you are not extremely intentional with your design.

OpenTelemetry is amazing. I have used it for multiple languages and frameworks (rust, node (react specifically), golang, C#) and it has been a pleasure to work with. The integrations are very similar and the fact that you can instrument multiple languages and pipe the OTLP outputs to a single swiss army knife agent (opentelemetry-collector) is amazing as well.

I have loved my experience with OpenTelemetry.

Long abstinence is the key. I have been able to re-frame my relationship with alcohol successfully---but this is often not the case for long time habitual users. I cut out alcohol, but substituted in non-alcoholic beer (they are VERY good now) and high CBD / low THC cannabis. I felt nearly no "high", but found that it hit the spot that the first beer would. Eventually once the habit was broken I kept drinking the near-beer and stopped the cannabis except for occasionally, and it worked! This may not be an option for you, but it worked for me.

That was one of the original purposes for LSD---it was billed as a "psychomemetic", in that it mimicked the state of psychosis and made it so therapists could better study and treat the disease in isolation.

I agree. I've been using Vaultwarden on ARM for over a year and it's been flawless. Just excellent execution and seamless integration with the iOS App Store version of the Bitwarden client.

Perhaps because of trucks, yes---but I've found the majority of car noise is from the tires and not the engines. Most modern ICE cars are exceptionally quiet.

The bit about getting a handgun permit is completely untrue. You can buy a handgun over-the-counter in California with no more than the normal waiting period and safety test (multiple choice test you take every five years. If you meant a handgun concealed carry permit being nearly impossible, well---yeah that's true in most of California with the exception being Orange County (practically shall issue).

And it can run on a Raspberry Pi! The DB can be hosted in SQLite (the default) or Postgres, as opposed to Bitwarden which requires MSSQL, which is not compiled for ARM.