Xavier

@Xavier@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows users don't want copilot on their taskbar⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is beautifully familiar.

  Am I seeing too many similarities between how Twitter/X was taken over and singlehandedly being irreversibly ruined?

  While Windows is stubbornly becoming increasingly user-adversarial (advertising, constant intrusive updates, forced transition from your favorite browser to Microsoft Edge, etc.) and unintuitive (sometimes even counter intuitive) interface design, placement and inaccessible settings.

  Well, delighting in schadenfreude, I won’t complain. Microsoft is inadvertently helping me help transition many friends, family and colleagues to various flavors of Linux systems, namely Linux Mint (whichever desktop they prefer) and/or Pop!OS most of the time, but also occasionally Fedora or a particular flavor of Ubuntu.

  I never recommend Arch or rolling release systems or immutable systems to first time Linux user so as to preemptively avoid additional layers of complexity, learning curve, downtime and troubleshooting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why has the world gone to shit?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you for this excellent writeup.

  A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).

  Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.

  However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Assuming a button that, every time you push it, your intelligence goes up. The obvious and sane thing to do is to push the button all day. Yes? No? Maybe? Is there something that I'm missing here?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on the definition of intelligence as there are many kind/type/sort/category of intelligences and every psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, linguist, ethnologist, educator and a multitude of other specialist will all have their own preferred way to differentiate, categorize, regroup and make hierarchies or diagrams of all matter of intelligence and the different aspects of cognition.

  Then there is general intelligence (g factor or general intelligence factor) which counterintuitively affects “intelligence” less as it increases, coined as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR):

  Tucker-Drob (2009) found that a general factor accounted for approximately 75% of the variation in seven different cognitive abilities among very low IQ adults, but only accounted for approximately 30% of the variation in the abilities among very high IQ adults.

  Hence, very loosely akin to current CPUs/GPUs limits (terrible comparison, I know), there’s only so much Gigahertz we can push silicon based CPUs, there is only so many transistors we can smash together into a smaller and smaller space, there is only so much distance/area to carry tiny and fragile signals from one end of the CPU to another before it become undistinguishable from background noise, there is only so much power we can feed a tiny CPU before it reaches thermal saturation and there’s only so many cores and/or modules we can add before most of it remain dormant/barely used in day to day operations.

  Now, concerning your hypothetical button, let suppose there is no such “diminishing return”, one could gladly continuously sit/walk/sleep on the button for more “intelligence”, but to keep up the brain and entire nervous system will have to drastically change just to handle all this increased intelligence. At some point even the brain volume will start to be affected and the brain would outgrow its cranium. All of it will probably excruciatingly painful and accompanied with a cocktail of neurological disorders since the brain keeps rewiring itself as it evolves.

  Neat question indeed. 😆

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Liquid Stool Post⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, thank you for expanding my vocabulary in ways I did not imagine possible.

  I did not need to know that 🤢.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But it's just banana cat videos⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the concept but I want something I can run locally (and update by myself) in a docker container or a Virtual Machine. I’m tired of online service changing their products for the worse or increasing prices because they feel like it.