Nah, sounds like management, but I am repeating myself. In all seriousness, I have found myself having to carefully rein some of similar decisions in. I don't want to get into details, but there are times I wonder if they understand how things really work or if people need some 'floor' level exposure before they just decree stuff.

Weirdly, this analogy does something for me and I am the type of person that dislikes the guardrails everywhere. There is argument to be made that a child should not be given a real bazooka to do rocket jumps or an operator with very flexible understanding of value of human life.

<< My "abstract thoughts" are a stream of words too, they just don't get sounded out.

Hmm, seems unlikely. They are not sounded out part is true, sure, but I question whether 'abstract thoughts' can be so easily dismissed as mere words.

edit: come to think of it and I am asking this for a reason: do you hear your abstract thoughts?

Different people have different levels of internal monologuing or none at all. I don't generally think with words in sentences in my head, but many people I know do.

Internal monologue is a like a war correspondent's report of the daily battle. The journalist didn't plan or fight the battle, they just provided an after-the-fact description. Likewise the brain's thinking--a highly parallelized process involving billions of neurons--is not done with words.

Play a little game of "what word will I think of next?" ... just let it happen. Those word choices are fed to the monologue, they aren't a product of it.

Hmm, yes, but, and it is not a small but, do people -- including full blown internal monologue people - think thoughts akin to:

move.panic.fear.run

that effectively becomes one thought and not a word exactly. I am stating it like this, because I worry that my initial point may have been lost.

edit: I can only really speak for myself, but I am curious how people might respond to the distinction.

>do you hear your abstract thoughts?

Most of the fucking time, and I would prefer that I didn't. I even wrote that, lol.

I don't think they're really "mine", either. It's just all the stuff I heard somewhere, coalescing into potential verbalizations in response to perceiving my surroundings or introspecting my memory.

If you are a materialist positivist, well sure, the process underlying all that is some bunch of neural activation patterns or whatever; the words remain the qualia in which that process is available to my perception.

It's all cuz I grew up in a cargo cult - where not presenting the correct passwords would result in denial of sustenance, shelter, and eventually bodily integrity. While presenting the correct passwords had sufficient intimidation value to advance one's movement towards the "mock airbase" (i.e. the feeder and/or pleasure center activation button as provided during the given timeframe).

Furthermore - regardless whether I've been historically afforded any sort of choice in how to conceptualize my own thought processes, or indeed whether to have those in the first place - any entity which has actual power to determine my state of existence (think institutions, businesses, gangs, particularly capable individuals - all sorts of autonomous corpora) has no choice but to interpret me as either a sequence of words, a sequence of numbers, or some other symbol sequence (e.g. the ones printed on my identity documents, the ones recorded in my bank's database, or the metadata gathered from my online represence).

My first-person perspective, being constitutionally inaccessible to such entities, does not have practical significance to them, and is thus elided from the process of "self-determination". As far as anyone's concerned, "I" am a particular sequence of that anyone's preferred representational symbols. For example if you relate to me on the personal level, I will probably be a sequence of your emotions. Either way, what I may hypothetically be to myself is practically immaterial and therefore not a valid object of communication.

^^; I think this post is close to singularity as we may get on this Monday.

The interesting thing is that chatgpt can absolutely profile you and profile you well in ways you probably did not consider ( ask for stylometric fingerprint if you think you are ready to go down that particular rabbit hole ). I don't say it very often, because I simply dislike advertising almost to the degree of certain comedian, but if there ever was a clear mismatch between what the tech can do AND what it actually is being used for, it is llms.

You can ask it to make guesses about your location, your educational background, etc, based on what you provided in the past. Illuminating.

I think my favorite was age estimate, which it did get fairly close based on generational phrases, references used and language artifacts. I was genuinely impressed.

> the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead

Maybe it's simply less visible?

I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to the "old" internet.

And somehow instead of trying to make it better, there are never ending attempts to make it even worse somehow ( if some of the patents are to believed ). I honestly sometimes wonder if some of the stuff is not in place already only because public reaction if all those were plopped in place in one go.

Yep, otherwise, VM is effectively one of the better ( and maybe even safer ) way of trying to escape the established ecosystem.

I want to offer a counter perspective. While the idea is simple and technically not new, it is implemented in a way that allows a huge swath of people to migrate from windows relatively painlessly. It is something. Dismissing it as 'not groundbreaking' is missing the forest for the trees.

Do you have any solid sources for the "huge swath" of people being enabled by this to migrate from Windows to Linux?

The only thing that will enable people to migrate is third-party app support; no matter how good Linux distros get it's all moot if the software users use every day doesn't support it.

No. Source is me. I am the anecdata. shrug It absolutely can be wrong, but to me the pattern is relatively clean. Most of the converts I have seen thus far were Windows holdouts.

What is the magic solution that will make people migrate? Non-image-based mainstream Linux distros, like Ubuntu, tend to be stable and don’t randomly break. Random breakage happens in Ubuntu, but it also happens in Windows, and probably in those image-based distros as well.

Ubuntu is basically windows. I can give you that it is stable, but if you are actually arguing that there is not difference between those ( no 'magic solution' ) edit: , then I don't buy the argument. I think you may be missing the point I was making.

edit: I re-read my previous post. It is possible it is not clear, there is a level of ease and stability that comes 'image based' distros. I am putting quotation marks, because I am almost wondering if this is the equivalent of leather warm seats in the car. You don't think you need it or want it, because car warms up just fine so its not needed. And yet.. when you try use it once, you are hooked.

This. In similar vein, buddy just converted few people to bazzite. I think the idea itself is neat ( we are only a step away now from combining that and qubes ). I am on kinoite myself for my ai dedicated box.