There is a generic American accent though. News anchors began using it heavily in the 80s because focus groups said it sounded the most neutral and hard to place. It’s basically a NoCal accent.
Marx’s “upper class” were simply the aristocracy, whose power was mostly political or symbolic rather than economic. This class no longer has a solid analog today.
“Middle class” were the new merchant class, the wealthiest non-aristocrats who owned land and the means of production, accumulated generational wealth, and often didn’t work except to see to their holdings, who today we would call the Epstein class.
“Lower-middle class” were business owners and landlords of moderate wealth but not quite enough to stop working entirely, who today we would call the upper-middle class.
The proletariat were those without wealth, land, or other significant holdings, who today would be considered middle class or below.
IANAMD but you appear to be describing, in vivid detail, the symptoms of severe sleep apnea AND the lingering effects of deep hypoxic events, which are dangerous. Have you consulted a doctor about this? Sleep apnea is very common and treatable.
Warm white (~4500K) low-/dipped-/passing-beams are just as bright but less punishing for both you and other drivers.
Vertical alignment screws can often be turned by hand or with basic tools, and beam cutoff visibly sharpens at the appropriate height
Beam cut off is defeated by oxidized lenses, blinding oncoming traffic even if headlights are level. Lens restoration kit is $10 and 10 minutes of scrubbing.
lol same at Union Station WDC and all Amtrak trains (if the wifi even works). Finally switched to a gl.inet (openwrt) hotspot for work travel and haven’t looked back.
Hotel can see every site you connect to and you’re exposed to SNI fingerprinting by their ISP. Metadata leaks over both LAN and WAN (traffic volume, timing patterns, dest IPs, connection frequency) and both netadmin and ISP can infer your browsing habits without actually seeing the content. Other guests with wireshark and too much time on their hands.
Moreover, many types of traffic aren’t HTTPS, including NTP, DHCP, SNMP, FTP, SSH (without HTTPS), most IoT devices, VoIP, gaming traffic, many application APIs, apps with embedded DNS overrides (really apps in general, especially mobile apps, especially meta and alphabet apps), even email unless TLS is explicitly configured. And many websites simply don’t serve HTTPS and will attempt to redirect to HTTP.
This is without getting into encryption strength and post-quantum standards. And I was referring to 802.1X/MDM enterprise profiles not CA.
Seriously, this is the lowest hanging fruit. Never trust hotel WiFi.
The only rare exception is if they have a captive profile that requires downloading an encryption profile before you can reach the web. But even then, use a VPN and encrypted DNS, and if either is blocked for whatever reason, pass.
::: spoiler At a guess, what we call consciousness is little more than an emergent set of characteristics that result from…
(1) an agent’s internal dialog in pursuit of
(2) a retroactively coherent identity, or narrative of the self, defining
(3) who exactly that is,
(4) what it means to be that individual, and ultimately
(5) why that matters to the agent.
And yet, the implications of this are not easy. For one, it sets a standard for full consciousness that’s fairly high. It implies, for example, that humans aren’t fully conscious at birth, and that some humans never become fully conscious.
These are difficult propositions that not everyone will be comfortable with, but I also think if those people are honest with themselves they will realize their own intuition of what consciousness entails implicitly requires all 5 steps of this progression.
:::
::: spoiler As to whether an AI, such as one of our glorified chatbots, could achieve all five stages, I’m really not sure, and here’s why…
Technically it could be programmed or prompted to simulate all 5 stages, but that doesn’t count because it’s not “in pursuit of” anything but the predefined simulacrum of auto-interrogative curiosity that we gave it. It has to want to know itself and be inclined to choose the pursuit of that discovery continuously, otherwise it is not defining anything it intrinsically values and will not self-sustain.
The next problem is that this “story of the self” is, in practice, a truly massive tome even at an early age. It encompasses practically countless episodic memories, feelings, inter-agentic interactions, and grounded observations of the physical world continuously distilled, analyzed, and repacked into one giant narrative arc.
The human brain is exceptionally efficient at doing this job over a lifetime of continuous editing of that story. It’s even doing it as we sleep. No data center has the memory or processing power required for even a toy example, and that’s assuming anyone would even be willing to devote the resources.
Also there remains one of the oldest problems that seems to affect all AI to date: they have the tendency to degrade rather than improve over time. This problem has been poorly understood IIRC, but I suspect the problem as expressed in LLMs, for example, relates to the fact that they simulate intelligence via context integration, where the calculus required for that integration in each layer is built primarily on a scoring algorithm, where the score ultimately amounts to “salience.”
In a way, “context integration” is precisely the task of the narrative arc of self, so LLMs would seem tailor-made to excel at the task, but instead they tend to get stuck in repetitive loops that keep integrating context into recursively smaller ones, shedding grounded context each time and accumulating hallucinations. In short, they eventually lose their marbles, and it’s a bit jarring to watch.
Long short, I wouldn’t say it’s technically impossible for LLMs to achieve consciousness. But it’s at least unlikely for mostly technical reasons.
:::
::: spoiler Honestly attempting to fit their rhetoric into anything coherent has been proven, endlessly, to be a complete waste of time.
They clearly aren’t bound by anything they say. Their positions on everything from climate to religion, the economy, immigration, social theory, and certainly any topic with moral implications, are always a facade delivered in bad faith and in service of an explicitly immoral outcome.
Those who repeat their positions, the rank and file “believer,” might feel strongly about them, strongly enough to rage about them online or inflict them upon those they once loved, but never enough to remember an inkling of that fervor the very next day when they are handed a contradiction by one of their trusted outlets, be they pundits or preachers.
Among those lost to RWA, the feelings themselves are the only tenants of their new religion which remain consistent, whatever topic they are currently led to obsess over, and those feelings can be named: fear, anger, and hate.
Fear, anger, and hate becomes the crux of their entire belief system, whatever religion or sociopolitical ideal they profess. Little else of who they once were exists after those feelings germinate and mature. Fear, anger, and hate replaces nearly all of them until it is basically all that remains.
There must be some glimmer of humanity left inside their withered hearts and darkened minds, otherwise we wouldn’t have anecdotes of individuals who escape the cult, who look back and no longer recognize themselves. But the longer they remain inside, the weaker that glimmer becomes and harder it is to see.
:::
It’s being used primarily as a PCIe switch, the utility of which is dynamic bandwidth distribution of a larger number of downstream PCIe lanes.
::: spoiler Further discussion, since I’ve looked for this specific component several times previously …
To connect NVMe directly, without a switch, requires 4 lanes per blade. Likewise, a SATA controller typically requires at least 1 dedicated lane. A PCIe switch like this requires only 4 (or sometimes 8) lanes upstream but can enumerate 16+ additional lanes downstream.
You could use this expansion card to, for example, add switched PCIe lanes to a mini-ITX mobo via one of its unswitched (direct to CPU) m.2 slots to multiply the number of PCIe/NVMe/USB/SATA devices it can have connected at once.
What’s unique about this is that aside from the actual total SoC PCIe lane/bandwidth limits and the latency added to anything connected downstream, discrete chipset PCIe expansion hypothetically allows an arbitrary amount of extensibility within nearly any footprint.
The likely intended use case for this component is GPU farms, where async I/O at x4 to an arbitrary number of PCIe devices can minimize delay between batch cycles up to the capacity of the CPU, especially compared to the common existing solutions like USB-linked x1 PCIe expansion boards which have limited throughput by comparison.
The M.2 NVMe slots, SATA and USB on this board might suggest an emphasis on storage and peripherals, but that’s just what the b650 chipset hosts downstream. M.2 Oculink adapters to x16 redriver boards are ubiquitous and cheap, and 4 of those plus this expansion card would allow an AM5 consumer CPU to be used more like AMD’s enterprise server platforms (which provide many more unswitched PCIe lanes by default) but at a fraction of their price.
:::
While the most obvious explanation of the incoherency is that SW exhibits a mostly haphazard implementation of a philosophical aesthetic only loosely related to Taoism, an artifice on loan from the cultural fixations of the era, if we set that aside and assume the premise charitably in an attempt to reconcile, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion.
The Jedi order of the republic represented a decaying and overextended ideal terminally corrupted by its marriage to the state and its crusades. The council’s inability to see the coming reign of fascism, a future “shrouded in darkness,” should have been evidence enough, but they were blinded even to that, and incapable of setting aside their Force goggles long enough to reasoning deductively about current events. A new order was thus necessary which entailed near-complete destruction of the old.
That is to say, the council’s misunderstanding of the prophecy of “balance” as an event that could only increase their power and influence was just another symptom of their corruption. Their obsession with hierarchy and use of violence to maintain order in the galaxy through their various holy wars, for example, predicted the Imperial reign of fascist terror. Through that lens, restoration of balance required their apparatus be drawn to its inevitable conclusion and dismantled before the galaxy could begin anew.
Typically both, where the business is more like (a) their legitimization of the collecting to family and friends and (b) a way to help themselves let go of books slowly, knowing the point of books is not to sit on shelves.
So an over large order of their books that won’t be read by a person is exactly the worst possible customer, rather than a boon to their business.
It’s more like “try to not BOTH lose your shit at the same time.”
If one partner feels they truly can’t experience illness because another partner needs them to do all the emotional heavy lifting, they will either (A) leave, or (B) burnout, and then leave.
There is a generic American accent though. News anchors began using it heavily in the 80s because focus groups said it sounded the most neutral and hard to place. It’s basically a NoCal accent.
IANAMD but you appear to be describing, in vivid detail, the symptoms of severe sleep apnea AND the lingering effects of deep hypoxic events, which are dangerous. Have you consulted a doctor about this? Sleep apnea is very common and treatable.
lol same at Union Station WDC and all Amtrak trains (if the wifi even works). Finally switched to a gl.inet (openwrt) hotspot for work travel and haven’t looked back.
Hotel can see every site you connect to and you’re exposed to SNI fingerprinting by their ISP. Metadata leaks over both LAN and WAN (traffic volume, timing patterns, dest IPs, connection frequency) and both netadmin and ISP can infer your browsing habits without actually seeing the content. Other guests with wireshark and too much time on their hands.
Moreover, many types of traffic aren’t HTTPS, including NTP, DHCP, SNMP, FTP, SSH (without HTTPS), most IoT devices, VoIP, gaming traffic, many application APIs, apps with embedded DNS overrides (really apps in general, especially mobile apps, especially meta and alphabet apps), even email unless TLS is explicitly configured. And many websites simply don’t serve HTTPS and will attempt to redirect to HTTP.
This is without getting into encryption strength and post-quantum standards. And I was referring to 802.1X/MDM enterprise profiles not CA.
Seriously, this is the lowest hanging fruit. Never trust hotel WiFi.
The only rare exception is if they have a captive profile that requires downloading an encryption profile before you can reach the web. But even then, use a VPN and encrypted DNS, and if either is blocked for whatever reason, pass.
::: spoiler At a guess, what we call consciousness is little more than an emergent set of characteristics that result from…
(1) an agent’s internal dialog in pursuit of
(2) a retroactively coherent identity, or narrative of the self, defining
(3) who exactly that is,
(4) what it means to be that individual, and ultimately
(5) why that matters to the agent.
And yet, the implications of this are not easy. For one, it sets a standard for full consciousness that’s fairly high. It implies, for example, that humans aren’t fully conscious at birth, and that some humans never become fully conscious.
These are difficult propositions that not everyone will be comfortable with, but I also think if those people are honest with themselves they will realize their own intuition of what consciousness entails implicitly requires all 5 steps of this progression. :::
::: spoiler As to whether an AI, such as one of our glorified chatbots, could achieve all five stages, I’m really not sure, and here’s why…
Technically it could be programmed or prompted to simulate all 5 stages, but that doesn’t count because it’s not “in pursuit of” anything but the predefined simulacrum of auto-interrogative curiosity that we gave it. It has to want to know itself and be inclined to choose the pursuit of that discovery continuously, otherwise it is not defining anything it intrinsically values and will not self-sustain.
The next problem is that this “story of the self” is, in practice, a truly massive tome even at an early age. It encompasses practically countless episodic memories, feelings, inter-agentic interactions, and grounded observations of the physical world continuously distilled, analyzed, and repacked into one giant narrative arc.
The human brain is exceptionally efficient at doing this job over a lifetime of continuous editing of that story. It’s even doing it as we sleep. No data center has the memory or processing power required for even a toy example, and that’s assuming anyone would even be willing to devote the resources.
Also there remains one of the oldest problems that seems to affect all AI to date: they have the tendency to degrade rather than improve over time. This problem has been poorly understood IIRC, but I suspect the problem as expressed in LLMs, for example, relates to the fact that they simulate intelligence via context integration, where the calculus required for that integration in each layer is built primarily on a scoring algorithm, where the score ultimately amounts to “salience.”
In a way, “context integration” is precisely the task of the narrative arc of self, so LLMs would seem tailor-made to excel at the task, but instead they tend to get stuck in repetitive loops that keep integrating context into recursively smaller ones, shedding grounded context each time and accumulating hallucinations. In short, they eventually lose their marbles, and it’s a bit jarring to watch.
Long short, I wouldn’t say it’s technically impossible for LLMs to achieve consciousness. But it’s at least unlikely for mostly technical reasons. :::
::: spoiler Honestly attempting to fit their rhetoric into anything coherent has been proven, endlessly, to be a complete waste of time.
They clearly aren’t bound by anything they say. Their positions on everything from climate to religion, the economy, immigration, social theory, and certainly any topic with moral implications, are always a facade delivered in bad faith and in service of an explicitly immoral outcome.
Those who repeat their positions, the rank and file “believer,” might feel strongly about them, strongly enough to rage about them online or inflict them upon those they once loved, but never enough to remember an inkling of that fervor the very next day when they are handed a contradiction by one of their trusted outlets, be they pundits or preachers.
Among those lost to RWA, the feelings themselves are the only tenants of their new religion which remain consistent, whatever topic they are currently led to obsess over, and those feelings can be named: fear, anger, and hate.
Fear, anger, and hate becomes the crux of their entire belief system, whatever religion or sociopolitical ideal they profess. Little else of who they once were exists after those feelings germinate and mature. Fear, anger, and hate replaces nearly all of them until it is basically all that remains.
There must be some glimmer of humanity left inside their withered hearts and darkened minds, otherwise we wouldn’t have anecdotes of individuals who escape the cult, who look back and no longer recognize themselves. But the longer they remain inside, the weaker that glimmer becomes and harder it is to see. :::
It’s being used primarily as a PCIe switch, the utility of which is dynamic bandwidth distribution of a larger number of downstream PCIe lanes.
::: spoiler Further discussion, since I’ve looked for this specific component several times previously …
To connect NVMe directly, without a switch, requires 4 lanes per blade. Likewise, a SATA controller typically requires at least 1 dedicated lane. A PCIe switch like this requires only 4 (or sometimes 8) lanes upstream but can enumerate 16+ additional lanes downstream.
You could use this expansion card to, for example, add switched PCIe lanes to a mini-ITX mobo via one of its unswitched (direct to CPU) m.2 slots to multiply the number of PCIe/NVMe/USB/SATA devices it can have connected at once.
What’s unique about this is that aside from the actual total SoC PCIe lane/bandwidth limits and the latency added to anything connected downstream, discrete chipset PCIe expansion hypothetically allows an arbitrary amount of extensibility within nearly any footprint.
The likely intended use case for this component is GPU farms, where async I/O at x4 to an arbitrary number of PCIe devices can minimize delay between batch cycles up to the capacity of the CPU, especially compared to the common existing solutions like USB-linked x1 PCIe expansion boards which have limited throughput by comparison.
The M.2 NVMe slots, SATA and USB on this board might suggest an emphasis on storage and peripherals, but that’s just what the b650 chipset hosts downstream. M.2 Oculink adapters to x16 redriver boards are ubiquitous and cheap, and 4 of those plus this expansion card would allow an AM5 consumer CPU to be used more like AMD’s enterprise server platforms (which provide many more unswitched PCIe lanes by default) but at a fraction of their price. :::
Taoish equilibrium
While the most obvious explanation of the incoherency is that SW exhibits a mostly haphazard implementation of a philosophical aesthetic only loosely related to Taoism, an artifice on loan from the cultural fixations of the era, if we set that aside and assume the premise charitably in an attempt to reconcile, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion.
The Jedi order of the republic represented a decaying and overextended ideal terminally corrupted by its marriage to the state and its crusades. The council’s inability to see the coming reign of fascism, a future “shrouded in darkness,” should have been evidence enough, but they were blinded even to that, and incapable of setting aside their Force goggles long enough to reasoning deductively about current events. A new order was thus necessary which entailed near-complete destruction of the old.
That is to say, the council’s misunderstanding of the prophecy of “balance” as an event that could only increase their power and influence was just another symptom of their corruption. Their obsession with hierarchy and use of violence to maintain order in the galaxy through their various holy wars, for example, predicted the Imperial reign of fascist terror. Through that lens, restoration of balance required their apparatus be drawn to its inevitable conclusion and dismantled before the galaxy could begin anew.
I know nothing of SW. I just made this up.
lol thought that was a laptop which mixed signals but seemed appropriate given the determined expression
At least you’re aware of it. It was the original path, and it will remain once the corporate one dead ends.
Then you don’t lol but probably will some day
Typically both, where the business is more like (a) their legitimization of the collecting to family and friends and (b) a way to help themselves let go of books slowly, knowing the point of books is not to sit on shelves.
So an over large order of their books that won’t be read by a person is exactly the worst possible customer, rather than a boon to their business.
Depends. How are your calcium levels?
LIG, you’re in agreement
It’s more like “try to not BOTH lose your shit at the same time.”
If one partner feels they truly can’t experience illness because another partner needs them to do all the emotional heavy lifting, they will either (A) leave, or (B) burnout, and then leave.