A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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    It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.

    More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!






  • Actually, I think you’re spreading some false-hoods here.

    I’ve spoken to the core-devs about this here, and they acknowledged that being able to follow people/users would be a generally good idea, but felt that it was a lot of work and so not a priority at the moment.

    I’m with you on the desire of a platform the fuses the two general mechanisms (groups and users), and I think a groups-first platform like lemmy can bring something valuable to how a user’s feed would work … but the reality is that this sort of thing is just not in the fediverse’s DNA at the moment. These aren’t for-profit companies that need to wheel out features constantly to keep their stock price up!

    There’s an exception to that though … friendica, hubzilla and streams, the sort of alternative timeline or “ancient magic” for the fediverse that predates ActivityPub and mastodon by long margins. They have clunky UIs, but are quite feature full, and happily combine both groups and users.


  • Yep. And then you realise that “move semantics” aren’t just a safety net that you have to “fight with” but actually a language feature against which you can develop/deploy desirable patterns.

    A minor thing I noted reading your code snippets was that I immediately noticed, like at a gestalt level, the lack of ampersands (&) and therefore references and could immediately tell that this was a “faux-O”/pipline style system. Not too bad for a syntax often derided as messy/bad.





  • Yea interesting. It really is the beef v cow thing entrenched directly in the culture.

    I wonder if, in anglo-phonic culture, it has roots back to the french-aristocratic v anglo-serf divide in Norman England. Looking to the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany as comparisons could be illuminating. I’ve certainly heard stories from non-anglo people about relatives raising, slaughtering and eating their own animals, but never anglo.


  • Yea, well it tracks with the deferred ethics of the whole dynamic/system.

    My favourite was the opening, which set the tone and had me double take to make sure I read it correctly: “You can slice someone’s throat and still love them.” Of course you can, so long as you respect them and remain mindful of the circle of life.

    I don’t engage in any vegan arguments at the moment … but I’d imagine the real razor would be whether anyone has actually killed the kind of animals they’re eating and would be happy to do that every time they ate (the corresponding amount of meat, just to be “fair”). I have, through scientific research seen and participated in animal killing, and watched how others digest the process. I’m pretty most moderately thoughtful people would not be up for it at all.







  • they drive away potential allies because the concept of harm reduction is anathema to their binary thinking. If you’re not ALL in, you’re the enemy.

    I can resonate with that. But I come back to … “it’s totally ok for people to create their own spaces, especially on federated social media and especially for minority groups/ideas”.

    There are likely plenty of other spaces for “potential allies” to engage and talk about veganism if they want to, or plenty they, or you, could make on their own.

    Tacitly admitting that vegans are usually antisocial zealots. “It’s right in the name!”

    Well, they’re running their own social media platform, so I’m not sure how anti-social they are.





  • I suspect the basilisk reveals more about how the human mind is inclined to think up of heaven and hell scenarios.

    Some combination of consciousness leading to more imagination than we know what to do with and more awareness than we’re ready to grapple with. And so there are these meme “attractors” where imagination, idealism, dread and motivation all converge to make some basic vibe of a thought irresistible.

    Otherwise, just because I’m not on top of this … the whole thing is premised on the idea that we’re likely to be consciousnesses in a simulation? And then there’s the fear that our consciousnesses, now, will be extracted in the future somehow?

    1. That’s a massive stretch on the point about our consciousness being extracted into the future somehow. Sounds like pure metaphysical fantasy wrapped in singularity tech-bro.
    2. If there are simulated consciousnesses, it is all fair game TBH. There’d be plenty of awful stuff happening. The basilisk seems like just a way to encapsulate the fact in something catchy.

    At this point, doesn’t the whole collapse completely into a scary fairy tale you’d tell tech-bro children? Seriously, I don’t get it?