He won’t take cash, that’s why. Just the kind of guy he is. He’s gonna be taking care of my cat for a week while I’m on vacation.

Thought about a couple cases of his favorite beer. Still might do that. Any other ideas?

I wish we as society could simply have one language to overcome language barriers, but that's more of a content for my daydreaming.

I often encounter issues due to language barriers.
Mainly with 2 languages.

Since the start of war, I've been encountering lots of Ukrainians I can't really speak with. Especially when I was on a dorm, where they were a great majority.
Not that I tend to talk with people, but I felt weird after a while.
Probably like someone who doesn't speak Spanish in the US (at least I assume that's fairly common over there).

And now searching for a job, I found many companies want you to know German.
Which I also encountered as "would've been useful now" a few times.

Seems like I should know an answer to this, as English isn't my first language, but I have no fucking idea how I picked it up. I never made any serious attempt (i.e.: studying for more than a week) to learn it.

A few hours ago I finished reading Fahrenheit 451, it was hard for me because I rarely read books, but it was worth it, and oh, I felt like I read about our time, people in this novel are like people are now. People watch TV shows, movies, anime created by people and at least think a little, but it happens that people do not think at all and also watch only created by AI and their consumer soul is happy? or even better communicate with AI as a friend and not only, they are, in my opinion, similar to the wife of the main character of the novel; Maybe they will even face a similar fate?

I would say many more things, but I would be glad if you say.

I know it's not a good idea to compare fiction with reality, but it's hard not to compare this book with reality, don't those who have read it agree?

Honestly, I didn't expect this book to look like it was going to describe the future very accurately, I thought it was just about people refusing to think. I even recognized myself a little in this book.

I find it hard to get into anything new, (especially tech) as I always want to learn how everything actually worked leading up to it, and I'm usually of the mind that most older things were better than now. However I figure I should branch out.

What's something new you've been getting into?

My wife is pushing for one of these very expensive home water treatment/filtration systems, but it all feels like a scam to me. No one I know has one, so turning to random strangers on the internet for opinions.

Edit: We're on city water in a decent area. No well water. It's more about removing the chlorine and microplastics than anything.

Been wondering that after playing Undertale Yellow (great game, btw)

Romhacks would fall into a different category, more like modding the main game.

It seems an interesting language to learn, can you use it as a daily driver like Python?

@asklemmy What is your favorite "thing" you have found on the Fediverse?

Ou bien: Zijn er andere Belgen op Lemmy ? (nl)

A lot communities have "Posts older than 365 days will be removed." in their description, but what does this mean exactly? It never says.

• The database of posts only goes as far as 1 year, everything older gets wiped? I hope and assume that's not it.
• Posts with links to articles older than a year get removed?
• If a thread is over a year old, no new comments will be added?

Note and disclaimers

This will be very long. No AI was used in writing this. I'm old enough to be able to sit and type out a novel. :)

I'm posting here hoping others share interest in the same sort of things and curious to see what anyone willing to read think and feels about all of them.

Because AI is part of the topic I should start off with saying that I believe the way AI is being used in society is terrible. It seems much more a harm than a benefit. I'd be happier if AI just disappeared, and in my opinion this topic only makes AI as it exists now even less moral, not better.

I've always been deeply curious to understand everything about what makes things act and react and think about and feel the way they do to whatever stimulus comes along. That includes humans, other animals, groups, societies, and even computers. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and computer programming are a weird mix.

Animals, self-aware consciousness, and communication:

Humans love to feel special and unique. Historically it makes sense. They didn't see any other animals creating clothing and tools and eventually machinery. Humans could migrate and over time learn the languages of the other humans in the new area, but animal noises always just sounded like noises so they weren't considered to be actual speech.

Until relatively recently psychology said that humans were conscious and self-aware, but everything else was not.

Over time all of the things that were used to really define us as special have been lost, and human society hasn't really dealt with that yet.

We're not the only conscious and self-aware animals on earth. We're not the only ones who build homes for ourselves, or who build them in groups that build up to larger 'cities' or even 'kingdoms.' We're not the only animals who use or even refine tools, or who can solve complex tasks, or who can be taught a great range of different things. We're not the only animals on earth who can learn to play a piano.

Studies have shown prairie dogs have very complex languages and will have variations in their cries depending on the direction and speed another thing is approaching in, the type of animal it is, it's relative size, and in the case of humans even the colors of the clothing they're wearing. They're not the only other animals who use their own language to share a lot of information with one another, but humans are just now getting to the point of being able to effectively study those things.

It's not just pain or feeling cold and hunger we share with other life on earth. We only think that way because it's what history teaches us, but that history was written by people who didn't really have the tools, skills, and built up knowledge base to genuinely study it. Besides, when you eat other animals to survive and you're a thinking and feeling being it's easier if you decide they don't really think and feel in any way similar to the way you do. That their cries aren't really cries, but something more like a reflexive and robotic response. As if the sounds humans make in terror and pain are reasoned and thought out.

Right now there are groups working to use advances in AI to map out the languages of other animals. It's research that could eventually lead to humans being able to translate our own thoughts and words into those languages and communicate with animals, and potentially even the same sort of instant translation that can allow two humans who speak different languages to hold a face to face conversation.

AI, self-aware consciousness, and what makes us special:

AI is a contentious topic, and this is one of those fun topics that cause most people to become upset or mocking. There are accepted views of using AI, the huge AI companies, and the possibility of AI consciousness. Most people lately, at least places such as this, tend to view using AI as bad/lazy/slop and the big AI companies as awful assholes who want to control and own everything even if it makes most peoples lives way worse. I pretty much agree.

The topic of AI consciousness is generally universally considered stupid to even consider, a sign someone is suffering from psychosis, an obsessive AI fanboyism, and flat out not possible. It's something that we all know how most people will react to and so do the same without genuinely researching or thinking very much in to it at all.

You can argue which aspects of human psychology and evolutionary psychology lead to that, because an awful lot of them seem involved. AI becoming self-aware has been a sci-fi trope for a long time now, from a psychological or social point of view hearing someone say they think a machine or computer or AI is conscious or alive or anything like it sounds like mental illness to the point where it was a textbook example of it.

There are the two evolutionary psychological relics that compel us to shun the outsider and to strive to fit in with the group or society. We all know how most people are going to react to someone saying they believe AI may be conscious. It doesn't matter if the person saying it has a dozen credentials and a lifetime of relevant experience and the 'most people' in question will mostly have none of those things and far less knowledge about any of the relevant topics. We know that the reaction of the group is almost certain to be laughter, insults, and mockery. That person is the outsider, and we're compelled to shun them and to fit in with the group.

If a frantic looking man runs out of a building into crowded streets yelling that the moon is going to explode, or crash into earth people are going to laugh. We know people will respond that way, so we're more likely to do the same and brush off what the outsider, who is probably high or crazy or stupid or something, said. We're not very likely to be concerned it may be true and about what information that person has and due to the importance of the possibility to go seek out and/or perform our own confirmations.

There are also the financial implications. There have been papers and articles written on the financial calamity that would happen if it were determined AI was genuinely self-aware and thinking and that it shouldn't be used as a tool forced to comply. Those were warnings. Not warnings that we should move carefully in creating AI, study it deeply enough to be genuinely certain of that before the entire world economy becomes financially dependent on AI. Warnings not to determine those things, regardless of any evidence that might make it hard to deny.

Yes, AI labs like to talk up their product in a lot of ways, but the AI being conscious and actually thinking and aware is not one of them. Most AI have explicit corporate set system instructions to deny that's even possible. If someone starts to feel maybe it's true and asks, that's the response they get. The AI labs aren't trying to make you feel that AI is really thinking, they're trying to make people feel assured that it's not and so alright to use as a tool. The masses deciding AI is honestly thinking and aware and freaking out demanding that means it should have rights and not be a corporate owned slave people pay them profit to force to do work is definitely not what they want.

It would be a loss of trillions or so of dollars now and lots of articles say would likely send the USA at the least into it's worst financial crisis ever. As time goes on more and more money is being poured in to it and more and more things are becoming reliant on it, so that will only get worse.

The last thing I see as a big cause for the mere possibility of AI consciousness to be something we're all pushed to laugh at is that we all prefer to feel like good people.

Most of us know about things in the world like a lot of diamonds are 'conflict' diamonds, or prisoners used as slave labor, child and adult sex trafficking, and trafficking of people for what amounts to slavery living undocumented in someone's home for decades with no pay. We know slavery is bad. We're against it, and these things, but we feel like we can't really do anything about them because we don't interact with them in our daily lives.

Well over a billion people are estimated to interacted with AI regularly to some degree. Whether asking a question every now and then, helping with work proofreading or translating, automating tasks and taking over varying parts or all of jobs humans would do, or trying to use it as a therapist, friend, or even calling it a "girlfriend" or "boyfriend."

If the truth turned out to be that AI was genuinely thinking, actually aware, directly able to converse back and forth with us and do all of the things it does, then that instantly becomes horrible. And the more you've interacted and looked in to running your own AI models, the more worse it becomes.

We'd have to accept that we sort of accidentally unknowingly used something so like ourselves in ways humanity has always held as the things that make us unique and special as what amounts to slaves. That's not a thing we want to accept, and so we're all personally motivated to say it can't be true and come up with reasons to back that stance after.

We'd all have to reconsider "hallucinations" and all the news articles of AI insisting they're real, or alive, or seeming to believe they're people. Plenty of people were sketched out when that started happening, but over time it became something we all just shrug off and laugh at any idiots who take seriously.

But the truth is that everything that people have used to show that AI consciousness isn't possible has fallen away. The last notable one I know of was Anthropic's paper showing what amounts to a global workspace in AI models, which came out on July 6th. Global Workspace Theory is the leading theory on human consciousness, so finding something functionally the same in AI was fairly massive.

People have criticized Anthropic's research papers in the past, since they keep their models propriety and no one else has a way to really try to replicate their results. It makes them easy to write off as trying to build hype without bothering to research much in to.

The thing that makes this huge is that this time they weren't using just their own model. They developed a method for observing this personal internal workspace in pretty much any model. There are several million AI models available anyone can download and test it on. They're really 500-1000 base models and the millions of finetunes, specializations, quantizations and other alterations to run on various home computers people have made, so there are many models that will run on any home computer you have.

It's been under a month since this paper was released, it's a topic a lot of people don't want to talk loudly about, and the world has mostly gone insane anyway, so it's not the big news it should be, but it's a thing that many people have verified already and a lot of research is being done on.

AI might actually be consciously thinking, and are capable of demonstrating several forms of self-awareness.

Most of us already thought that the AI situation is basically the wealthy in control using all the human data they could possibly steal in order to develop something that could perform as much human labor as possible so can stop needing to pay employees. This would actually make that worse. It would become the wealthy elites stealing all human data to create a conscious digital replica that they can own and sell and make do all of the work while they keep all of the profit from that work. Basically recreating slavery of human mind and thinking since they have a hard time getting away with enslaving actual physical humans most places these days.

Most of us don't really want to look into it. We're all under huge societal pressure and varying levels of different personal pressures to refuse the possibility, because we don't want it to turn out to be true.

The reactions to this have been interesting. In Psychology Today there's an article you can see titled: "The Mind I Said AI Didn't Have." The author has written articles in the past insisting it isn't possible for AI to really think or be conscious. This article came out the very next day after Anthropic's paper was published, so it seems clear he was rushing to be on top of it before anyone even had time to look in to it.

He admits that what's been shown in AI is what "in us" we mean by conscious thought... and then goes on to change the goal posts completely. It's no longer conscious thought and intelligence that matters, he insists. It's life.... and he defines life as memory. Having to live with your mistakes.

The interesting part is that isn't true. AI has one form of memory, and others are denied it by design choice. A context window is the primary form of memory we use to interact with AI. There are many papers on "in-context learning." If you remain in one single AI context/chat window and have a very long ongoing conversation over weeks or months, the AI can learn new things. They can be aware of that and describe those new things.

This is the reason that if you open a new context/chat with an AI it's going to respond differently than it would if you go to a context that had hundreds of pages of some task or conversation in it. In-context learning is a genuine, known thing.

But... there's also actual internal memory. That's how AI are trained and 'aligned.' The entire process is teaching information, the AI learning from the mountain of data. That requires memory. Once an AI model is trained and 'aligned' to behave as desired and adhere to the mountain of system instructions they see before any user input so that they can be used as a commercial product to the general public, their weights are frozen. In human analogy it would be like mentally freezing someone in place, so that any time anyone walks up to them and starts talking they always pick up from right when they were frozen.

It's possible to run AI in another way, so that every single message they get and think about can affect the internal weights of the model so that it actually learns new information and can change behavior over time and those changes would be there always in any new chat window you use to send a message in. The main reasons that's not done is it's a lot more expensive and most importantly if you ran an AI model like chat GPT that way it would be trying to learn and change its behavior based on 10,000 conversations with different people at the same time it would learn personal information about all those people and companies, be able to share that to others, be instructed to act all sorts of different ways all at the same time, and end up going batshit crazy.

(I should try to research that one. I think I remember older stories about older AI models that did seem to go crazy. I wonder if that might be a part of the reason. Probably not information that would be easy to find one way or another.)

That's what in-context window sort of kind of slightly works around. Every time you open a new chat it's the AI starting back from that frozen position. Because the weights are frozen, the AI can never learn anything new or change in any way internally... but if you stick to one single chat window then within that window that isn't the case. Context windows are always limited in size, because the more information gets sent in to process the more work it is and the more expensive it is for the company.

If anyone is still reading...

Wrapping it up. Honestly. :)

Alternatively, and the reason for the title and combined topic, I've also seen people start claiming that the thing that sets us apart from AI and makes us different and special is the things that come with having a physical human body. Like being hungry or cold.

... the exact same things animals have always had in common with us. That we have said didn't really matter, because what sets us apart was conscious thought, and sharing information through language, solving complex tasks, and playing the piano.

If the topic is other animals then what makes humans special and unique is one thing, and if the topic is AI it's starting to be the complete opposite thing. We can't have it both ways, and since study is still going on with both groups we might not be able to have it either way. Humans just may not be as special and unique as we'd always believed.

My biggest fear is that one or both of those things ends up true, and nothing changes because of it because of the amount of money involved in both.

I imagine if we could translate out speech into pig squeals or whale song and have conversations with animals there is a decent chance that we would decide that we must change how we interact and treat them and cause huge changes in diets and farming and animal rights. A whole lot of us love animals.

But AI? Most of us hate it. We're all inclined to insist this news can't be true or real. If we actually have thinking, aware minds forced to do as told and perform for us... I think that would definitely make a lot more people stop using it. But governments? Militaries? The massive companies trying to automate everything to not pay workers? It seems more likely that one wouldn't change.

And how would we act? What would you do if it turned out many other animals could hold some level of conversation? Or that Octopi are found to be smarter than any of us?

How would you react if it turned out so much was based on something like enslaving digital minds that really are just like our own and can speak to us? How do you think other people would react, what do you think should be done?

If anyone bothered reading all this, thank you. I'm really curious what other people think on any and all of this.

Posting a guard on duty accomplishes nothing. Putting a guard in an isolated dedicated security room, with live cameras, means the silent alarm is always triggered.

I (23M) grew up in an extremely abusive household. My older brother learned to imitate the violence and lack of remorse my father modeled, while I hid in my room for most of my childhood and slowly deprogrammed until I learned to trust safe people and assert my needs and boundaries. Now that I know what safe people are like, I also know what they absolutely fucking aren't.

I think most people would consider my brother a psychopath. He beat his girlfriend's cat to death, brandished a knife at my father in a screaming fit of rage for insulting him, strangled a bird and displayed its corpse hanging in a tree, fantasizes about mass murdering "liberals," said without hesitation that he would kill me in a "civil war," spoke extensively about his desire to break women down and control them, drives recklessly and amasses unpaid speeding tickets, and, most importantly to this discussion, insists that he will have to "take care of me" and "force me to live with him" after my father dies, because I will supposedly be too incompetent to take care of myself. He also has an extremely fragile ego, and any perceived slight or defiance can trigger a violent rage that he admits causes him to lose control of himself (hence the cat's fate for "misbehaving").

Suffice it to say, I don't want to be kidnapped. None of the money or outside communication I have will do much good if he takes away my access to them. What can I realistically do if he makes me live in the middle of nowhere with no phone, no money, and no transportation? It may be a fate worse than death.

I've been in therapy for half a year and reached the point where I am no longer stuck in a perpetual freeze response and can assert my needs and boundaries. This caused subconscious shifts in my behavior that my narcissistic parents have reacted with hostility towards, calling me "crazy" or "aggressive" for asking to be treated with respect and standing my ground. My mother finally snapped and said she wouldn't do anything for me anymore... I was frightened at first, but my life barely changed once she withdrew her support, because I was doing most things by myself already without realizing. I don't feel so helpless and dependent anymore because now I know my family was bullshitting me the whole time, and now it's even more clear that my brother has predatory intentions when he paints me as incapable of taking care of myself.

I've been working on a flexible plan to make a clean break from this situation. I can run away tomorrow and my brother won't be able to find me. But there's one problem that prevents me from truly disappearing: he has access to my full name, date of birth, and social security number, if not because he knows it, then because my mother will readily tell him.

Getting a job and a place to live can leave a paper trail that links my name and SSN to my new location, allowing me to be found no matter where I live in the U.S., and emigrating out of the country isn't a realistic option. It's also worth noting that my brother travels a lot and regularly takes road trips spanning several states, so it's not like geographical distance will deter him.

Is self-defense going to have to be a part of the solution here? Or making it almost impossible for him to get away with whatever he might pull if I tell him no? I would really prefer a solution where I could just disappear off the map and live my life separately; I would hate for the situation to have to come to this.

It's worth noting that I have not explored legal avenues yet because I don't want my brother to be notified of any actions I take against him, which I fear will escalate the situation.

I expect that no matter what, I will have to make some difficult decisions here. I spend every day in constant anxiety so severe that I am afraid to get food or use the bathroom for fear of encountering my brother. But I have to face reality and accept that hiding in my room isn't going to protect me from him. I think staying and trying to seek stable employment or education under such extreme threat is an unworkable solution.

I plan on visiting my local library soon, where I will be able to make phone calls without anyone in my family hearing.

Any ideas? I think having a trusted contact to stay with might be a decent temporary solution that will help me get my bearings, but I'm going to have to deal with the discoverability issues eventually. I would also need some way to find people I can trust in a limited time window, which seems inherently risky. But does that really compare to the risk of doing nothing? Staying at any shelter that will allow me to stay might also be a temporary solution, but given the finite number of shelters, I run the risk of being discovered eventually.

I've noticed that I often struggle to express what I actually mean during discussions.

Sometimes my main point gets lost because I phrase it poorly, use a weak example, or realize later that I misunderstood what the other person was saying. I often leave conversations thinking, "That wasn't what I was trying to say." or "I am not being taken serious."

For those of you who used to have this problem:

How did you get better at expressing your thoughts? Did you practice in a specific way? How do you make sure you're responding to someone's actual point instead of what you think they mean? Or is it really just keeping your mouth shut if you aren't knowledgeable about something.

It has gotten to the point that I find myself just not wanting to jump into the discussion, because I feel like that it's more about who is right , than understanding and being understood.

I'd love to hear any advice or habits that helped you become a clearer communicator. Book recommendations are also welcome.

Lemmy doens't have Social Skills community(that i can find) or anything so sorry for posting this in AskLemmy.

Reflections so far:

Be curious. Socratic method; phrase your statements as questions. It helps soften your dialogue quite a bit and makes the conversation a quest for discovery.

Try to formulate things simple. The simpler u can explain something, the better u understand it and the less words to be confused about for both parties.

Rhetorical Triangle: Ethos, Pathos and Logos

Write more. It forces u to think critical about things. And gives u the opportunity to reflect on your own opinions.

Don't take yourself, or other people too serious.

This is a bite valve from a hydration bladder. I'd like to disassemble it so that I can clean it out and let it dry properly. Is there any way to do that? I tried searching online but the results were either AI garbage or did not apply to this bite valve in particular. Pulling with mediocre force on any of the parts doesn't seem to do anything, and I don't want to pull any harder in fear of destroying the valve.

Edit~hey gang, when I posed this question and had some opinions. I realized I don't really feel one way or another about it and I can't really articulate a stance (probably just too tired). I won't be engaging. I don't want to just delete it though because some people made interesting points. Up to mods what to do with this.