Did you even read the declaration? It is precisely about commitments to spend more and buying a string defense.

Also, despite what some sources in the US claim, Europe has been contributing quite a lot to the Ukraine war effort, in fact slightly more than the US.

Singapore has not managed it by being a "much smaller state", it managed it by being a highly repressive and authoritarian state. Myself, I prefer the junkies on the streets.

I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.

By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...

> authoritarian

Thank you for using this term instead of calling Singapore a dictatorship (as many others are wont to do). It's a much more accurate description of Singapore's style of governance.

> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined.

I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics:

"Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."

It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.

That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all!

Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent.

LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!

Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality.

The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted.

I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.

I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle.

I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.

Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard", and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.

Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)

There are lots of statements we can form that "make sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince yourself of something when the only standard is "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means. You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space. Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement (science).

If consciousness isn't a physical process, then you've lost me again. People have discussed these things for hundreds of years.

> You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space.

Yeah, there's not a lot down there, mostly your assumptions about your sense inputs corresponding to some kind of causally consistent external reality. It's the same region as the lead up to what you seem to take as an axiom, "Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement".

I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world. So it's not really an axiom. There's no shortage of metaphysical ideas from the past, from well-intentioned people who thought they could intuit the world, that we have had to throw out.

> I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world.

This is not actually a proof. It is, however, exactly the kind of soft reasoning that motivates reasonable axioms. I'm not saying it's a bad axiom, I'm saying you should know what you're doing. That way when you run into a domain where it doesn't apply very well, you know where and how to back up and restart.

Bathrooms need icons because they have to assume users who can't read, or don't know the local language. None of these two problems apply to language selection 99.9999% of the time: if you can't read, you can't use a system based on reading no matter the language, and if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it.

Quite obviously you never interacted with any software which defaults to the language you can't read, despite having a support for the language you do understand.

How would flags in the language selection help? The actual problem is finding the language selection at all (which still has an icon of a (stylised) globe on MacOS).

Language select used to have a flag of current language. Political correctness might have made companies change that convention making it hard to find as you say, but it used to be that you looked for flags to find the language setting.

I remember windows having flags for the languages, but now it is a strange A symbol that I have no clue what it is and I'd have no chance of finding if it was in the wrong language.

> if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it

So, if you saw any of these languages in a list, you wouldn't select them?

英语

영어

อังกฤษ

Come on now. Can you point to one single case of something close to this scenario having happened in real life to a small self-hosted WordPress blog? Or even a big one? Governments are not that stupid, they are not that malicious and they do not have infinite resources to pursue such frivolous and nonsensical activities. This reads like some weird sort of paranoid legal fanfic.

I wonder if advertisers feel the same way. If I was buying ads on YouTube, my least favorite audience would be the people who go out of their way to not see them.

Versus what, tv where the medium demand the highest cost per eyeball and every single person is a captive audience (unless you DVR)? Still smells like a good deal for advertisers unless the idea have changed significantly in the years since I cared to know anything about the ad markets.

I think advertisers haven't adapted well to the youtube market at all. They're still operating under the TV model where ad breaks are an expected part of the tv viewing experience and don't understand that on youtube they are intrusive as hell . This also couples negatively with advertisers viewing youtube apparently not putting any limits on ad length as an opportunity to deliver a sermon. I think most people would be annoyed but not totally put off by a couple 15 seconds ads but the issue is that users just have no idea if they'll get a 15 second ad or a 15 minute ad so they skip everything out of extreme frustration with the entire experience.

I don't know about that. Ads seem to mostly work on inundation, not cultivating positivity.

Try to find out why, and please avoid Internet "red pill" stuff. I'm not telling you this as any sort of political statement nor am I trying to fight any culture wars here. This is just the advice of a middle-age guy with perfectly mediocre / average looks, and some life experience.

From what I observe, 9 times out of 10 the problem lies in personality. I know plenty of guys with no money and no looks that have no trouble attracting the interest of the opposite sex. Why? Because they have a great personality, as in, it feels good to be around them. Furthermore, people who rely only on look and status to attract a partner and do not work on themselves are unlikely to have a happy relationship in the long term.

I am not blaming people for having unappealing personalities. This is usually the product of things that are outside of their control, usually some sort of trauma. Life is not fair. A lot of people are traumatized and do not realize it. This can be overcome, but you must want to overcame it and you must be able to face harsh truths. Maybe therapy can help, maybe meditation, maybe even things that are considered "woo" but that allow you to face your demons. Whatever works and clicks with you is a valid answer. All roads lead to Rome if you are courageous enough.

Check out this guy, I have the impression he is particularly suited for the HN demographics: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG

Good luck man, you can do it!

I also don't want to dredge up culture wars stuff, but just wanted to say it's really nice to see men warning other men away from the redpill path. Thanks for encouraging therapy and self-healing.

Do you think living with my parents due to disability could be an issue?

Probably someone else who has had the same experience and understands you completely.

The question comes into whether you've continue to apply self-effort towards your inner growth, like the other person may have.

When we go about seeking our best way, it increases the chances of meeting others doing the same.

Awesome, I recommended the same channel.

This channel looks to be a solid recommendation.

Personality is everything, and can be developed from leveraging one's sincere ability to be curious.

As someone who accidentally outgrew gaming after playing them more than anyone I knew, a channel by this name, with this kind of content can shine the path forward to other equally interesting sides of one's self.

In my case, I rediscovered creating and building things was more interesting than playing in others worlds.

I never really quit gaming. I just didn't identify as someone who played games any longer.

Good advice.

In my observation, especially as you get out of your 20s, single guys are… kinda phone it in for various reasons. Even moderate effort makes a dude a rockstar.

This kind of advice is such garbage.

No, reading "come as you are" or any of the shit bell hooks writes doesn't just fix issues for people like the OP. Telling them then that they have a "bad personality" is so fucked up. Personality is subjective, and most people on earth can find others who believe that their own personality is "perfect".

Someone not being successful in the dating market does not necessarily imply that their personality is bad. Saying they have no game and implying that this speaks about their personality is really hurtful. Women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality - and indeed, given what we know about how seductive dark triad traits are, it may in fact be a signal of a bad personality.

It's pretty bad when you straight up recommend "woo" to people, and effectively say "all roads lead to rome... EXCEPT THE RED PILL!"

The reality is that no matter how garbage Tate et all are, the alternative explanations for why increasingly large amounts of men have no game are so bad that huge swaths of men get seduced by tate's bullshit.

Your kind of response only takes impressionable men who would fall for it and further entrenches their beliefs that the red pill is the "subversive", "real" way that alpha men are ending up with harems while billy the beta ends up making another HN post about typescript

Something can be hurtful and true. In fact, it's almost always the case that the most true and important things are hard to hear, hard to believe.

When you can accept that your problems are your own responsibility (which is not the same as "fault"), you'll start to move forward.

Yes, I'm speaking from experience. It's not easy.

To be clear, I didn't tell OP that he has a bad personality. I don't know OP, how could I know that? What I told him, and do know, is that in my set of experiences this is usually the problem. And I include myself in that set of experiences, to be clear.

I completely agree with you that "women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality". Women are not immune to having terrible personalities. Women, like men, are highly flawed beings. We are all human. We all have to work on ourselves. What I will say is that if you have a good personality, you are more likely to attract a partner that you can be happy with for the long term. This is precisely how you avoid dark triad people, by being self-confident, by knowing who you are, by not needing constant external validation, by not being so influenced by what other people thing of you, by being empathic but not a people pleaser.

You talk about "game". Game is transactional. Thinking in those terms attracts people with transactional mindsets. That is precisely the problem with the red pill, it guides you towards that world. It is self-reinforcing. It leads to depression and despair, because it guarantees to make you more and more aligned with the sort of people that you should avoid. It thrives on the funhouse mirror that is social media, where if you don't make a million a year and are more than 6 feet tall you might as well shoot yourself in the head, unless you use "game" (i.e. deceive people). It's a path to hell.

I did not "straight up recommend woo". What I talked about is "things that sound like woo". Which is another way to say, have an open mind to things that might seem mushy to your male brain, that are not necessarily supported by peer-reviewed studies. Be less mentally rigid, is what I am saying. Men tend to fall very easily in this trap, again me included.

I love subversive stuff. I was a teenager in the 90s, we were all edge lords back then. I miss the time when conspiracy theories were fun. We are not in that time anymore. Tate is vile. He is an abuser of men and women, and he is the one selling impressionable men on lies that will destroy their lives.

You are probably quite young or inexperienced yourself if you think that having and harem will make you happy. The idea makes me shudder. Is it possible to have an "harem"? Sure. You will be surrounded by dark triad women, or by victims who need your money. None of them will love you. Why would you want that?

The advice is "find out why" and "work on yourself." I wasn't aware these were at all controversial, even within red-pill spheres.

You seem to be rejecting personality as something to be addressed at all, which is frankly shocking. I'm fascinated to know what alternatives you suggest, as your comment contains no actionable advice.

I can't express how much I appreciate this - thank you!

> These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses.

What is fashionable to call AI these days are ultimately rule-based systems with if elses. It just so happens that it's a bazillion of those, and they are created by gradient descent.

And that they're not if-elses but nonlinear functions.

You mean functions such as:

   if x > 0:
       return x
   else:
       return 0

?

That's one example of a nonlinear function, yes. You also have (eˣ)/(1+eˣ), or (e²ˣ-1)/(e²ˣ+1), or a host of others which don't contain anything if-like at all.

My somewhat snarky point was that there is no magic distinction such as:

> These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses.

I believe I already made my point with the ReLU example, if you don't want to concede it that is also ok.

I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Neural nets are fundamentally different from rule-based systems. The fact that one of the non-linear functions which is sometimes used in neural nets can be implemented using an if statement seems utterly irrelevant.

That's RELU, which clearly belongs to the realm of AI. Dangerous stuff.

It's almost like a chose the example on purpose ;)

I love Calibre, and I am very thankful to the people who work on it. It's a shiny example of an open source project that creates a common good.

I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually, I feel that every time I start it, this little chore is imposed on me, without any reward. If you really must release updates at this rate for some reason, then I would say that an auto-updater that runs in the background would be a huge huge improvement to the overall experience.

I update it with Brew on macOS and Scoop [1] on Windows (but I guess it is included in other package managers such as chocolatey).

Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a packaged version is a nice workaround for me.

[1]: https://scoop.sh/

It's also on the official microsoft package manager (winget).

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

It is: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=calibre

I have to admit I've never heard a complaint about too frequent optional updates.

Sure, if you are forced to update. But if your Calibre ain't broken then just skip the update?

If it was security updates or features that I would like, then I'd want to update frequently. By having too many releases users will start skipping them, and then users aren't getting those important updates.

Realistically, Calibre should just integrate an update delivery mechanism such as Sparkle on macOS (not sure about other platforms), but sadly I think the developer has Strong Opinions and I can't see this happening.

Forcing the option to be presented is also a problem. People aren't running the software to manage the software, they are running the software to read a book or whatever.

Right on.

That's a huge issue these days. We have to spend far too much time updating or upgrading software [1], figuring out why or even whether it is needed, (trying to) fix issues arising from all that, (trying to) roll back if we cannot solve those issues, having downtime on use of the software while all this is (mis)happening, and more.

[1] And what the heck is the difference between updating and upgrading, anyway? (I'm not interested in googling it. More busy work.) And who the heck is interested in the difference? Not end users, for sure. I have come across these two similar, hence maddening terms, in at least Ubuntu Linux distributions. Why can't they use less ambiguous terms?

And to top it all, I'm a techie. If I (and many other techies) have such issues, what to say about laymen, who are sometimes called "normies" by said techies and even by biztechies? I've actually heard or read both types using that term, disparagingly. The irony is that it only reflects on them, i.e. all of us in those fields, because the term implies that we are abnormal - with good reason.

End of rant.

I'll see myself out now, your tech honour (overlord).

;)

I call installing new software versions "updating" because its newer, while "upgrading" implies things are improved, which is far from a given when installing software updates.

Good explanation. Date meaning time and grade meaning quality. I get it, thanks.

Don't package managers solve this? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I was under the impression that good package managers existed for all major desktop OSes. Surely Windows and MacOS aren't still in a situation where apps are expected to regularly check for updates and upgrade themselves, right?

For Windows, false, unless you install it through the "Microsoft Store"

Chocolatey exists and supports Calibre.

I don't have this problem because I just don't update mine very often.

Package managers are the way to go for this kind of software. Brew, scoop, snap...

This is already possible…

I think it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If releases weren't frequent people would have to build their own from the master branch. A system package manager makes updates really low friction. Ubuntu seems to be only a few months behind the upstream releases. IMO individual packages should not be reinventing the package manager wheel.

The main problem with Calibre is it's quite hard to package and many distros seem to have given up.

The releases are frequent in part because Goyal refuses to separate all the content-based stuff (parsers for online news sources, for example) from the application.

This is an extra pain in the ass for users because if your favorite news site parser breaks, you have no choice but to upgrade Calibre itself instead of just updating a config file.

At a minimum the news-parsing stuff should have long ago been split out into a plugin. It has nothing to do with calibre's function as an ebook library tool.

The updates have nothing to do with news parsers. News parsers are loaded dynamically, every time they are used. So are metadata downloading plugins. So are get books stores. Indeed almost all code that parses data from the web in calibre is loaded dynamically independent of calibre updates. The calibre developer whom you so blithely complain about here actually jumps through a million hoops to make sure those bits of calibre remain backward compatible with version of calibre and therefore python, going back a decade and more.

I agree with you but I also think that calibre should have update patches instead of downloading and installing 100mb file every 2 weeks. Calibre comes with its own python it is mostly self contained so it would be great if we had a choice for downloading just an update patch. I don't think this is something Kovid has the time though he probably could do it. It's the same problem when he was not willing earlier to move to python 3 as the amount of man hours required vs maintaining Python2 for calibre himself was easier. But someone came along and started porting calibre to python 3 and Kovid used their help to move to python 3. So if a dev comes along with better way to update calibre Kovid will probably accept it but as it is not a priority for him he might not ever get around to doing it himself.

This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules. If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.

> This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the contrary.

> If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.

The only thing stopping me is common sense.

> If releases weren't frequent people would have to build their own from the master branch.

But why??? What in the world of Calibre demands such urgent updates? I use a variety of software (some quite complex) that do a great job with much less frequent updates. Why not Calibre?

A big portion of what people use Calibre for is parsing, converting, and generating HTML. The epub file format, in practice, is zipped, poorly-specified and poorly-generated HTML. It is far from an exact science, and minor improvements to this can result in countless lives being saved slight amounts of discomfort from terrible HTML-handling or poorly-handled OCR.

To give an example, I once needed to reference a 2003 book that was out of print for a long-running project I was working on at the time, and the publisher who released it digitally had gone out of business, and the author's mailserver had gone dark. I checked the usual suspects for the PDF or hard copy of the book, but the only remaining copy of it I could find was a Calibre automated epub conversion from quite a few years in the past. A few years later, I once again looked for a better copy, only to find another Calibre epub conversion, but still no PDF in sight. This one, seemingly generated a few years later, was much higher in quality.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I really agree. Update fatigue is a real thing. MKVToolnix is the same way, every single time I start it I am interrupted by an update dialog. Even the act of just dismissing it is a minor annoyance.

I would be happier if it just did it in the background while it was running like Chrome and Firefox. Download the update in the background and then silently install it next time the app starts. I don’t need another daemon running in the background at all times.

> Download the update in the background and then silently install it next time the app starts

and silently break something the next time you start an app? Better use some scoop package manager and update at your own schedule

>I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually...

Super easy on the Mac. No issues at all.

Updates are hardly mandatory. I heard advice on Mobileread a few years ago saying don't bother updating unless there's something you need, and I've often skipped several versions between updating mine.

I myself love the frequent updates but understand where you're coming from. Perhaps you can install/upgrade via your package manager, on macos at least homebrew has Calibre (and his other project kitty) available as casks.

Using Homebrew Cask for Calibre actually makes the problem worse because the download is consistently very slow for some people. For me, it took around an hour the last time I had it installed on my Mac.

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/issues/104814

I have Calibre installed via Homebrew and it still constantly pesters me.

I haven’t looked into it but I suspect the app is updated far more often than the cask.

Yet another background daemon. No thanks. Update when you need to, it's not like it's mandatory.

> Lack of religiosity is the default state

On the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...

> and with it you get the default discontent with death

That is a huge assumption. There is a huge variety of ways in which societies, cultures and individuals relate and have related with death.

Popular or widespread doesn't mean it’s default. Religion is part of culture and that’s something that’s passed down person to person. A blank culture or no culture has no religion. Tabula rasa.

I’m not assuming anything, I’m not pegging the default discontent with death to a particular value, I don’t know what it is and it’s irrelevant. I’m just saying the some religions, with certain concepts of afterlife, like catholicism, would reduce that discontent.

Why do you assume a tabula rasa person would assume that consciousness ceases to continue on death? I don't think there's anything obvious that would suggest this goes one way or the other and that different people could end up settling for different conclusions. An obvious natural guess would be that it'd be similar to sleeping, as in, you would see dreams

Why would you assume that I assume a tabula rasa person assumes that consciousness ceases to continue with on death? I assume that they wouldn’t know what happens and have some baseline level of feelings about death.

Because why would consciousness continue after death when it didn't continue before birth?

What's different about the post-birth state compared to post-death?