Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • He’s right. There just isn’t the political will in the population to reopen the topic of Brexit now. Whether anyone likes it or not, the things British people really care about right now, in no particular order, are:

    • Inflation

    • House & utility & food prices

    • Immigration

    • NHS waiting lists & more dentists

    • Train infrastructure.

    People can make very legitimate arguments linking Brexit to those issues, but it’s not politically viable to open that can of worms again. They just really want their lives to improve for the first time in over a decade.


  • There’s also the fact that a hypothetical end to US aid wouldn’t end EU aid. It’s definitely not on the same scale as the US due to our much smaller military sector, but that’d likely change in the event of a US shut-down of aid.

    In my mind, the most likely results would be:

    Short-term: Very dangerous period for Ukraine, they lose some ground, lots of men (similar to the last time they had a crippling artillery shell shortage).

    Medium-term: EU military sector slowly ramps up to meet demand, as about 3/4 of central & eastern EU considers this an existential war that cannot be lost at any cost.

    Long-term: After the war is over (however many more years that takes), Russia finally negotiates some kind of ceasefire where they can save some face internally and brag about how they “Denazified” Ukraine while going home and accomplishing nothing, EU is much more self-sufficient and therefore buys less from the US, and they aren’t seen as a trust-worthy ally militarily anymore. Even if on paper most EU members are still in NATO, they consider the security guarantees of the EU as much more important and serious.




  • At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals

    This is absolutely the right approach, even if you were planning to quit from the start (not the case with you, but still). “This is my last ever cigarette” just caused me to delay and delay and delay. The only realistic way to do it for me was one craving at a time (“I’m not smoking for the next hour”), then a day at a time. Handling the hours and days was hard, but once you do that the weeks and months take care of themselves.

    Vaping for me was a major misstep. Just caused me to consume more nicotine than when I was smoking.


  • There’s two separate addictions going on with smoking: habit and chemical. What patches, nicotine gum, etc are trying to help people do is tackle them separately.

    This means you can focus on getting out of the habit of lighting up after a coffee, or after a meal, or whatever triggers you had, while delaying the chemical withdrawal which seriously messes with your head until later. Tackling the two seperately is easier for many people.

    With that said, patches don’t work for everyone, and I hope you find the cessation aid (if any) that works for you. Quitting smoking is an absolute bitch.

    For me personally, the most helpful aid was nicotine gum, and then swapping out the nicotine gum for normal gum once I was confident I’d kicked the habit part and could focus on the chemical withdrawal.







  • So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

    The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

    Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

    While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

    Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

    There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

    To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.




  • I’m happy with the Oxford definition: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”.

    LLMs don’t have knowledge as they don’t actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

    If asked to answer 10*5, they can’t reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren’t in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.



  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.mldeleted
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    28 days ago

    Start looking now. Tell prospective employers that you’re working on the certification and include it in your CV (as a work in progress, ofc). Job searches take a long time, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’re out.

    Edit: @MrBobDobalina@lemmy.ml has exactly the correct approach for getting it in writing. Keep it professional, emotionless, as close to an accurate summary of the situation and the decisions made as possible.