How does this relate to internet access?

it's about minimising damage in the case of questions leak. The exam paper is the same across the country, so if a paper is leaked from one school, the internet would quickly make the problem nation wide.

You bribe them to not notice the phone you are using to help you answer exam questions. Without internet access that's more difficult.

People don’t have to die for degrowth, just less people have to be born

I agree with this sentiment but wonder… as long as there are humans, is an ever increasing resource consumption and waste production inevitable? Isn’t this unquenchable desire for more intrinsic to humans? Yes, this means we will probably blow the planet it up, but is there any other way?

With a sufficiently low and stable population, of, say, 50 million, renewable resources, such as water, wood, nitrogen, and fertilizer could be reused indefinitely. But non renewable resources, like oil, natural gas, and metals will eventually become permanently extinct, like oil and natural gas, or will have to be recycled in perpetuity, like metals. This is what awaits us sooner or later anyway.

If a business lasts long enough for your code to be replaced, that’s a success. The code you wrote helped your company beat the odds and stay alive.

I’m not convinced that an enterprising kid couldn’t easily bypass these restrictions

I'm convinced that barring kids who are exclusively homeschooled, every kid has a way to bypass these restrictions either by themselves or with a classmates help.

Source: was a kid not that long ago.

That’s true of nearly everything though. That lock on your front door? I can easily bypass it but yet you still have it. Anyone determined enough can do almost anything. But throw a wide enough net and at least you can prevent the casual and lazy offenders. Also I think prevention is an ongoing thing not a one and done thing. You shouldn’t say “oh I put a dns block on YouTube so now I don’t need to follow up on my kids” and I feel a lot of parents do just that.

My teenager has fake icons on her phone that say Snapchat, instagram, etc. they open up the calculator apps.

She doesn’t like being embarrassed that she’s not on social media, so she fakes it to fit in.

Her Grandma didn’t smoke, but all her friends did. So she kept a pack in her purse for years, never touched it. But had to fit in.

The people your teenager are trying to fit in with check to see for an app icon, but not the friend request from the social media account and posting history?

Just curious, what makes Crystal so much faster for this use case?

Crystal performance is close to Go-lang. It's just very fast across the board.

Consequently, just like Go-lang, it beats Ruby by an order of magnitude on pretty much any benchmark.

Newcomers often assume Crystal must be sluggish like Ruby because "how could a language with such a convenient syntax be so fast", but it really is not.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

> Crystal performance is close to Go-lang. It's just very fast across the board.

I know Go is known for it concurrency, does Crystal come close to that aswell?

in fact Crystal concurrency is the same with Go, both using coroutine technique. though Go should be more performance because it is built for that feature.

Interesting, I might give Crystal a try!

The biggest thing is the massive speed improvement compared to working with bloated ActiveRecord models, associations, plus some memory bloat. The Crystal implementation is massively fast dealing with database data.

I attempted to deploy a simple app on Fly a couple of weeks ago, but porting it from heroku became a nightmare, servers crashing, cryptic error messages, etc. Maybe I'm in the minority but in any case my experience with Fly definitely left me questioning the hype around it.

There are really only a few frameworks where our experience approaches Heroku. And even for those, it's only the newest versions. Phoenix, Rails, Laravel, and Remix are all pretty seamless to launch.

Most others require pretty decent Docker knowledge.

Indeed, the amount of overengineering these days is astounding

A lot of people that are passionate about things are not content with the status quo. They want to “make a mark” so to speak.

Not to dissuade you from finding passion, but from someone who’s always been passionate about things, it can drive you a little crazy. Not to mention the joy that you speak of is temporary, there is always another hill to climb/ goal to reach

One could imagine that human’s would appear unconscious to a hyper intelligent alien species. Perhaps it’s all relative.

You're conflating consciousness with intelligence. The two are not the same.

One is the experience of qualia, and the ability to hold preferences.

The other is the behaviors associated with making predictions and intentionally manipulating the world to achieve tasks.

We have a hyper-intelligent chess engines that cannot be argued to be conscious. We also have small mammalian minds, like Koalas, that are dumb as a brick, but are very likely conscious.

Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia.

A rock for example is below that threshold. The question then becomes what exactly is the minim level of perception we are willing to accept. Individual cells respond to their environment indirectly, that’s enough to qualify IMO but I accept people would disagree.

Which just illiterates people don’t generally use philosophical definitions directly. What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.

The ideas is if you had some, theoretical, mechanical computer built of stone (something trivially producible), if we believe that any artificial intelligences can be sentient, then it would be trivial to extend this to create a sentient, but essentially just a complex stone object.

A single stone is different than a system consisting of large numbers of stones in some non random configuration.

It’s like the flaw in that “Chinese room” thought experiment. The person following instructions isn’t the room any more than the walls are. All that thought experiment demonstrates is a CPU has a more limited perspective than the computer it’s part of.

I mean, showing that difference is extremely hard philosophically.

Consciousness is an actual thing. It's not an idea. The idea that somehow a collection of stone objects springs forth a consciousness when arranged in one pattern versus another... is certainly an odd concept.

Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system?

Temperature for example isn’t a substance. I am not saying consciousness couldn’t be a thing, but it just seems to be an assumption without justification.

As to arrangements of stuff being important, arrangement of individual pieces can make the difference between a watch and a pile of pieces or a person and a dead body. Many emergent properties depend on the specific arrangements of components.

>Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system?

If consciousness were simply the property of a system, then I'd assume it is effectively an illusion. I'm not sure, and I'm not saying this it would be de facto wrong, I'm just saying it's absurd for me to conceive of it this way, because if it is the case that it's a byproduct of a system, then there is effectively no self. It may be the case that that is true, bit it's useless to conceive of it.

Is math an illusion? Math is a property of systems, as is our and our calculators ability to do it. I would argue that makes it more real.

When you see an object in reality, you're really making a series of assumptions. What you see is reflected light, and you construct a highly innacurate but useful model of what that light logically implies. Something that is external can only be perceived epistemically, as a sufficiently good guess. There's no evidence we're not in a simulation, so it's a toss-up as to whether anything physical exists at all.

Contrast the concept of self awareness. 'I think, therefore I am' is not a guess. It is a certainty, regardless of the broader context, that somewhere, something is a host to my experiences and thoughts.

Tangent: You can extend that a little bit by reasoning that you exist, therefore the things you interact with must exist as something. That doesn't get you past the possibility of the matrix, but it does escape total nihilism.

As I said in my first post “What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.”

> Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia.

How do you know that? It’s entirely possible that a rock has all sorts going on that we just can’t detect.

Which sounds facetious, but given that we can’t even detect consciousness in humans, it seems difficult to rule it out entirely.

I wouldn’t say it’s a requirement for qualia, but rather for experience.

That’s a good point. I suppose then, to a hyper intelligent alien species we would be the Koala’s, unintelligent but conscious.

I am not entirely prepared to accept that koalas have small mammalian minds

I realized recently there’s no evidence that they don’t, but a wealth of evidence that they do.

I watch animals very closely now and I see more all the time that they are just like me in most ways. I suppose I used to watch them as a person who eats them, and my comfort with doing so depended on not seeing them as conscious creatures like me. Now that I don’t eat them, it’s as though there are more similarities than there are differences.

I suspect if animals could speak, we’d realize they’re remarkably similar to us. This probably sounds ridiculous to many people, and would have to me once too.

A key part of this is not that I’m elevating animals’ conscience to that of humans so much as lowering humans’. We tend to think we’re exceptional, but I think our exception is probably just intelligence. The rest, I don’t know, I suspect we’re all very much alike.

Apologies, I should have made my comment clear instead of trying to be witty - what I meant was that Koalas are marsupials, not mammals.

That said, I agree with what you are saying. We tend to assume a bigger than likely distance between us and other animals.

Ha, I completely overlooked that they’re marsupials, too.

Now I suppose neither of us are prepared to accept it.

I am hypo intelligent, but my coworkers definitely appear unconscious. Incomplete, ill-posed statement fragments over chat or better yet, in needless "sync" meetings.

Insects display unbelievable forms intelligence to anyone that pays attention.