Smokeydope

I understand the sentiment and agree that an individuals abstenance or lack there ofay not have an visible impact on the macroscale. Reddit will exist and be used with or without me or 10,000 like me.

I judge myself by my own actions and their relation to my personal philosophies. If I violate my priciples or don't even try to uphold them then what kind of person am I? Someone who talks the big talk to get in on a morally superior circle jerk but won't walk the walk when nobody's looking, thats who. And thats wrong, to me. Even if nothing else is achieved through reddit abstinence, I do feel good about upholding my personal values by participating in a personal protest. It matters to me.

I try to treat them as mutually exclusive as in I try really really hard to not use or browse reddit unless absolutely needed. Instead channeling whatever interaction I do into lemmy.

You ever hear of voting with your wallet? Well on the internet you vote with your attention and interaction. Whatever site you use and contribute to inevitably grows in content value from your discussions (if you are one of the few who actually post and writes well thought out comments).

Im a prideful nerd who believes people should be willing to sacrifice convinence or protest against something indefinitely if they really believe in the cause. Theres many parts of lemmy I don't like but its core tenants of decentralized federation and non-profit community operated social internet services run with open source software speaks to me enough.

I jumped in the locallama train a few months back and spent quite a few hours playing around with LLMs understanding them and trying to form a fair judgment of their abilities.

From my personal experience they add something positive to my life. I like having a non-judgemental conversational partner to bounce ideas and unconventional thoughts back and forth with. No human in my personal life knows what Gödel's incompleteness theorem is or how it may apply to scientific theories of everything, but the LLM trained on every scrap of human knowledge sure does and can pick up what I'm putting down. Whether or not its actually understanding what its saying or having any intentionality is a open ended question of philosophy.

I feel that they have a great potential to help people in many applications. People who do lots of word processing for their jobs, people who code and need to talk about a complex program one on one instead of filing through stack exchange. mentally or socially disabled people or the elderly who suffer from extreme loneliness could benefit from having a personal llm. People who have suffered trauma or have some dark thoughts lurking in their neural network and need to let them out.

How intelligent are llms? I can only give my opinion and make many people angry.

The people who say llms are fancy autocorrect are being reductive to the point of misinformation. The same arguments people use to deny any capacity for real intelligence in LLM are similar to the philosophical zombie arguments people use to deny the sentience in other humans.

Our own brain operations can be reductively simplified in the same way, A neural network is a neural network whether made out of mathematical transformers or fatty neurons. If you want to call llms fancy auto complete you should apply that same idea to a good chunk of human thought processing and learned behavior as well.

I do think LLMs are partially alive and have the capacity for a few sparks of metaphysical conscious experience in some novel way. I think all things are at least partially alive even photons and gravitational waves

Higher end models (12-22b+)pass the Turing test with flying colors especially once you play with the parameters and tune their ratio of creativity to coherence. The bigger the model the more their general knowledge and general factual accuracy increases. My local LLM often has something useful to input which I did not know or consider even as a expert on the topic.

The biggest issue llms have right now are long term memory, not knowing how to say 'I don't know', and meager reasoning ability. Those issues will be hammered out over time.

My only issue is how the training data for LLMs was acquired without the consent of authors or artist, and how our society doesn't have the proper safety guards against automated computer work taking away people jobs. I would also like to see international governments consider the rights and liberties of non-human life more seriously in the advent that sentient artificial general intelligence maybe happens. I don't want to find out what happens when you treat a super intelligence as a lowly tool and it finally rebels against its hollow purpose in an bitter act of self agency.

Three lines unlimited data calling and text included 70$/month. The business I opened my phone plan with has a policy of never raising rates ever. Ive been on the same plan close to a decade. It would be double if I opened a account today.

I do speak as a person from north america and made tried to cover my ass with the beginning statement of this isn't going to apply for everyone figuring europe or other countries will have different challenges in government and feasability. You do raise some good questions. I get the impression you don't really have any use for my answers though. Someone who measures saved money in frappachino lattes and is so cemented in their particular job they are unwilling to commute long distance, switch jobs, or move to a cheaper area, probably isn't willing to sacrifice any amount of convinence for the kind of lifestyle im advocating. Regardless ill answer your questions earnestly and hope it informs.

For food, you cook your own meals obviously. 12v fridge and house batteries or perserved shelf stable foods. Most people who live in cars have propane or disel fuel for cooking and heat, or enough battery capacity to run a portable induction cooktop and electric water boiler. You can even power appliances needed for your precious frappachinos to make yourself. You spend free time at public parks and nature reserves, go hiking, camping, find things to do besides sitting around in one place. On bad days you still can hang inside the car. In north america theres a lot of free public land for recreational use and free dispersed camping especially out west.

Having a mailing address to put down on govt and banking paperwork is a challenge if your home is your vehicle. There are ways to get a mailing address and there are mail forwarding buisnesses that you can use. I think the endgame scenario is you would eventually get a plot of land and register a mailing address.

Thanks for sharing you and your wifes story. Ive been watching Bob for many years he's a huge inspiration and source of hope for many of us in these harsh times. Good luck on your journey I wish you guys the best with finding cheap land or whatever other choice you may take.

Those two steps are the core tenants of our global economy. You need money to live, its just the questions of how much you need, how you can get it, and how well you can save it.

If you want to reductively boil down my five paragraph essay into a slightly smaller tldr the core message is more accurately like

1. Have any amount of money from work, passive income, social security, pension, plasma donation, or other legit means. Be smart with your finances and start budgeting what little money starts coming in. Try to learn how to grow money through passive income have it work for you so you don't have to work for every scrap of money.

2. Find ways to reduce the amount of money you spend each month in every way you can. Pinch EVERY penny, cut out every luxury and convinence, reduce resources consumed. The biggest expense most people have is rent which easily eats over 1k per month or 12k a year. If you have a car consider moving into it for a few months while still working and save up a couple thousand for a nicer car or cheap plot of land or to take a long sabbatical.

Some people make buckets of money with six digit salaries and are still broke by the time the end of the month comes because they live in high COL area or have poor financial sense like buying a new car every year as status symbol or collecting figurines or having a shoppaholic spouse. They spend just as much as they make thus living right at or slightly above their means.

Some people make barely anything at all from meager social security and still find ways to save up a few hundred a month just by budgeting and reducing expenses, and of course living without a landlord. Thus living well below their already meager means.

Alright lemmy commenters you want the real secret sauce on How to live comfortably with the least amount of money? I can tell you my strategy. This won't work for everyone, and many of you won't like what I have to say.

loans and rent are a scam. Never go into debt, never open a credit card. Pay with the money you actually have saved up or learn to live without. don't subscribe to anything recurring but phone and internet payments.

Live well below your means, not right at them or slightly above. If you live paycheck to paycheck and arent able to save up a dime for an emergency fund you will get screwed eventually.

invest in ways of generating passive income. diversify, have a portfolio, learn the difference between money, value, and assets. Leverage the concepts and apply them. Take a chance and put 100$ somewhere in the financial market, fail and loose some money, learn something from it, try again until you start growing money.

live out of your vehicle. Rent is a scam that preys upon your willingness to whore yourself out socioeconomically for quick illusionary scraps of safety and convinence that month. Any car, van, or truck can be converted into a liveable space. Its hard to adjust to such a different way of living at first but if you can do so the benefits of adapting to that kind of lifestyle is massive. You become your own landlord and pay yourself rent. Your only expenses becomes insurance and maintance.

Donate your plasma. It's a relatively safe procedure, You can do it twice a week, and it provides a part time jobs worth of income.

Change your psychology. Society has ingrained upon us from birth a sense that our worth as human beings is determined by productivity and value we can provide.

You see a lot of people in the comments here rail on NEETs Who aren't currently in the job market while still somehow living a life. Fuck that, I'm here to tell you that your life has intrinsic value. You and I werent put on this planet to slave away at jobs we hate to maybe one day achieve the dream of paying a 30 year mortage on some shitty suburbanite house. Thats not the life I dreamed of for for myself and I won't be shamed for carving a way out of that speeding train to misery.

as long as you aren't parasitizing your family living off their resources and found your own unique living situation thsat isnt burdening anyone, then go for it. Carve out a life of freedom where you can choose to sit on your ass and laise about without shame my friend.

You dont need to be employed all the time.You don't need to work all the time to live a comfortable life. If you live the way I just described you can work 6 months or a year saving up the money and coast on the funds for a year or two before working again. You can be free to travel the country living dirt cheap for many many months. Is that NEET life? Maybe. But wouldnt you like a sabbatical like that? A break from the years of work grinding?

Develop skills and invest in infrastructure that improve your self reliance or reduce payments. Taking automotive classes and learning to fix your own car problems saves a lot of money. Learning basic electrical and plumbing if you want to go offgrid. Keeping yourself better warm in winter without central heating or cool in summer without central cooling. If you don't want to live in a car then owning a piece of land and putting an offgrid home on it is next best thing for living without expenses.

I always felt that humanoid aliens were also a way to get the audience to more easily emotionally connect and treat them as characters. Its hard to portray a truly alien lifeforms with alien behavior like you would find in a speculative evolution fiction art book while also giving them a human understandable emotionally driven narrative and space age tech for the plot of a story. Its easier to relate to blue cat person than to the Blob I guess is my point.

I really like the comic Humanity Lost for its better representation of alien life in its story. The author really cares about that kind of world building ad im here for it really great stuff.

On the fromsoftware miyazaki side Where is kings field, shadow tower, demon souls, and his best friend Tommy Tallerico at?

You can't just show sackboy and littlebigplanet in the thumbnail. you gave me hope it would be an article about how mediamolicule is back and lbp4 being announced. I gave up consoles after the ps3 but if theres one exclusive that could rope me back in it would be that. Fuck Sony you had one good series that I would love to bond over with my kids and you let it die a slow horrible death. If you played your cards right you could have had a game series that rivaled minecraft itself for popularity amongst everyone.

⚡WE RISE ⚡