SSD installs were, for the longest time, the single best ROI on upgrading a laptop. I think a SATA SSD in that 2012 bad boy could considerably boost its performance.
I still do this for friends and family: put in an SSD and maybe add a bit of RAM.
Either, clone the OS or else do a fresh install. The old drive goes into a USB enclosure if it's a laptop.
It feels like a brand new computer, going from minutes to seconds to do anything.
(Going from a Raspberry Pi 4 on a MicroSD to a pi5 with an nvme drive is a similar night and day difference. The pi5 feels like a snappy modern computer. Previous pis always felt slow.)
I agree, but the incentives for Alphabet to encourage content like this isn't there. The content that is encouraged is that which keeps eyeballs glued to YouTube.
There's always L Ron Hubbard, but I'll assume he's a one off aberration, as very few sci-fi authors veered off into founding infamously belligerent religious cults.
That said, the idea that people in power wouldn't think of ways to abuse pretty much any technology and that considering such things is some personal fault of @doublerabbit is quite the silly accusation for @iancmceachern to have made.
Hubbard is an example that proves the point, not a good dude.
I wasn't comparing "people in power" to the parent commenter.
I was comparing the study authors to the parent commenter.
My point was, more globally, should we halt scientific progress because things could be used with bad intent to do bad? Where, and how, do we draw the line?
Oh you have a comprehensive physical model of individual human behavior do you, in particular the decision making process of life-changing choices? I'd love to see the publication.
Yes, we can believe many things without any proof or justification. We call that religion, not "physics".
Edit: this was in response to a prior edit of the parent that (correctly) explicitly stated their position was a personal belief, not some sort of universally acknowledged axiom as they have since edited it to seem.
That's not the claim. The claim is that if you're born poor, your chances of being poor when you become an adult are much higher.
Perhaps you know that and still think that because the kid who is born poor "chose" to stay poor, but I hope no one capable of having a discussion about this topic thinks like that.
No, that is not the claim. That is a simple statistical fact that is obvious to anyone who looks at the data.
The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support my position.
> folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states"
FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??
Where does this quote you have made up come from? I am directly quoting the comment I directly replied to, you seem to be quoting... absolutely nothing? It's not on this page or the main article at least. Or do you use quotation marks to mean something besides a quote?
If you don't disagree with my criticism of the comment I replied to, you've certainly picked an odd way to express that.
My feeling is that dumbo-octopus wants to fight somebody who believes that we have no agency and that socioeconomic conditions entirely determine our future, but it's not working because there's nobody like that nearby.
My reply was to erikerikson, who I there directly quoted. Just because y'all jumped in in their stead does not make you authorities on their opinion. That said, I've been happy to disagree with the exact points you've made whenever you've made them. (Excepting, I suppose, your comment about the spirit of the edit, which I have no way to reasonably contest)
I wasn't trying to argue against free will or anything like that (I'm a compatibilist about that debate). I was just trying to point out that it's obvious that prior conditions are relevant. Prior decisions also. But free or not, there's nowhere to come from but the past.
It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:
> You have to balk when anyone says....
and
> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...
And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.
We do not agree, direction of causation is a matter of personal interpretation. And I'm not the only one who believes a reversal of order could be justified, Scott Aaronson's essay The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine^ goes into far more detail on the matter than I could hope to here. It's long but thorough - I highly recommend it if you have the time.
To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)
This is too simplified. What is the state of a person? It's an object of infinite information, the question what aspect you focus on is very non-trivial.
You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life.
Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious reason.
I agree with you that like the post I responded to that my response is too simplified. I also agree with the post I first responded to that we are, physically or mentally and emotionally, in at least some regards never in the same exact state twice.
To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal progression of identity and referencing the physical dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of that minutiae.
My point is that we are the intersection of what we are across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about what we mean by a person doesn't help.
You have like zero molecules left in your body from 10 years ago.
If you are worried about physics, the most important consideration is your diet.
And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate?
If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
For example if you want a house, you should have timed your birth to 30 years ago.
It's plug-in system is quite comprehensive. I just finished writing a note taking plug-in and the source code itself was a great reference for developing a plug-in.
