Well, 2001 is actually a happy ending, as Dave is reborn as a cosmic being. Solaris, at least in the book, is an attempt by the sentient ocean to communicate with researchers through mimics.
BTW: Those are just the monetary donations towards the foundation, additionally you have developers that are directly paid to work on the FreeBSD project (search for "Sponsored by"):
Can't argue it's niche but it's far from uncommon. The BSD licensing allows usage in places allergic to the GPL so you see it (or don't) often used behind the scenes in lots of products.
...and I'm writing this comment on a Lenovo T450s running FreeBSD. Dang can probably verify the user agent of my POST, if he has nothing better to do (pretty sure he does).
The experience is not perfect (just _now_ I'm enjoying fighting with a deskhop (https://github.com/hrvach/deskhop) which isn't seen as a ums pointing device unless another usb mouse is also present, but that's the first problem in months (admittedly it's also the first change in as many months)).
Would be interested to hear more about BSD as a daily driver.
Is the slower wifi problematic? How about browsing the web, are the major bowsers (chromium or Firefox) supported? What about running the tools necessary for web development (or any other language that isn’t C)?
Chromium and Firefox are both there, yes. Sometimes one or 2 versions behind if you go for the packaged version, but I've compiled them both before quite painlessly. Even in the packages you may occasionally run into something not working - browsers are so big now and not all corner cases get tested for every possible OS. I've had tabs crashing, although not since a couple years.
The wifi is not really slow but disconnects with a certain frequency (at least 1 brief drop per day) which on the same hardware didn't happen on Windows or Linux. The slowness is not noticeable until you're trying to move gigabytes - watching youtube is unaffected for example.
Can't help with the web development info, I'm relatively ignorant there - more on the sysadmin side of things :) but a lot of Linux software can be run directly thanks to a compat layer (linuxulator) which gives you a convincing impersonation of a centos, debian or ubuntu - or you can actually run the distro themselves in a jail.
The biggest absence is Docker. Not as a concept (jails are actually better under many aspects, and native to FreeBSD), but because so much software is now shipped like that. There's progress to get them working properly, otherwise you run them in a Linux Bhyve (BSD hypervisor) VM.
I haven't tried running an LLM since none of my FreeBSD machines have hardware even remotely capable of that, would be nice to hear if anyone was successful.
It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics.
I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent".
Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.
I've always thought of mathematics as something that reveals itself - self evident for those who know to look for it.
Humans are absolutely "generally intelligent" - the languages we all come preloaded with provide a substantial base hominid intelligence.
Were one to compare all known species and their respective forms of intelligence, humans would be the standard for general intelligence and intelligence in general - this is only debatable if you entirely ignore the works of humanity, as it is only us that can see all known things as resources or potentially so.
Let a tree be known by it's fruits. Not to discredit the intelligence of dolphins, octupi/squids, chimps, ravens, certain dogs and cats but by no means are they, in any measurable way, comparable generally to a human or even specifically, save species specific intelligence, like how to operate a built in ink cloud organ.
If the point of evolution is to create endlessly more complex iterations of life forever, which it might as well be, we are the finest known example of evolutions success - we are the earth's magnum opus. Furthermore, were Earth alive and we its offspring, we are more than it - as a child is more than it's mother or father alone. We are the most important thing here rn.
At least so far. Definitely win overall.
Can another species do math, identify everything, name it all and turn a tree into a chair? That's base reqs to challenge for the smart crown.
tl;dr: I agree with the comment I'm replying to - I just like to write books
I had an experience where I knew(not believe) I was the kind of the screen in which everything appears(including the human body). Lasted for a couple of hours.
After the experience all the religious teaching started to make sense instantly.
I think the thing is Self, Soul, Consciousness, Atman, Reality, Simulation, Screen or whatever you call it.
It's what all the world religions point to.
Though teachings has been made so hard to grasp by culture and dogma.
It's something you(the ego) cannot know without experiencing it. You can try to believe it. But the ego will not let you.
I don't think the ego has any intent. I think it's a collection of memories and emotions that you have accumulated over the past. Like a cache that is outdated.
Imagine your knowingness as an information stream of images (memories included), smell, feelings, sound etc.
For most people the information stream has the ego dominating.
When the ego is strong people identify themselves with the idea of them based on their memories, beliefs, culture etc.
When the ego goes away I think you are left with who you really are which when you experience feels eternal and permanent and is a placeholder in which everything appears.
>We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies
Did we? If we're in a simulation instead of base reality, it's possible that simulation have actually created them for us when we started looking, depending on the scope and paramaters of simulaiton scenario.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The idea that the act of observation impacts an experiment (or how particles behave) is one of the most counterintuitive and surprising “truths” I’ve ever heard. I would love to hear a logical explanation of why (not just a description of it).
Observation doesn't impact experiments. Interaction does. In fact, it is quite difficult to formulate the "collapse" of the wavefunction as a physical interaction and to the extent that we can, the experimental evidence seems to suggest that it is not. This is a common misconception about quantum mechanics, partly because even undergraduate texts conflate the uncertainty principal with observation.
The logical explanation: "observation" has nothing to do with conscious woo, it's just that in order to have a definite answer we build experiments so they collapse the wavefunction.
It's like asking someone on a date: maybe they were in a superposition before, but now they have to answer, and having answered ("been observed"), that answer is highly likely to stay constant in the short term.
(when you think about it from this point of view, it's classical physics that's counterintuitive: why should we expect that asking questions about one projection of state doesn't affect the answers we get from later asking about others, not even in the slightest?)
The point I was trying to make is that if we are indeed in a simulation, and I'm not saying that we definitely are, but if we are - one possibility to design such a simulation in a way to make it more efficient is to actually make computations depend on the observer, meaning that sorry, but in this case it would have conscious "woo" built in.
Just in the same way as that only visible from current perspective objects are being drawn on a frame of a 3D game.
Currently unobserved parts of the simulation might exist in different form.
It's okay to disagree with simulation theory, but it is a perfectly valid possibility according to everything we know.
Personally, I don't think it's the only possibility, but i think it's quite probable and should be taken seriously.
One problem is that gravity is universally coupling, so no part of the universe is technically "unobserved." I suspect that we could look back at the dynamics of large scale systems and see deviations from GR if the simulation were neglecting any part of the universe in the absence of observation/interaction.
If I were building a simulation I would just have not made gravity universally coupling because it makes it hard to chunk reality up into parts. Thus it seems like the universal coupling of gravity is evidence against a simulation hypothesis.
The reason for my personal choice to not take simulation theory seriously is because simulations are an instance of Russell's Teapot. Anything which can be explained as S simulating T can be explained more simply as just T (or, in the opposite direction, even more complicatedly as R simulating S simulating T, etc. Can* we go all the way to a countably infinite tower of simulations?).
* if yes, then I'd have to admit that the omega-tower could be as interesting to study as the 0-tower, but if no then I'd maintain the 0-tower is way more interesting than any of its successor towers.
If you were to believe the universe was a simulation, would you do anything differently? could you?
(this line of approach, less formal and perhaps more congenial to CPS' other culture, is inspired by Dewey and James' pragmatism, in which philosophical problems are only well-posed if they have "cash value". We hackers don't make comparisons without subsequently using the flag value; they didn't ask questions whose answers are moot)
If we were in a simulation, due to the hard problem, it would be impossible for the simulators to know whether anything in their simulation had qualitative experiences, so they could not make conscious observation a prerequisite of detail rendering, only interaction. No woo necessary.
In my experience learning something comes from playing with it. So allow me shameless plug: https://archive.is/xDb8o This is a Linux tutorial I wrote quite some time ago but it's still relevant, it tries to give you some hands-on overview of Linux system by having you to execute commands and understand the output.
It goal is to just go through it to familiarize yourself with different parts of the systems. There is verbose table of contents on the first page if you scroll down.
How can I better describe myself is something I'm trying to clarify for myself. I'm sure there is a place in tech world for a guy who likes to fiddle with data and monitoring which benefit the company which will hire me a lot.
I did full time jobs before, but not part time ones, not including some side projects for my friends, but I didn't specifically search for what I'm asking here, definitely not tried to search part-time position specifically tailored to my tastes.
As to job market, the industry is so big and ups and downs happened before a lot, I'm thinking it's not about the market but about my ability to find what I want. You're on point about bypassing automated screening systems, the question is, do you have some ideas how to do it in my case?
I'm suggesting you present yourself in terms of business value rather than technical jargon. For example:
Skilled at collecting, analyzing, and monitoring website traffic using structured and unstructured logs. I have put together several dashboards to show activity at a glance, giving actionable insights that improve lead collection and customer retention, Extensive experience developing tools with Python and SQL.
Full-time, part-time, contracting... those are details you work out once you get a prospective employer to talk to you at all. Every f/t job can be part-time, every f/t job is also a freelance opportunity. You start with identifying companies that might want your skills, you sell them on your value-add, then you work out the arrangement. You don't want to limit your search or set up roadblocks before you persuade them they can use you.
Right now the problem isn't so much the crappy job market (though that's a problem), it's that with so many people laid off and coming out of school looking for jobs the competition has become fierce, and employers are drowning in applicants. If you can bypass that you save them time and effort.
As a freelancer I try to focus on business needs, ask the potential customer to list their top needs and pain points, offer to fix one of the top issues, and I don't charge if I can't deliver value. You have to carefully listen to the customer and understand the problem and potential solutions to make that work. Every business has problems and unfulfilled needs, and a job for the person who can solve those problems. Freelancing is a good way to get in the door if you want to move into a part-time or full-time role.
I don't have specific advice for the skills and interests you listed, but I think the general approach to finding work applies regardless of what you specialize in.
