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This Message Does Not Exist

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Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#261

Post by [deleted] »

sethammons wrote: post #257
b112 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you can't say no because you haven't studied it for years". I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes. Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination. There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.

> I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes. Copernicus deniers didn't need years of study either as their source material said differently. I'm not saying anything either way on philosophy, I'm simply pointing out that your presented logic there is flawed

[deleted]

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#262

Post by tjoff »

necovek wrote: post #258
tjoff wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it can't trust the storage. Maybe you are in incognito. Maybe you are not using your own computer etc. Not particularly likely it will ever sync again.

You are setting different goals: a client (non-web) app running on a different computer would not have access to local storage for another computer where that same app was running locally. FWIW, even on the same computer, you can frequently run the same client using a different profile, user account or similar, and it wouldn't have access to another instance of that same client. Browser does have local storage and yo…

You wouldn't install and configure an app on a different machine for quick instance. Which you do for a webpage. Hence outlook can't assume that the message can be recovered because it can't assume it will ever see that local storage again.

A webapp has it's place. It is an inferior option but it is convenient for when you lack access to a proper client, doesn't make sense for them to target the same goals.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#263

Post by vsuperpower2020 »

lupire wrote: post #248
skyechurch wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual philosophers are capable of using answering machines and even landline telephones without having all their assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and legitimately don't see how this matters.…

If you have problems of a more pressing nature, why are you faffing about on HN? It smells like you are just mocking people for being interested in thinking about things. Why?

This is also why people don't like philosophers. You have no monopoly on "thinking about things" and you aren't being mocked for doing that.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#264

Post by HocusLocus »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #237
croniev wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy. Heres a take for you: This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people wil…

I think it is okay to philosophise about situations and events that seem a bit paradoxal but the explanation is obvious. Even more, that is a core trait of philosophy. There are many similar situations where what we hear, read or see is technically incorrect. Since the sender (or the activator of an agent) of the message in such case assumes the interpreter has enough common knowledge, it is a perfectly okay communic…

> [...] My car informing me that one of the tyres is low on pressure [...]

Thank you for putting this in a larger philosophical prospective. For I have something on the next level, a car that tells me "a tire has low pressure", but does NOT tell me which tire it is. I did the best I could to understand why my beloved car would do this, but gave up and had to interpret it as a deliberately malicious act.

My suspicions were confirmed when 1 of 4 sensors (inside the tires) had failed, and the technician read the diagnostic and proceeded directly to the tire in question. I had been desperately holding on to the remote possibility that the car really didn't know which tire has low pressure or which sensor failed, but it told the technician but not me.

I am wondering if it would be best to give the car to the technician to ensure my personal safety. How would the next aspect of this dislike manifest? Most scenarios I can think of result in the car's own suicide, but perhaps it will run me over? Please help.

Signed, LOW TIRE PRESSURE

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#265

Post by Aerbil313 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #110
OmarShehata wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The average person is much smarter than you think they are (when it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it…

The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.

Half the people in my class in college don't know what Windows is. As in, they know they use a laptop. They don't know they are using Windows.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#266

Post by haiku2077 »

trifurcate wrote: post #106
haiku2077 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your software is running on a VM, and that VM is suspended (e.g. for migration), the end of sleep could be minutes or months in future. This is surprisingly common when running on certain VM instance types on public cloud! Common enough that I've had to account for it in production code.

The confidence interval comment still applies for any production or client environment I've ever deployed code to. Unless you actually expect your environment to spend more than 5% of its time on average getting suspended and resumed. Maybe you work on some tooling that is scheduled to run right around migration time (for servers) or sleep/resume time (for clients).

Or you run at scale on a public cloud provider. We observe a few of these events per month.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#267

Post by nakanaa »

A related thought I had thinking about this:

If we placed a giant sign around Earth stating, 'This planet does not exist,' and considering that Earth will not survive the Sun's demise in 5 billion years, would it be a paradox for aliens in galaxy GN-z11, located 13.4 billion light-years away, to observe this sign?

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#268

Post by garfieldnate »

croniev wrote: post #225
dfabulich wrote: post #151

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM > According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). (If you're interested, you ca…

Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy. Heres a take for you: This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people wil…

Lots of linguists only work on static structures, diagramming morphosyntax and semantics of a standalone utterance. All of the fuzzy social context stuff doesn't generally get broken down into a "mathematical" structure in the same way. The piece we're missing here is called "grounding", the mapping of words in the utterance to entities in the context. I think it gets largely ignored because of this study of static structures. I don't know of any generic parsing framework/theory/tool that comes with grounding out-of-the box. It's just not done. Please prove me wrong if you know of a tool that does this. Other keywords are "deictic" and "pragmatics". Generally you only start to worry about grounding when you're doing some kind of robotics or other human-computer interaction and you need a human's words to map to sensor data or something on the screen to understand what the intention is.

As a possible exception, anaphora/cataphora resolution is pretty well-studied and for example is supported in spaCy (https://spacy.io/universe/project/neuralcoref), but this is mapping one word in an utterance to another word in the utterance, rather than to an entity in the context.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#269

Post by nuancebydefault »

HocusLocus wrote: post #264
nuancebydefault wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is okay to philosophise about situations and events that seem a bit paradoxal but the explanation is obvious. Even more, that is a core trait of philosophy. There are many similar situations where what we hear, read or see is technically incorrect. Since the sender (or the activator of an agent) of the message in such case assumes the interpreter has enough common knowledge, it is a perfectly okay communic…

> [...] My car informing me that one of the tyres is low on pressure [...] Thank you for putting this in a larger philosophical prospective. For I have something on the next level, a car that tells me "a tire has low pressure", but does NOT tell me which tire it is. I did the best I could to understand why my beloved car would do this, but gave up and had to interpret it as a deliberately malicious act. My suspicions…

Weird that tires have pressure sensors. I really thought that the control unit's logic simply averages rpm values to identify low pressure tires. I'm glad my car informs me which tire it is convinced of to suffer from 'depression'. I already checked that it identified the correct one.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#270

Post by galaxyLogic »

layer8 wrote: post #231
madeofpalk wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually correct, but a lie still exists.

No, it’s a citation of a message that does not exist. I wasn’t talking about a message sent by an AI, I was talking about an AI reproducing the alledged content of a purported message. If you open a text file in an editor, and then delete the file on disk, then the file does not exist anymore, but you can still read its contents in your editor. Same if you open a web page in your browser, and the page is then deleted…

It depends on how we define what we mean by the word "message".

In the common sense interpretation "file" is not a "message". Nor is the display on which you are reading the message. Nor is a clay-tablet on which ancient Sumerians wrote messages.

"Message" is information sent by someone to someone else. A message could be saved in a file but then the file is just the "medium" for transferring the message to its future readers.

So I would think that "This message does not exist" is something like writing "This is not a pipe" on a painting of a pipe.

I never understood what Marshall McLuhan meant with "Medium is the message". Medium is what makes it possible to transmit messages. Can anybody help me out, what did McLuhan mean?

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