From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):
Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.
One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.
Why is "God did it" a better answer than "it just happened" ? If you prefer the "God did it" you then have to account for where God came from and end up with a set of answers that could just as easily be applied to the universe itself. Believe what you want, but this isn't some kind of gotcha.
what’s the difference between “god did it” and “it just happened”? you’re just hand waving over the question of “how did it just happen?”. matter just magically appeared?
I do see, mostly from Americans, self introductions of the form "I'm so and so... and I love Jesus" in contexts that have nothing to do with religion. I've never had anyone bring up their atheism or agnosticism in that way in a non-religious context.
Have you ever encountered the atheist version IRL? Not just in internet bickering?
Maybe it was regional - I wouldn't know which region they were from off the cuff.
My family is mostly C of E and I don't recall any of them ever bringing up religious topics with third parties unprompted, so it did strike me as pretty weird.
I like mechanical keyboards and the likes with a lot of key travel. So not a fan of these laptop keyboards. That and cost and availability too. That keyboard does not appear to be available on my country...
Fair, although I used to prefer the old chonky Thinkpad keyboards to anything else. There was (is?) a Model M style buckle spring keyboard with a trackpoint, but it had the numeric pad, so no good to you.
I guess one could do a project-keyboard and add a trackpoint to it. I don't know if you'd have to macgyver it up, or if there's something you can buy as a package for the trackpoint. That would be fun. One could even do a 40% version with it and damn the RSI :)
For me at least the post wasn't loading on mobile (Firefox on Android) and looks like others had the same issue. Skimming the article just now on the laptop (Firefox on Linux) I see in the images that the author is using a trackpoint on their keyboard, but it's not mentioned in the text anywhere!
Edit: Ohhhh... I see that big box at the bottom that I just dismissed without reading as one of those "continue reading my other articles" chumbox inspired things, is actually a continuation of the article via multiple options. I guess that might be what upset my mobile browser too.
I'm still not spotting any discussion of the trackpoint though...
Years ago I used to read his blog on Django and found it quite interesting despite being neither a Django nor even a python user - this must have been at least 10 years ago and perhaps more.
When he resurfaced in my feeds as an AI commentator it took me quite a long while to join the dots that he was the same person!
Pre-internet the commercial phone book was actually fairly useful. The "problem" was that most people didn't need it updating as often as the phone book company would have liked.
> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?
The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.
Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
> The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.
> The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that has a rich inner life, experiences qualia, and is ridden with self-doubt FFS.
Ha! This is so delightful. I vaguely remember chipping in some paltry sum on some early plea for donations for this, and getting a random manual duplicate in the post as a perk. Since then I've occasionally wondered how it's going, but never quite got around to looking it up properly. Somehow ten years passed.
Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.
One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.
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