Or.. the manual is 10+ screens worth of mostly obscure options that only one person ever used 20 years ago all listed in alphabetical order with no regards to relevance. Meanwhile all you really need is the syntax of that one really useful option that everyone should know.
That's my experience with RTFM anyway.
I wouldn't say that the answer is to go ask someone though. Ignore the manual AND the IRC. Go straight to Google. Someone else already asked your question. You are not a special and unique snowflake.
Almost skipped right over this one. What's likely to be special about 'yet another Linux distro'?
"...together which[with] an assortment of interesting new features." Ok, I'll bite. Is there actually something unique here?
"Most importantly, Kali is now a rolling distribution, using Debian..." A sensible choice. Why re-invent wheels? It seems like almost everything is based on Debian. I'm not exactly getting a good feeling that there is going to be something unique here. I almost quit reading.
"There are also huge changes to the UI..."
Yes.. go on
"..., including a fully fledged, custom GNOME 3 environment"
Ugh. I quit using Gnome years ago, probably before many of you were even using Linux. While I must admit, I don't know much about Gnome 3 I do know that I absolutely HATED Gnome 2.
Oh.. and using Gnome.. really failing the uniqueness test now. If there is something unique in Kali you should have lead with that.
"LOL, I am a Linux guy myself but if you can't even upgrade a CPU on a Windows box then you must be a major moron."
I've done this plenty of times and i can tell you this.. it's a gamble. Most of the time replacing the CPU is just as easy as with Linux. Every now and then though... it never even boots again without a reformat. It's not just the CPU either it's hardware in general. I think it might in part be due to Micorosoft's anti-piracy measures. The fact that all under-the-hood settings are thrown into one big clusterfck registry is definitely a big part of the problem too.
Ubuntu would be my answer for pretty much any desktop use including this.
No, I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu. No, Unity is not necessarily the best interface. No, I don't think going their own way with Mir is a good idea.
But...
Ubuntu has the most people out there already doing this kind of thing. That means the most liklihood things will 'just work' and the most online community support when it doesn't. Since you have a whole lab to support and probably other things to do with your time you will likely apreciate taking the path of least resistance.
So.. I wouldn't pick the 'best' distro, I'd pick the most popular one. Currently that's Ubuntu. It sucks.. because this kind of thinking is what causes incumbant favorites to remain at the top even when they cease to deserve it. But... that's reality.
Where I live there are clouds most days of the year. I do see a lot of turbines around. Most days there isn't enough wind to drive them. They just sit there like the tripods in War of the Worlds after all the martians died. Fortunately for me there are at least two nuclear power plants nearby and many many coal plants. Even better, the local environment which does not provide a ton of sunlight or wind also does not provide earthquakes! Energy costs where I live are about 1/10th what my friends out west pay.
I do wish more of those coal plants would be converted to nuclear though. It's diffuse enough I never notice but I don't want to breath any coal plant exhaust.
Better yet... if we could only harness the hot air coming from the anti-nuke crowd's mouths... unlimitted nearly free energy for everyone! All it costs is a bit of soy and granola! It might be a bit stinky though.
Don't get me wrong.. I'd love to see wind and solar replace as much of the power generation as is practical. Anyone who thinks that is going to be enough to save the world though.. they need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that the world is much bigger than their sunny little wind blown corners.
Why would you lock your back wheels? Have you actually ever tried your emergency brake? No car I have ever owned is capable of applying enough stopping power to actually lock the wheels. It only slows them down.
Also.. don't yank up on it. You wouldn't slam your foot brake at that speed would you? Hold the button down on your emergency brake so that it doesn't lock and ease it up just like you would with your foot!
Then what would you recommend one do if their brake fluid leaks out?
The emergency brake works via cable. It will pretty much always work. Pop a leak somewhere and the rest of your braking system.. being hydraulic becomes useless quickly. That's why we call it an emergency brake!
The trick is you don't just yank the handle up and set it like you would when you park on a hill. Stay calm. Keep your finger on the button, you don't want it locking!. Ease the handle up carefully. Don't suddenly force it when you start to feel the resistance.
I haven't had to do this us this in an oncoming traffic, imediate sort of emergency. I have practiced it under more controled conditions so that I would be ready if I do. I did use my e-brake to drive home once when I blew a brake cylindar. Fortunately I noticed this before I was up to speed so I was able to take it very easy and didn't have to use the e-brake for any sudden, unexpected stops.
I haven't run anything that was built using Wine (as far as I know) since back in the day of WordPerfect.
I have run many Windows applications in Wine though. many of them are quite usable. Not perfect.. but usable. Wine can be a useful tool as opposed to the kind of tool that posts "IT TOTALLY SUCKS" comments.
I'm going to regret asking but.. is KDE talking directly to the graphics drivers? I knew the situation with X on a programming level was bad but.. that bad?
Is that why starting with version 4 KDE has worked terribly (if at all) in VNC? Is it because it wants to talk directly to the hardware's drivers and VNC is something other than hardware?
- Forgive me if the KDE/VNC situation has improved, I stopped using KDE in part because of this over a year ago.
Symbian was pretty good for it's time. I loved my S60 phone. So long as we are talking about what they could have done hypothetically in the past I don't think switching to Android at some point in the past was the best answer.
Had Symbian been modrenized years before it became necessary to switch (which we know they failed to do on time), given a marketplace, devices with full keyboards, etc... maybe we would be living in a 3-player smartphone world today.
I see several questions in here and I'm not entirely convinced that it can be proved that the answers are all related.
When I think of generating sensations I think of nerves sending messages to one another to get from some point in ones skin to some point in the brain. It seems trivial to grasp that concept while at the same time the complexity at the cellular level and below could be beyond comprehension. Still, this could be very easily seen as being similar to signals on a wire between a sensor and a CPU or neural net in a piece of technology.
To me the question isn't how are these sensations generated, it's how is it that I perceive them as a whole, self-aware being. Why am I not just a bunch of cells each perceiving only the signals they receive individually from their neighbors, completely unaware of the complex human behavior that emerges as the sum of their interaction. Or.. why stop at cells? Why aren't we just collections of individual atoms interacting with one another, unaware of their nature as part of the whole. Or quarks.. strings... ????
I've watched a few videos where scientists talk about their different ideas regarding this. I remember a few where they showed that certain areas of the brain show activity in a conscious person and if that area is turned off the person has no awareness. This certainly may be part of the answer however it still just sounds like circuits to me. It sounds like a switch that can be turned on or off. But what is it turning on or off?
Whatever it is does it make a difference if that switch is made from flesh, silicon or something entirely different? I think the original question was why believe that it can. My question is... why believe that it can't.
As for the origin of life. That is a great question and a fun one to learn about. I'm not really sure how it's relevant though. It's the question of how did this particular kind of 'sensing beings' ie life come about. It's not a question of what other things might or might not be possible. You asked "what makes people think that it doesn't require living cells to have feelings, sensations and emotions?"
What is living? We seem to agree that we can't define that. What is a cell? It's a living thing enclosed in a membrane. It's a part of the 'mechanistic' definition of the only life we currently know. How about Feelings, sensations and emotions? Those could be defined as simply current status. The robot's sensor sends a message to it's CPU that it is being damaged; nerves in my skin tell my brain that I am being cut. Emotions.. my current mental state. Programs contain variables.. the programmer can instantiate a variable to hold whatever states the programmer wants to keep track of. The AI's anger status is currently 90%, switch to the more aggressive behavior subroutine...
I think the real question is why we perceive this status information as whole, self-aware beings that is the question. I don't know if we even can ever hope to answer that but until then it's not that I think I have a reason to believe a machine could do the same. It's that I have no useful information to indicate that one could not.
Most admins will naturally keep the software installed on their servers pretty spartan. Less software installed means less software to compile. For a server updating may seem long to someone who started with binary packaged Linux distros some time in the 20-teens but if you already lived through downloading binary packages over the slower internet connections we had before that it really isn't that bad.
On the desktop... certain things like Gnome, KDE or LibreOffice can take over a day to build. Fortunately... new builds of those things don't come that often.
This still may sound pretty bad but consider this... It's all automated. It isn't like you have to sit there and babysit it. Just run it in a screen session. You can keep using your computer just like normal while updates are building. Most of the time I don't even notice the difference. But.. if you really need the CPU for other things you can always nice the build down. It may take longer but it is out of sight, out of mind running in a screen session so who really cares?
So.. why bother? Sometimes people make fun of Gentoo users for being overly obsessed with optimization. Yes.. that is one advantage, you can optimize everything and make it run a lot nicer, especially on older hardware. That's not a bad thing!
But.. I like it more for the customization. Every program with optional support for any particular file format or compatibility with another program that I like to use automatically gets built with that support.
Also... no dependency hell. Binary distros have gotten a lot better over the years I must admit but.. when you do start installing things from outside your distro's repository.. it can get pretty difficult. If you've ever had apt-get attempt to uninstall half your system because some library update conflicts with something you installed from another repo you will understand what I am talking about. With Gentoo these things "just work"!
Since it's desktops, not servers where people are more likely to install a lot of random stuff and therefore run into dependency issues I think it's the desktop that Gentoo is most advantageous for, not the server. Once one tries to advance beyond just using the default applications that come with the distro I actually think Gentoo is the best desktop Linux out there!
I'm not selling any KoolAide though. I don't think Gentoo is THE best distro possible. I would like to see something that mixes binary and source base a bit better. It would be nice if.. when none of my Use flags or compiler options depart from the norm Gentoo would just download a binary. Maybe users could even set up a P2P network of trusted friends which shares the build load, copying binaries between users with similar use and compiler flags. Another feature might be an emerge command that automatically downloads a generic binary for immediate use but simultaneously begins building the customized one to replace it in the background.
Maybe I'm describing Arch? I haven't tried that yet.
Oh, yah... I think it's great that Gentoo supports Systemd without ditching Openrc. I have no particular hate for Systemd although some things do concern me. Whatever problems it solves they are not ones that have affected me personally.
I think it's a shame that Gnome and Kde seem to be set for requiring Systemd. I use neither myself currently although I am concerned that I may be forced to install them in the future depending on how remote display ends up working out in Wayland. I will not be surprised if this means I am forced to use Systemd.
It seems like, contrary to how Linux software developed in the past more and more is being written specifically to work with either Gnome or KDE rather than being written to just work with Linux in general. Were it not for this I would think that their reliance on Systemd is only their own problem. It is already difficult to find a decent DVD-burner front-end that works without either installed for example.
Which coming from him probably means he is being sincere about not hating it. Since when has Linus Torvalds been known to be PASSIVE aggressive when it comes to his opinions on software?
Ok... I wrote a big huge TLDR response to this but then I decided to open a new-tab and re-read the comments that began our discussion and deleted it. Now I will write another:-)
Life can be described in 'mechanistic' terms. A definition that I have heard along those lines is that it must have metabolism, reproduction, self repair and evolution to be life. Usually this results in discussions about what happens if you find something that only fulfills some of the 4. Also commonly mentioned are viri which in a sense do some of these things but require cells to infect in order to do so. This seems to me to be the kind of 'life' definition you are using when you talk about things like death from sodium azide.
I'm not sure how it can be argued that life, by that kind of definition has anything to do with emotions. Do single celled organisms have emotion? Which of these attributes do what to form love, anger, fear?
Those things are states in the brain.. which happens to be composed of cells which are alive by the mechanistic definition. To some degree we can understand and demonstrate those emotions as being physical states in the brain. Scientists have brought the emotions out by poking, prodding and stimulating various regions of the brains of living, conscious people.
On the other hand, there is incredible complexity in all that huge mass of cells and how they communicate. We can't map out all the interactions which occur as a brain experiences love or anger or fear and simulate them on a computer.
Further, and i think more importantly.. I don't think we really understand how we perceive those brain states. When the cells of my brain activate to form an emotion I don't experience it as an individual cell taking a bunch of inputs from other cells and deciding based on them when it is time to activate a bunch of outputs sent to other cells. I experience it as a whole individual.. as a person.
If the emergent behavior of the sum of reactions between these mechanisticly living things can form me.. why can't the sum of reactions between some other form of logic gates combine to form what is essentially a person. I can't even define what exactly a person is so surely I can't rule that out!
It seems unlikely to me that things like metabolism and self-repair are what set me apart from a non-sentient robot.
"I would like it very much if you could provide some information that suggests that all you need is complexity to make something with feelings and emotions."
I don't know why you would expect evidence of that from me. It isn't quite what I said! Maybe there is some aspect to our existence as people that goes beyond the materials and energy interacting within us. I don't know. Good luck proving it either way. But.. even if something like that does exist.. is it generated by the formation of our bodies? Is it somehow attracted from elsewhere and binds to us as our bodies are formed? Even if there is something more to us.. without thoroughly understanding it whose to say the same thing wouldn't (or would) happen to a sufficiently complex AI?
But... emotions, memories, sensations... they have all been produced experimentally in real human beings by electrically stimulating various areas of the brain. So.. tell me that much of us doesn't exist at least on some level as mere signals passed around by cells.
"But the key is that they are alive"
Have you ever attempted to put a real definition on the term 'alive'? good luck with that. I feel I should write more on this but what do you write to describe the indescribable?
"There is no evidence that any machine of any type even has a "thought", let alone an emotion."
Agreed. But... human beings can be considered to be highly complex chemical machines. And.. your statement still stands. Something that was only a 'sufficiently complex' machine could theoretically appear to be a person. (oh yah.. try to define person too). Maybe that's all a sufficiently advanced AI would be. But.. maybe that's all you, and every other person on the planet is. Sufficiently advanced chemical machines that they seem to be people. I only 'know' that I am a real person. And.. nope... I can not prove it! I can give you no evidence that I actually have thoughts and emotions rather than just sufficiently complicated electrical and chemical signals to simulate them.
So... I take that one on faith. I'm not a big fan of faith over science but how do you devise a test for things like person hood that can't even be defined? Since I believe that I am a person and other humans seem to be of similar makeup and have similar traits of sensation and emotion I believe that they (including you) are people too!
If the day ever comes that someone creates a sufficiently advanced AI... it's going to be quite a conundrum figuring out if we should consider that to be a person or a thing and what basic rights therefore do or do not apply. Good luck to anyone on either side of that argument! If anyone ever thinks they can win it I think they are deluded.
I'll take the 'lets just assume it's a person' side because it' safer. It would be less harmful to anthropomorphize a machine than to objectify a person.
"I wonder what it is that makes people think that robots can be given emotions, when we have no idea how brains generate emotions?"
Ah, how refreshing. An intelligent thought on this subject.
"what makes people think that it doesn't require living cells to have feelings, sensations and emotions?"
Damn... I jumped the gun.
Cells are really vessels containing incredibly complicated chemical reactions. They communicate through various electrical and chemical means. I don't know if there is any non-material, spiritual aspect to it or not (and not interested in a debate on it) but if the sum of all these reactions and chemical plus electrical signals can add up to either make us or attract the undefined spiritual thing or whatever.
Why couldn't the sum of a whole bunch of electrical signals through semiconductor switches or even something really crazy like a mechanical computer made of wheels and gears do the same?
Now.. whether something like this could actually be built is an entirely different question. The complexity would be unimaginable. But then.. I don't see anybody building humans out of raw chemicals either yet nobody is going to argue that a being made of cells can't have feelings, sensations and emotions.
Slashdot Mirror
Those poor Windows ddvelopers... just imagine... being forced to work with Mac developers!
Because https://xkcd.com/927/
OMG, I can't believe I actually was the first to post this one!
Or.. the manual is 10+ screens worth of mostly obscure options that only one person ever used 20 years ago all listed in alphabetical order with no regards to relevance. Meanwhile all you really need is the syntax of that one really useful option that everyone should know.
That's my experience with RTFM anyway.
I wouldn't say that the answer is to go ask someone though. Ignore the manual AND the IRC. Go straight to Google. Someone else already asked your question. You are not a special and unique snowflake.
Ok, here ya go.
Almost skipped right over this one. What's likely to be special about 'yet another Linux distro'?
"...together which[with] an assortment of interesting new features."
Ok, I'll bite. Is there actually something unique here?
"Most importantly, Kali is now a rolling distribution, using Debian..."
A sensible choice. Why re-invent wheels? It seems like almost everything is based on Debian. I'm not exactly getting a good feeling that there is going to be something unique here. I almost quit reading.
"There are also huge changes to the UI..."
Yes.. go on
"..., including a fully fledged, custom GNOME 3 environment"
Ugh. I quit using Gnome years ago, probably before many of you were even using Linux. While I must admit, I don't know much about Gnome 3 I do know that I absolutely HATED Gnome 2.
Oh.. and using Gnome.. really failing the uniqueness test now. If there is something unique in Kali you should have lead with that.
I'm done reading. Goodbye.
I don't send a lot of angry emails but I'm pretty sure that angry Slashdot comments do the same thing.
"LOL, I am a Linux guy myself but if you can't even upgrade a CPU on a Windows box then you must be a major moron."
I've done this plenty of times and i can tell you this.. it's a gamble. Most of the time replacing the CPU is just as easy as with Linux. Every now and then though... it never even boots again without a reformat. It's not just the CPU either it's hardware in general. I think it might in part be due to Micorosoft's anti-piracy measures. The fact that all under-the-hood settings are thrown into one big clusterfck registry is definitely a big part of the problem too.
Ubuntu would be my answer for pretty much any desktop use including this.
No, I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu. No, Unity is not necessarily the best interface. No, I don't think going their own way with Mir is a good idea.
But...
Ubuntu has the most people out there already doing this kind of thing. That means the most liklihood things will 'just work' and the most online community support when it doesn't. Since you have a whole lab to support and probably other things to do with your time you will likely apreciate taking the path of least resistance.
So.. I wouldn't pick the 'best' distro, I'd pick the most popular one. Currently that's Ubuntu. It sucks.. because this kind of thinking is what causes incumbant favorites to remain at the top even when they cease to deserve it. But... that's reality.
"there is no question that Windows outshines every Linux distro when it comes to entertainment."
Not necessarily...
Compare the odds of your computer contracting something evil while surfing porn in Windows or Linux.
Clearly Linux wins for entertainment in at least some circumstances!
Where I live there are clouds most days of the year. I do see a lot of turbines around. Most days there isn't enough wind to drive them. They just sit there like the tripods in War of the Worlds after all the martians died. Fortunately for me there are at least two nuclear power plants nearby and many many coal plants. Even better, the local environment which does not provide a ton of sunlight or wind also does not provide earthquakes! Energy costs where I live are about 1/10th what my friends out west pay.
I do wish more of those coal plants would be converted to nuclear though. It's diffuse enough I never notice but I don't want to breath any coal plant exhaust.
Better yet... if we could only harness the hot air coming from the anti-nuke crowd's mouths... unlimitted nearly free energy for everyone! All it costs is a bit of soy and granola! It might be a bit stinky though.
Don't get me wrong.. I'd love to see wind and solar replace as much of the power generation as is practical. Anyone who thinks that is going to be enough to save the world though.. they need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that the world is much bigger than their sunny little wind blown corners.
More people need more stuff and services. When jobs go down while population is rising somebody is doing somehting wrong.
What a stupid strawman!
Why would you lock your back wheels? Have you actually ever tried your emergency brake? No car I have ever owned is capable of applying enough stopping power to actually lock the wheels. It only slows them down.
Also.. don't yank up on it. You wouldn't slam your foot brake at that speed would you? Hold the button down on your emergency brake so that it doesn't lock and ease it up just like you would with your foot!
Are there computers out there that are locked into Windows due to UEFI that could be freed through this hack?
Then what would you recommend one do if their brake fluid leaks out?
The emergency brake works via cable. It will pretty much always work. Pop a leak somewhere and the rest of your braking system.. being hydraulic becomes useless quickly. That's why we call it an emergency brake!
The trick is you don't just yank the handle up and set it like you would when you park on a hill. Stay calm. Keep your finger on the button, you don't want it locking!. Ease the handle up carefully. Don't suddenly force it when you start to feel the resistance.
I haven't had to do this us this in an oncoming traffic, imediate sort of emergency. I have practiced it under more controled conditions so that I would be ready if I do. I did use my e-brake to drive home once when I blew a brake cylindar. Fortunately I noticed this before I was up to speed so I was able to take it very easy and didn't have to use the e-brake for any sudden, unexpected stops.
I haven't run anything that was built using Wine (as far as I know) since back in the day of WordPerfect.
I have run many Windows applications in Wine though. many of them are quite usable. Not perfect.. but usable. Wine can be a useful tool as opposed to the kind of tool that posts "IT TOTALLY SUCKS" comments.
I'm going to regret asking but.. is KDE talking directly to the graphics drivers? I knew the situation with X on a programming level was bad but.. that bad?
Is that why starting with version 4 KDE has worked terribly (if at all) in VNC? Is it because it wants to talk directly to the hardware's drivers and VNC is something other than hardware?
- Forgive me if the KDE/VNC situation has improved, I stopped using KDE in part because of this over a year ago.
Symbian was pretty good for it's time. I loved my S60 phone. So long as we are talking about what they could have done hypothetically in the past I don't think switching to Android at some point in the past was the best answer.
Had Symbian been modrenized years before it became necessary to switch (which we know they failed to do on time), given a marketplace, devices with full keyboards, etc... maybe we would be living in a 3-player smartphone world today.
You had me until Python. Any language where whitespace has meaning... I still can't believe such a thing actually caught on.
I see several questions in here and I'm not entirely convinced that it can be proved that the answers are all related.
When I think of generating sensations I think of nerves sending messages to one another to get from some point in ones skin to some point in the brain. It seems trivial to grasp that concept while at the same time the complexity at the cellular level and below could be beyond comprehension. Still, this could be very easily seen as being similar to signals on a wire between a sensor and a CPU or neural net in a piece of technology.
To me the question isn't how are these sensations generated, it's how is it that I perceive them as a whole, self-aware being. Why am I not just a bunch of cells each perceiving only the signals they receive individually from their neighbors, completely unaware of the complex human behavior that emerges as the sum of their interaction. Or.. why stop at cells? Why aren't we just collections of individual atoms interacting with one another, unaware of their nature as part of the whole. Or quarks.. strings... ????
I've watched a few videos where scientists talk about their different ideas regarding this. I remember a few where they showed that certain areas of the brain show activity in a conscious person and if that area is turned off the person has no awareness. This certainly may be part of the answer however it still just sounds like circuits to me. It sounds like a switch that can be turned on or off. But what is it turning on or off?
Whatever it is does it make a difference if that switch is made from flesh, silicon or something entirely different? I think the original question was why believe that it can. My question is... why believe that it can't.
As for the origin of life. That is a great question and a fun one to learn about. I'm not really sure how it's relevant though. It's the question of how did this particular kind of 'sensing beings' ie life come about. It's not a question of what other things might or might not be possible. You asked "what makes people think that it doesn't require living cells to have feelings, sensations and emotions?"
What is living? We seem to agree that we can't define that. What is a cell? It's a living thing enclosed in a membrane. It's a part of the 'mechanistic' definition of the only life we currently know. How about Feelings, sensations and emotions? Those could be defined as simply current status. The robot's sensor sends a message to it's CPU that it is being damaged; nerves in my skin tell my brain that I am being cut. Emotions.. my current mental state. Programs contain variables.. the programmer can instantiate a variable to hold whatever states the programmer wants to keep track of. The AI's anger status is currently 90%, switch to the more aggressive behavior subroutine...
I think the real question is why we perceive this status information as whole, self-aware beings that is the question. I don't know if we even can ever hope to answer that but until then it's not that I think I have a reason to believe a machine could do the same. It's that I have no useful information to indicate that one could not.
"Gentoo, you're impractical"
Gentoo isn't really as impractical as it sounds.
Most admins will naturally keep the software installed on their servers pretty spartan. Less software installed means less software to compile. For a server updating may seem long to someone who started with binary packaged Linux distros some time in the 20-teens but if you already lived through downloading binary packages over the slower internet connections we had before that it really isn't that bad.
On the desktop... certain things like Gnome, KDE or LibreOffice can take over a day to build. Fortunately... new builds of those things don't come that often.
This still may sound pretty bad but consider this... It's all automated. It isn't like you have to sit there and babysit it. Just run it in a screen session. You can keep using your computer just like normal while updates are building. Most of the time I don't even notice the difference. But.. if you really need the CPU for other things you can always nice the build down. It may take longer but it is out of sight, out of mind running in a screen session so who really cares?
So.. why bother? Sometimes people make fun of Gentoo users for being overly obsessed with optimization. Yes.. that is one advantage, you can optimize everything and make it run a lot nicer, especially on older hardware. That's not a bad thing!
But.. I like it more for the customization. Every program with optional support for any particular file format or compatibility with another program that I like to use automatically gets built with that support.
Also... no dependency hell. Binary distros have gotten a lot better over the years I must admit but.. when you do start installing things from outside your distro's repository.. it can get pretty difficult. If you've ever had apt-get attempt to uninstall half your system because some library update conflicts with something you installed from another repo you will understand what I am talking about. With Gentoo these things "just work"!
Since it's desktops, not servers where people are more likely to install a lot of random stuff and therefore run into dependency issues I think it's the desktop that Gentoo is most advantageous for, not the server. Once one tries to advance beyond just using the default applications that come with the distro I actually think Gentoo is the best desktop Linux out there!
I'm not selling any KoolAide though. I don't think Gentoo is THE best distro possible. I would like to see something that mixes binary and source base a bit better. It would be nice if.. when none of my Use flags or compiler options depart from the norm Gentoo would just download a binary. Maybe users could even set up a P2P network of trusted friends which shares the build load, copying binaries between users with similar use and compiler flags. Another feature might be an emerge command that automatically downloads a generic binary for immediate use but simultaneously begins building the customized one to replace it in the background.
Maybe I'm describing Arch? I haven't tried that yet.
Oh, yah... I think it's great that Gentoo supports Systemd without ditching Openrc. I have no particular hate for Systemd although some things do concern me. Whatever problems it solves they are not ones that have affected me personally.
I think it's a shame that Gnome and Kde seem to be set for requiring Systemd. I use neither myself currently although I am concerned that I may be forced to install them in the future depending on how remote display ends up working out in Wayland. I will not be surprised if this means I am forced to use Systemd.
It seems like, contrary to how Linux software developed in the past more and more is being written specifically to work with either Gnome or KDE rather than being written to just work with Linux in general. Were it not for this I would think that their reliance on Systemd is only their own problem. It is already difficult to find a decent DVD-burner front-end that works without either installed for example.
Which coming from him probably means he is being sincere about not hating it. Since when has Linus Torvalds been known to be PASSIVE aggressive when it comes to his opinions on software?
That much evil in one place at the same time... What are you thinking?
Splat! I just flew into the paywall.
Ok... I wrote a big huge TLDR response to this but then I decided to open a new-tab and re-read the comments that began our discussion and deleted it. Now I will write another :-)
Life can be described in 'mechanistic' terms. A definition that I have heard along those lines is that it must have metabolism, reproduction, self repair and evolution to be life. Usually this results in discussions about what happens if you find something that only fulfills some of the 4. Also commonly mentioned are viri which in a sense do some of these things but require cells to infect in order to do so. This seems to me to be the kind of 'life' definition you are using when you talk about things like death from sodium azide.
I'm not sure how it can be argued that life, by that kind of definition has anything to do with emotions. Do single celled organisms have emotion? Which of these attributes do what to form love, anger, fear?
Those things are states in the brain.. which happens to be composed of cells which are alive by the mechanistic definition. To some degree we can understand and demonstrate those emotions as being physical states in the brain. Scientists have brought the emotions out by poking, prodding and stimulating various regions of the brains of living, conscious people.
On the other hand, there is incredible complexity in all that huge mass of cells and how they communicate. We can't map out all the interactions which occur as a brain experiences love or anger or fear and simulate them on a computer.
Further, and i think more importantly.. I don't think we really understand how we perceive those brain states. When the cells of my brain activate to form an emotion I don't experience it as an individual cell taking a bunch of inputs from other cells and deciding based on them when it is time to activate a bunch of outputs sent to other cells. I experience it as a whole individual.. as a person.
If the emergent behavior of the sum of reactions between these mechanisticly living things can form me.. why can't the sum of reactions between some other form of logic gates combine to form what is essentially a person. I can't even define what exactly a person is so surely I can't rule that out!
It seems unlikely to me that things like metabolism and self-repair are what set me apart from a non-sentient robot.
"I would like it very much if you could provide some information that suggests that all you need is complexity to make something with feelings and emotions."
I don't know why you would expect evidence of that from me. It isn't quite what I said! Maybe there is some aspect to our existence as people that goes beyond the materials and energy interacting within us. I don't know. Good luck proving it either way. But.. even if something like that does exist.. is it generated by the formation of our bodies? Is it somehow attracted from elsewhere and binds to us as our bodies are formed? Even if there is something more to us.. without thoroughly understanding it whose to say the same thing wouldn't (or would) happen to a sufficiently complex AI?
But... emotions, memories, sensations... they have all been produced experimentally in real human beings by electrically stimulating various areas of the brain. So.. tell me that much of us doesn't exist at least on some level as mere signals passed around by cells.
"But the key is that they are alive"
Have you ever attempted to put a real definition on the term 'alive'? good luck with that. I feel I should write more on this but what do you write to describe the indescribable?
"There is no evidence that any machine of any type even has a "thought", let alone an emotion."
Agreed. But... human beings can be considered to be highly complex chemical machines. And.. your statement still stands. Something that was only a 'sufficiently complex' machine could theoretically appear to be a person. (oh yah.. try to define person too). Maybe that's all a sufficiently advanced AI would be. But.. maybe that's all you, and every other person on the planet is. Sufficiently advanced chemical machines that they seem to be people. I only 'know' that I am a real person. And.. nope... I can not prove it! I can give you no evidence that I actually have thoughts and emotions rather than just sufficiently complicated electrical and chemical signals to simulate them.
So... I take that one on faith. I'm not a big fan of faith over science but how do you devise a test for things like person hood that can't even be defined? Since I believe that I am a person and other humans seem to be of similar makeup and have similar traits of sensation and emotion I believe that they (including you) are people too!
If the day ever comes that someone creates a sufficiently advanced AI... it's going to be quite a conundrum figuring out if we should consider that to be a person or a thing and what basic rights therefore do or do not apply. Good luck to anyone on either side of that argument! If anyone ever thinks they can win it I think they are deluded.
I'll take the 'lets just assume it's a person' side because it' safer. It would be less harmful to anthropomorphize a machine than to objectify a person.
"I wonder what it is that makes people think that robots can be given emotions, when we have no idea how brains generate emotions?"
Ah, how refreshing. An intelligent thought on this subject.
"what makes people think that it doesn't require living cells to have feelings, sensations and emotions?"
Damn... I jumped the gun.
Cells are really vessels containing incredibly complicated chemical reactions. They communicate through various electrical and chemical means. I don't know if there is any non-material, spiritual aspect to it or not (and not interested in a debate on it) but if the sum of all these reactions and chemical plus electrical signals can add up to either make us or attract the undefined spiritual thing or whatever.
Why couldn't the sum of a whole bunch of electrical signals through semiconductor switches or even something really crazy like a mechanical computer made of wheels and gears do the same?
Now.. whether something like this could actually be built is an entirely different question. The complexity would be unimaginable. But then.. I don't see anybody building humans out of raw chemicals either yet nobody is going to argue that a being made of cells can't have feelings, sensations and emotions.