Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That's me!

Blog (blog.lmorchard.com)

@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

  • 1 day ago
    Wherein Minnaloushe is a world-class dangler #cats
  • 1 day ago
    Really surprised at the battery life, it's spent more time "returning to the home planet" than alive
  • 1 day ago
    Huh, my Tamagotchi has been on its way to the home planet for a bit over 2 years now. https://old-toots.lmorchard.com/2024/08/06.html?highlight=tamagotchi#anchor-eaaa9b7924fa5b9d927345d861e2b52ea027f38499e67d3a92fa46285a7189d6
  • 2 days ago
    That book, along with stuff like the works of Douglas Hofstadter, started me wondering how much of people is natural brain hardware and how much is nurtured cultural software - and how different past waves of humans with biology largely identical to ours today might have hosted radically different minds. Also makes me wonder how malleable we might be and how future minds might work? Or, you know, it could all be wrong and humans have gone essentially unchanged for millennia.
  • 2 days ago
    The book posits the notion that, once upon a time, about 3000 years ago, human minds weren't unified in introspective consciousness as they seem now: in the ancient world, folks own brains talked to them as hallucinated gods - and they obeyed on auto-pilot. No introspection or meta-cognition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
  • 2 days ago
    Ooh, another nerd who's read _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ by Julian Jaynes! This book was absolutely fascinating to me in college when I was getting my psych degree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ado90kMT_FM
  • 2 days ago
    It just occurred to me that I could make this whole situation even more nerdy-ass by firing up a Switch emulator on my gaming PC and playing my old backup copy of P5R that way via Moonlight on the real Switch. That probably breaks several laws somehow
  • 2 days ago
    But wait, it gets even more nerdy-ass: The gaming PC on which I installed Persona 5 Royale lives in the basement now, running Sunshine so I can access it with Moonlight. And there's a homebrew Moonlight client for Switch. So, I started playing P5R again on my Switch, via Moonlight, on my gaming PC in the basement. Because why not? https://github.com/XITRIX/Moonlight-Switch
  • 2 days ago
    Tonight's nerdy-ass activity: Persona 5 Royale for PC is on sale on Steam. Like a sucker, I've bought it again for the 3rd time. But, I've got 40+ hours into the game on Switch. Turns out my Switch is jailbroken, though, and I've backed up all my save games. And, weirdly, unlike PS4, it turns out that P5R save games on Switch are compatible with PC. Copied the files to the right obscure place and - voila - 40+ hours worth of P5R saves on my PC. https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/converting-a-ps4-persona-5-royal-ng-save-to-steam-with-adversarial-interoperability/
  • 3 days ago
    Like, this kind of thing makes me cranky. Imagine when these folks come equipped with screenshots of "well the watermark detector said you're AI" because they think they're Columbo or something https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1164/when-online-commenters-detect-my-art-as-ai
  • 3 days ago
    I've got well over 20 years worth of blog posts and the text of several books I wrote - and I know they all ended up in the training corpus of multiple LLMs. I'd like to run all that through Claude watermark detection and see how well it does. Lotta folks catching "that's AI" strays these days, and that's not even using any tools except "I can tell by the pixels that it is a fake" https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content
  • 3 days ago
    Oh, right, the Church of Scientology is after me. I forgot. (This was all in today's mail, each as separate pieces from the letter. I haven't had contact with the CoS since about 1995 in Michigan)

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