You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have. If you then try to use that definition to determine whether a machine understands, you'll have a clear answer for yourself. The whole operation, however, does not lead to much understanding of anything.
>> Understanding, when used in its unqualified form, implies people possessing same.
> You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have.
This is not what I said.
What I said was unqualified use of "understanding" implies understanding people possess. Thus it being a metaphysical property by definition and existing strictly within a person.
Many other entities possess their own form of understanding. Most would agree mammals do. Some would say any living creature does.
I would make the case that every program compiler (C, C#, C++, D, Java, Kotlin, Pascal, etc.) possesses understanding of a particular sort.
All of the aforementioned examples differ from the kind of understanding people possess.
Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.
It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.
Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?
Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.
If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.
Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.
Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.
Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.
Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.
But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.
And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.
If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.
lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.
I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.
It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.
I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).
The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.
This was a village of 8,000 people.
Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.
The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!
Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.
The thing with idealists in the philosophical sense is that they're typically not very well grounded in reality. Not saying it's always drugs/psychotic breaks/deep meditation, but often it is. Even more so with the panpsychists.
I took one of the last ham radio exams in the Netherlands that were taken by having many test takers in a room (now it's computer based, using the same infrastructure as the driver's license theory test).
Of thirty people, there were only men. Not all were old, but at least 70% seemed 40 to 50. Zero minorities. I fit the profile myself (a part from being German, not Dutch) but still feel grossed out by it
I'm the person most positive about technology of all my friends, and this gets a no from me. A relationship is an endless sequence of coordination problems, and you need to work out a way to do these effortlessly. Defer to the person with stronger opinions, everybody decides half of the time, some quid pro quo, I mean there's just endless ways to solve this in an easier and more fun way than using an app.
I'd generally call this amount of tables an antipattern - doing this basically implies that there's information stored in the table names that should be in rows instead, like IDs etc. -- But I'll admit that sensor related use cases have a tendency to stress the system in unusual ways, which may have forced this design.
Especially back when we started. Now we would've done it differently, but still think postgres wouldn't really work. Guess we will never now as even far smaller data sets do not work in the way we need them.
I sympathize, and I think this is a bigger problem than the skills/experience/age issues. I'd do what I can to either move to a more dynamic place, or get a remote job for a US company. I know it's hard, but it's better than investing two years to become a pro in a different stack - and still be stuck in the same socioeconomic trap.
It's just not cursive. This is not controversial, there was a huge debate ~15 years ago when cursive instruction was removed from the curriculum in the US.
What is the point of arguing definitions in this case? It seems you think one thing. The Wikipedia article says another.
Are you claiming there is only one internally-consistent way of defining terms? Hopefully not.
Do you think that definitions exist "out there" as objective realities? Hopefully not, as they exist in your head. On what basis is the definition in your head better than Wikipedia's? Or vice versa?
Are you claiming definitions are determined by authorities? Hopefully not. What do you think the editors of dictionaries themselves have to say about that? As I understand it, they view themselves as collecting popular usage.
Does popular usage serve as the "proper" and "fixed" definition? If so, does that mean usage {1, 10, 100, 1000} years ago was wrong?
Are you making some kind of statistical claim; e.g. "most people would think that cursive is..."?
The trope of "No, Thing X is not Y, see Source S" is rather myopic. There is often no disagreement once you speak clearly about what you _mean_.
Did you read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article? It contrasts cursive with block letters.
Anyway, you're of course free to call block letters cursive. It's not the traditional meaning, and it's interesting to observe that people don't even know that anymore.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Second, please recognize that my comment was based on what you wrote above: "It's just not cursive." But it seems my point didn't get across.
> No, your point came across. You think every sort of handwriting is cursive, and I don't think I can help you with that :)
No, that was not my point.
I'll try it a different way with two questions and a comment: what is the point of arguing definitions? What does it get you? If your point is communication and persuasion, pointing to a definition and asserting that it settles the issue isn't a great strategy.
And by the way, it is incorrect to claim I something like a complete relativist regarding definitions; I am not saying anything goes. For example, I said above that internal consistency matters.) Very important is a particular focusing goal other citing authority (such as effective communication) which involves 2+ parties.
Typo fixes: "And by the way, it is incorrect to claim I'm something like a complete relativist regarding definitions; I'm not saying anything goes. For example, I said above that internal consistency matters. It is important to have a particular focusing goal other than promoting one definition over another. For example, if your goal is effective communication you probably won't be tempted to say things like "It's just not cursive."
