Yeah, for a decent entry level camera it’s around a thousand bucks, and lenses tend to go for close to that as well. If you do decide to go for it at some point, something like Sony A6100, is a good starter. I started on the older A6000 model, and it served me pretty well.

That’s how I started originally. I’d just walk around and if I saw something that looked neat, I’d snap a pic with my phone. And then I figured getting an actual camera might be a good pretext to get out of the house. The lockdowns kind of sealed the deal since I started getting cabin fever with nowhere to go. :)

Thanks, I find processing the photos tends to be half the fun. There are a lot of blackbirds around here, and they’re very feisty. Sometimes they’ll even attack hawks, and dive bomb people if they pass to close. But they’ll also eat seeds right out of your hand. And titmouses definitely look neat. I like the color scheme, and the mohawk is very cool. Apparently they do come to Ontario, but I’ve yet to see one myself.

It’s definitely a fun hobby, although a bit pricey in terms of gear. And I very much agree, just being around nature makes you feel better and allows you to think clearly. I was between jobs for a couple of months a few years ago, and I spent the whole summer going to the park. I’d get up around 6 in the morning, leave my phone at home, and go spend the whole day at the park. It was the happiest I can recall being in my adult life. Completely disconnected from everything, and just vibing.

I started with plants, but moved on to birds and occasional critters like chipmunks. Birds definitely take a bit of patience to get nice shots I find. I post some of my stuff on here https://pixelfed.social/Yogthos

I got into doing nature photography over the pandemic as a way to get out of the house, and it’s been amazing for my mental health. It forced me to get out and just live in the moment really paying attention to the environment around me. I’ve realized how little we notice of the world around us normally. I’ve also found martial arts are a similar experience in a sense that you’re really just focused on the moment and forget about everything else you’ve been thinking about.

Wait till you find out how modern economies function.

That’s one thing that’s stayed constant to this day.

should do an AMA on how long it took you

Have some humility and willingness to learn.

I have plenty of willingness to learn from people who have a clue on the subject.

I didn’t say it was the primary function.

You literally tried to argue that evolution doesn’t create complexity if there’s a more efficient path.th.

Then what about Darwin who literally said, “Natural selection is continually trying to economize every part of the organization.” Now please go and read some introductory texts on biology before trying to explain to me why Darwin is wrong. There’s so much going on when it comes to the thermodynamics of living systems and you’re clearly not ready to have a conversation about it.

Again, you’re showing a superficial understanding of the subject here. Natural selection selects for overall fitness, and efficiency is only a small part of equation. For example, plants don’t use the most efficient wavelength for producing energy, they use the one that’s most reliably available. Similarly, living organisms have all kinds of redundancies that allow them to continue to function when they’re damaged. Evolution optimizes for survival over efficiency.

You’re baseless assuming that hydrocephalus causes the brain to lose a substantial amount of its complexity.

Maybe read the actual paper linked there?

But hey neuroscience hasn’t really advanced at all since 1980 right? The brain is totally redundant right? There’s no possible way a critical and discerning person such as yourself could have been taken in by junk science, right?!!

What I linked you is a case study of an actual living person who was missing large parts of their brain and had a relatively normal life. But hey why focus on the actual facts when you can just write more word salad right?

I took issue with specific statements you made that stand apart from the rest of your comment.

You took issue with made up straw man arguments that you yourself made and have fuck all with what I actually said. Then you proceeded to demonstrate that you don’t actually understand the subject you’re debating. You might as well start believing in the astrology, crystals, and energy healing. At least those interests will make you seem fun and quirky instead of just a sad debate bro.

Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine.

I literally said these things, and you never gave any actual counter argument to either of them.

You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

You’re betraying your ignorance of how biology works and illustrating that you have absolutely no business debating this subject. Efficiency is not the primary fitness function for evolution, it’s survivability. And that means having a lot of redundancy baked into the system. Here’s a concrete example for you of just how much of the brain isn’t actually essential for normal day to day function. https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles.

There’s nothing silly in stating that the underlying principles are similar, but we don’t understand a lot of the mechanics of the brain. If you truly can’t understand such basic things there’s little point trying to have a meaningful discussion.

I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

That’s literally the whole context for this thread, it just doesn’t fit with the straw man you want to argue about.

A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

Whose work am I taking at face value specifically? You’re just spewing nonsense here without engaging with anything I’m saying.

thank you for gracing us with an example of how a thirteen year old understands the world

I suspect that something like LLMs is part of our toolkit, but I agree that this can’t be the whole picture. Ideas like neurosymbolic AI might be on the right track here. The idea here is to leverage LLMs at parsing and classifying noisy input data, which they’re good at, then use a symbolic logic engine to operate on the classified data. Something along these lines is much more likely to produce genuine intelligence. We’re still in very early stages of both understanding how the brain works and figuring out how to implement artificial reasoning.

O7

LLMs and the human mind operate on categorically different principles.

A bold statement given that we don’t actually understand how the brain operates exactly and what algorithms that would translate into.

Where the straw man?

The straw man is you continuing to argue against equating LLMs with the functioning of the brain, something I never said here.

All the verbiage used to describe neural network models has little to do with how the brain actually works.

You appear to be conflating the implementation details of how the brain works with the what it’s doing in a semantic sense. There is zero evidence that all the complexity of the brain is inherent to the way our reasoning functions. Again, we don’t have a full understanding of how the brain accomplishes tasks like reasoning. It may be a lot more complex than what LLMs do, or it may not be. We do not know.

Finally, none of this has anything to do with the point I was actually making which is regarding embodiment. You decided to ignore that to focus on braying about tech companies and LLMs instead.

the wasp nest has really come out in the comments here 🤣

I actually preferred Inventing Reality from Parenti

Does feddit have screening questions on sign up to make sure people signing up are actual fascist?

^ how to let people know you have mental capacity of a 13 year old

This completely understates the gulf between what we call AI and how the human brain actually works.

Way to completely misrepresent what I was actually saying. Nowhere was I suggesting that there isn’t a huge difference between the two. What I pointed out is that, while undeniably more complex, our brains appear to work on similar principles.

My only point was that the feedback loop from embodiment creates the basis for volition, and that what we call intelligence is our ability to create internal models of the world that we use for decision making. So, this is likely a prerequisite for any artificial system that has any meaningful intelligence.

Maybe try engaging with that instead of writing a wall of text arguing with a straw man.