People will use “shitty corporate Linux” because no corporation is going to pre-install an OS that isn’t shitty spyware because spying on you is worth money and why on earth would a corporation leave money on the table?

It’s almost as if there is a financial incentive to enshitify everything.

I think the death penalty could be just, but, unfortunately our justice system is too capricious and dysfunctional to be worthy of administering it.

Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, testified in defense of evolution at a trial in Arkansas then was on the same plane as Bill Clinton during Clinton’s interregnum between governorships. Clinton said he “would have vetoed that bill”, meaning the bill mandating equal time for creationism.

If lemmy was around while you were 16 you are clearly a child. Now, pass me my cane, I want to shake it while I yell at those clouds.

I’m gradually concluding that every decision in computer UI has been wrong. Peak UI happened in the 1990s; it’s been downhill ever since. People think terminals are scary, but come on—asking ChatGPT “how do I do this?” and getting three lines that have worked unchanged since 1989 is not harder than watching some tech-bro explain which menus to click… menus that get rearranged every six months so they can find new ways to wedge ads into your ribbon.

Look, the hospital is going to put me in enough debt that I’m going to have to give them one (or two) kidneys if I don’t want them to end up with my house. No time to pay back any loans right now.

Danm, I’m checking myself into the burn ward currently. I wish I could up my social credit score making memes like this 😉.

Well apparently fedora w/ kde is wrong or something. I have no idea why.

I mean I use Ubuntu with I3, which is obviously a better choice and all /s.

I’m sorry, but this reads to me like “I am certain I am right, so evidence that implies I’m wrong must be wrong.” And while sometimes that really is the right approach to take, more often than not you really should update the confidence in your hypothesis rather than discarding contradictory data.

But, there must be SOMETHING which is a good measure of the ability to reason, yes? If reasoning is an actual thing that actually exists, then it must be detectable, and there must be a way to detect it. What benchmark do you purpose?

You don’t have to seriously answer, but I hope you see where I’m coming from. I assume you’ve read Searle, and I cannot express to you the contempt in which I hold him. I think, if we are to be scientists and not philosophers (and good philosophers should be scientists too) we have to look to the external world to test our theories.

For me, what goes on inside does matter, but what goes on inside everyone everywhere is just math, and I haven’t formed an opinion about what math is really most efficient at instantiating reasoning, or thinking, or whatever you want to talk about.

To be honest, the other day I was convinced it was actually derivatives and integrals, and, because of this, that analog computers would make much better AIs than digital computers. (But Hava Siegelmann’s book is expensive, and, while I had briefly lifted my book buying moratorium, I think I have to impose it again).

Hell, maybe Penrose is right and we need quantum effects (I really really really doubt it, but, to the extent that it is possible for me, I try to keep an open mind).

🤷‍♂️

Gary Marcus is certainly good. It’s not as if I think say, LeCun, or any of the many people who think that LLMs aren’t the way are morons. I don’t think anyone thinks all the problems are currently solved. And I think long time lines are still plausible, but, I think dismissing short time line out of hand is thoughtless.

My main gripe is how certain people are about things they know virtually nothing about. And how slap dashed their reasoning is. It seems to me most people’s reasoning goes something like “there is no little man in the box, it’s just math, and math can’t think.” Of course, they say it with a lot fancier words, like “it’s just gradient decent” as if human brains couldn’t have gradient decent baked in anywhere.

But, out of interest what is your take on the Stochastic Parrot? I find the arguments deeply implausible.

So, how would you define AGI, and what sorts of tasks require reasoning? I would have thought earning the gold medal on the IMO would have been a reasoning task, but I’m happy to learn why I’m wrong.

I don’t see why AGI must be conscious, and the fact that you even bring it up makes me think you haven’t thought too hard about any of this.

When you say “novel answers” what is it you mean? The questions on the IMO have never been asked to any human before the Math Olympiad, and almost all humans cannot answer those quesion.

Why does answering those questions not count as novel? What is a question whose answer you would count as novel, and which you yourself could answer? Presuming that you count yourself as intelligent.

How do you know we’re not remotely close to AGI? Do you have any expertise on the issue? And expertise is not “I can download Python libraries and use them” it is “I can explain the mathematics behind what is going on, and understand the technical and theoretical challenges”.

In the US, sure, but there have been class revolts in other nations. I’m not saying they lead to good outcomes, but king Louis XVI was rich. And being rich did not save him. There was a capitalist class in China during the cultural revolution. They didn’t make it through. If it means we won’t go extinct, why can we have a revolution to prevent extinction?

I mean, geodetic interferometers already exist and can measure very small deviations. Give them arms the length of the observable universe and they will increase in accuracy, not decrease in accuracy.

If you constructed a circle with the radius of the universe, then measured its circumference and radius measurement accuracy would easily be able to tell the difference between a real circle and a mathematical circle. That is because neither the perimeter of circle will nor the diameter of the circle will be through in empty space. They will be near enough to matter to measure detectable deflections.

From your measurement of pi, we can deduce that you live in an anti-de Sitter space, so all the string theorists will now be sending you emails to test out their theories.

Overly snarky response: Uhhhm. Have you been asleep since, what, 1915 or something? We have extraordinary evidence, and everyone has accepted it, in so far as I know.

Less snarky response: the path on which light moves is the universes instantiation of a straight line. It is “the (locally) shortest path between two points”, the same definition you learned in geometry class. Yet in our universe, two straight lines can intersect each other twice. This is because our universe has at least some local curvature, meaning it is locally non Euclidean. In order to have a mathematically perfect circle you would need to live in a universe without any matter or energy, and with certain other properties.

The universe is non-Euclidean, so no circle made in the actual geometry of the universe actually has the ratio of pi between its circumference and diameter.

Is that the part you are confused about, or did I write something else badly?

[finding people who don’t know that we live in non Euclidean space these days is like finding people who think the sun goes round the earth. But I guess if people can’t be bothered to learn 350 year old mathematics, they also can’t be bothered to learn 100 year old physics. Oh well.]