Whether or not Linux becomes a mainstream option and loses much of its appeal in the process creating a schism between ‘sanitised linux’ and ‘free rebel’ linux with the latter being sidelined because of various attestation and verification schemes stopping you from actually doing anything useful with your free-rebel computer; doesn’t sound like it would actually make a huge difference.

If all the recent rise in popularity and usability and adoption of linux stopped dead in its tracks today or even went backwards, and also the dystopian future you fear about mandatory face scans becomes reality, those using linux will get sidelined and put in to a ‘digital exile’; if insetad it does continue to rise and erode some of the share of desktops that windows enjoys and you end up with the ‘sanitised linux’ you’re afraid of causing a divide amongst the linux community, then you just get the same outcome for those that refuse to use the sanitised versions and insist on their ‘free rebel’ versions.

Either outcome, doesn’t sound like it’s any worse the other really, but at least in the interim, greater mainstream embrace of linux would be better and even in long term where it might get sanitised, it could still be a better outcome depending upon just how badly compromised the ‘sanitised linux’ actually turns out to be.

In the end, this sanitised linux could be worse than windows and ultimately the situation wouldn’t really have changed much since at that point ‘free-rebel’ linux basically just becomes what was always ‘linux’ and ‘sanitised linux’ is just ‘something else, not really linux in most people’s estimation.’ The two scenarios look kinda the same to me.

Mr Ellison, we’re very disappointed in you. You have failed to understand that as a member of the human race and a member of our society the rest of us have certain minimum expectations of you that you need to live up to and when you say things like wanting to keep some of us captive you must understand that you’re not hitting those expectations. Think of them like “KPIs.”

Much as you might like to, you simply cannot continually fail to meet those minimum expectations and expect the rest of us to take you seriously or listen to anything you have to say. It’s a non-starter because it’s obvious that whatever you say is fundamentally tainted by your total lack of respect for humanity so there’s just no need for us consider any of it.

Despite your failings, you’re presumably born of flesh and blood so that means you can do better. Just try harder and eventually it’ll be like second nature.

I don’t feel like LLMs are conscious and I act accordingly as though they aren’t, but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion. Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is, it seems difficult to rigorously decide upon what does and doesn’t get to be in the category. The usual means by which LLMs are explained not to be conscious, and indeed what I usually say myself, is something like your “they just output probability based on current context” or some variation of “they’re just guessing the next word”, but… is that definitely nothing like what we ourselves do and then call consciousness? Or if indeed that is definitively quite unlike anything we do, does that dissimilarity alone suffice to declare LLMs not conscious? Is ours the only possible example of consciousness, or is the process that drives the behaviour with LLMs possibly just another form or another way of arriving at consciousness? There’s evidently something that triggers an instinctual categorising, most wouldn’t classify a rock as conscious and would find my suggestion that ‘maybe it’s just consciousness in another form than ours’ a pretty weak way to assert that it is, but then again there’s quite a long way between a literal rock and these models running on specific rocks arranged in a particular way and which produce text in a way that’s really similar to the human beings that we all collectively tend to agree are conscious. Is being able to summarise the mechanisms that underpin the behaviour who’s output or manifestation looks like consciousness, enough on it’s own to explain why it definitely isn’t consciousness? Because, what if our endeavours to understand consciousness and understand a biological basis for it in ourselves bear fruit and we can explain deterministically how brains and human consciousness work? In that case, we could, if not totally predict human behaviours deterministically, then at least still give a pretty good and similar summarisation of how we produce those behaviours that look like consciousness. Would we at that point declare that human beings are not conscious either, or would we need a new basis upon which to exclude these current machine approximations of it?

I always felt that things such as the Chinese Room thought experiment didn’t adequately deal with what I was driving at in the previous paragraph and it seems to me that dismissals of machine consciousness on the grounds that LLMs are just statistical models that don’t know what they are doing are missing a similar point. Are we sure that we ourselves are not mechanistically following complicated rules just as neural networks and LLMs are and that’s simply what the experience of consciousness actually is - an unconscious execution of rulesets? Before the current crop of technology that has renewed interest in these questions, when it all seemed a lot more theoretical and perennially decades off, I was comfortable with this uncomfortable thought. Now that we actually have these impressive models that have people wondering about the topic, I seem to be skewing more skeptical and less generous about ascribing consciousness. Suddenly now the Chinese Room thought experiment as a counter to whether these conscious-looking LLMs are really conscious looks more convincing, but that’s not because of any new or better understanding on my part. I seem to be just goal post shifting when faced with something that does a better job of looking conscious than any technology I’d seen previously.

But see, doesn’t that just mean it’s a really good operating system? Not necessarily “fun”? I don’t know if I’m getting my point across here. Think of a pair of shoes, there is much variation of form and design intent and pricing and capability but nevertheless they’re pretty much all there to facilitate the task of walking. You could get a really bad pair of shoes that constantly dig holes in to your foot and fall to pieces and make walking a huge chore. Maybe some day someone will make a pair that somehow force you stop and look at billboards and ad displays, those would be your windows shoes. You could also get a great pair, that feels so comfortable you could forget you’re even wearing them, they look great and they were a fantastic price and they never worsen your ability to perform the task of walking. They might even be such good shoes that they’re suitable for all sorts of walking adjacent tasks like running as well, perhaps you’ll enjoy running, again though what’s fun there? Running? Or having shoes that don’t make running difficult? I’d assume the former. That’s what I tend to wonder about with the folks who talk about how much fun Linux is. I’m sure the various distros are really great operating systems that work way better than a lot of other options and don’t have the same perverse incentives that keep those other options so consistently poor and for all those reasons it’s a great choice but who’s looking at operating systems thinking “this is going to be fun”? I’d love to have that same capacity to be so amused by it but it’s hard to see it as anything other than a functional piece of equipment. I certainly will have preferences and appreciation for good equipment but I wouldn’t think of it as fun. I have a similar reaction to people that say they like it because they want to tinker or “you can do anything you want with it”, I don’t want to yuk anyone’s yum but, what would you even be trying to do with it?

I’m always somewhat confused by this, I haven’t tried Linux since 2009 so maybe I just need to try it some more to appreciate what people mean by thks. I’d say it was “fun” in so much as it was nice to have a challenge for a little while but that was more sort of incidental to it facilitating my computer being a useful machine for me. In terms of it being a better operating system that does it’s job efficiently without problems, shouldn’t it be sort of… Invisible then? Like how can it be fun? I use my computer to do stuff so for me it’s sort of like an operating system is only noticeable to the extent that it is bad and if it isn’t bad I won’t really be aware of it.

Sounds like it’s still quite a worry, maybe she’s safe from malicious software but sounds very prone to being mislead in to doing things by bad actors through her computer.

I like it.

I like the idea but I must say it’s going to be hard to hold our noses and proclaim anything he does to be “noble” even for the sake of the joke.

Gee that’s a real removed ain’t it perplexity?

In such a case, does the plaintiff have to actually have a kid though? Like if it’s an open secret that the case is manufactured, do you not get in to any kind of trouble if for example you made up the hypothetical damaged child? Because otherwise some poor kid is still going to have a rough time whether the case is “real” in the sense of a genuinely outraged parent who suddenly decided to sue, or “manufacturerd” in the sense that the story is basically hypothetical and can’t be disproven and the motivations for suing are part of a political movement with backing and strategy behind it.

Black sight? Binocular Superiority? Better Seeing?

I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.

That’s got to be the key to all this, specificity, it’s great that it’s got natural language processing to simplify things but sometimes that’s what’s actually getting in the way. What they should really do is have a special version of chatGPT for programming where users can interact with it in a very special form of structured English. It’s still natural language, this is the future after all, none of that zeroes and ones crap like the stone age, but just highly specific words with carefully defined meanings particular to making repeatable and executable steps in a pattern that does the same thing every time in response to inputs to produce outputs. You could then “speak” to one of these LLM things using this carefully structured English to automate specific tasks. The real kicker would be that you could tell it to chain together a bunch of these tasks you’ve had it automate for you to build up in to something much more complex. This would really harness the power of AI because at each step it’s made it for you, with minimal input from yourself because you’re just ‘talking’ to it in a very specific way. Admittedly this approach would be a little bit less obvious for new users than a standard LLM, but if an average person kept doing this for like a year or two they’d get pretty adept at this manner of speech, it’d be kind of like learning another language and people have been doing that for as long as there’s been people, I speak in a language everyday, I’m doing it right now. We could make it easier too, we could have courses and schools to help people get better at it faster.

Yeh, arguably and to a limited extent, the problems he’s having now aren’t the result of the decision to use AI to make his product so much as the decision to tell people about that and people deliberately attempting to sabotage it. I’m careful to qualify that though because the self evident flaw in his plan even if it only surfaced in a rather extreme scenario, is that he lacks the domain specific knowledge to actually make his product work as soon as anything becomes more complicated than just collecting the money. Evidently there was more to this venture than just the building of the software, that was necessary to for it to be a viable service. Much like if you consider yourself the ideas man and paid a programmer to engineer the product for you and then fired them straight after without hiring anyone to maintain it or keep the infrastructure going or provide support for your clients and then claimed you ‘built’ the product, you’d be in a similar scenario not long after your first paying customer finds out the hard way that you don’t actually know anything about your own service that you willingly took money for. He’s discovering he can’t actually provide the service part of the Software as a Service he’s selling.

ok, meet in the middle, shove a firecracker up his arse and attach some wings to him.

I didn’t know who that was before looking it up and I totally thought you were taking about the Pokemon lol

Look it was a long thread okay.

I haven’t been presented with any Ts and C’s. Do they apply if I already installed Firefox before this?

Wasn’t that interested before but it does give it a certain allure now to be sure.

This seems like it makes sense on at least 2 levels, either because he’s saying he at some point had the ‘woke mind virus’ and deleted it, or more likely he’s saying this is what people need to do to ‘free’ themselves of the ‘woke mind virus’.

You don’t have to endorse it to understand it. I don’t really understand Hazel’s confusion.