Yeah every time I ask people what non-D&D systems they play I get a rude wake-up call.

If we didn’t evolve to have gay sex why are gays so good at sex? QED.

One of the first books I can remember reading was a Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The concept of tesseracts totally blew my young mind.

It was tulips all along, but stupider.

Your day is coming soon, cryptocurrency.

Wow where in the world did this come from

Such a great series! I just finished a reread of it; totally worth it.

The only misstep in the series, in my opinion, is the novel-length Network Effect. I think the perfect format for Murderbot is novellas. Wells’ longer form felt like a couple Murderbot stories mashed together and didn’t work as well for me.

It’s never explicitly stated what Murderbot’s gender presentation is. I do visualize it as feminine presenting personally, but I just finished a reread and it is never stated anywhere. A character calls it “third mom” at one point but it’s unclear if this is because it looks feminine or because it was smothering her as her extant mothers do.

Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.

Still overpriced!

Where to begin! The famines? The oppression? The lack of liberties? The persecution of queer people, or, indeed, any thought viewed as slightly aberrant? The megalomaniacal madman who keeps his people in chains while he lives the life of the ultra-rich? The gasping, desperate poverty of his subjects? Their inability to leave the country? The militarism? The backwardness?

Oh, wait, what we like?

Uh…

I’ve run into this in Debian. Not sure what to tell you – the base repo does not have an explicit contract that everything in it uses the same version of all available software.

Not really; they will try to automatically download dependencies, but they don’t provide the application with resolution to the correct dependency. So upgrading libssl for one dependency could still break another.

It benefits the end-user.

People do not want to be in dependency resolution hell; where they have three programs that all use different versions of libssl and require them to install all of them properly and point each application to the correct one. Most users have no ability to resolve problems like that. By not bundling, the application developer is forcing them to either try anyway or just not install their software.

Bundling dependencies with Flatpak or Snap helps the end user at the cost of only a few extra megabytes of space, which most users have in abundance anyway.

It’s entirely not irrelevant. Even if you create a program to evolve pong, that was also designed by a human. As a computer programmer you should know that no computer program will just become pong, what an idiotic idea.

You just keep pivoting away from how you were using words to them meaning something entirely different; this entire argument is worthless. At least LLMs don’t change the definitions of the words they use as they use them.

I’m giving up here but evolution did not “design” us. LLMs are designs and created with a purpose in mind and they fulfill that purpose. Humans were not designed.

If you truly believe humans are simply autocompletion engines then I just don’t know what to tell you. I think most reasonable people would disagree with you.

Humans have actual thoughts and emotions; LLMs do not. The neural networks that LLMs use, while based conceptually in biological neural networks, are not biological neural networks. It is not a difference of complexity, but of kind.

Additionally, no matter how many statistics, CPU power, or data you give an LLM, it will not develop cognition because it is not designed to mimic cognition. It is designed to link words together. It does that and nothing more.

A dog is more sentient than an LLM in the same way that a human is more sentient than a toaster.

LLMs do not “teach,” and that is why learning from them is dangerous. They synthesize words and return other words, but they do not understand the content presented to them in any sense. Because of this, there is the chance that they are simply spouting bullshit.

Learn from them if you like, but remember they are absolutely no substitute for a human, and basically everything they tell you must be checked for correctness.

Lol… come on. Your second source disagrees with your assertion:

Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

You are wrong and it is quite settled. Read more, including the very sources you’re trying to recommend others read.

The two types of loops you equivocate are totally different; saying that a computer executing a program, and an animal living, are actually the same, is very silly indeed. Like, air currents have a “core loop” of blowing around a lot but no one says that they’re intelligent or that they’re like computer programs or humans.

You’ve ignored my main complaint. I said that you treat LLMs and humans at different levels of abstraction:

No; you are analogizing them but losing sense of their differences in the process. I am not abstracting LLMs. That is all they do. That is what they were designed to do and what they accomplish.

You are drawing a comparison between a process humans have that generates consciousness, and literally the entirety of an LLM’s existence. There is nothing else to an LLM. Whereas if you say “well a human is basically just bouncing electro-chemical signals between neurons and moving muscles” people (like me) would rightly say you were missing the forest for the trees.

The “trees” for an LLM are their neural networks and word vectors. The forest is a word prediction algorithm. There is no higher level to what they do.

That’s a fair assessment but besides the point: A thermostat has an internal state it can affect (the valve), is under its control and not that of silly humans (that is, not directly) aka an internal world.

I apologize if I was unclear when I spoke of an internal world. I meant interior thoughts and feelings. I think most people would agree sentience is predicated on the idea that the sentient object has some combination of its own emotions, motivations, desires, and ability to experience the world.

LLMs have as much of that as a thermostat does; that is, zero. It is a word completion algorithm and nothing more.

Your paper doesn’t bother to define what these T-systems are so I can’t speak to your categorization. But I think rating the mental abilities of thermostats versus computers versus ChatGPT versus human minds totally absurd. They aren’t on the same scale, they’re different kinds of things. Human minds have actual sentience. Everything else in that list is a device, created by humans, to do a specific task and nothing more. None of them are anything more than that.

LLMs already do quite a few things they were not designed to do.

No; they do exactly what they were designed to do, which is convert words to vectors, do math with them, and convert it back again. That we’ve find more utility in this use does not change their design.

What if “the internet” developed some form of self-awareness - would we know?

Uh what? Like how would it? This is just technomystical garbage. Enough data in one place and enough CPU in one place doesn’t magically make that place sentient. I love it as a book idea, but this is real life.

What about feedback and ability to self-modify?

This would be a significant design divergence from what LLMs are, so I’d call those things something different.

But in any event that still would not actually give LLMs anything approaching: thoughts, feelings, or rationality. Or even the capability to understand what they were operating on. Again, they have none of those things and they aren’t close to them. They are word completion algorithms.

Humans are not word completion algorithms. We have an internal existence and thought process that LLMs do not have and will never have.

Perhaps at some point we will have true artificial intelligence. But LLMs are not that, and they are not close.