Intentionality is the key difference. You can eventually tell a Chinese room’s nature by giving it new variables that it hasn’t encountered before. New problems lead to algorithmic breakdown.

That said, there’s deeper conversations you can have about what consciousness truly is, of course. My personal view is that it requires a level of complexity that we are still very far away from architecturally, and a level of scalability that we may not even be able to support ecologically. This thought experiment is mainly to show you what the inner workings of a computerized process can look like, and works to provide a demystified perspective.

A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.

And the added economic benefits of having in-house services are basically a return on investment that balance out any higher initial costs. It’s a no brainer.

The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.

Because they’re just as stupid as other people, but they’ve also got the survivorship bias compounding the effect of their stupidity.

Get rid of the execs and their overinflated salaries/bonuses instead. How’s that for agile?

“Most powerful man in the world”. Nationalistic egocentrism never fails to get a laugh out of me.

Definitely need more of this in our politics. Change starts with the rhetoric. We need schools to teach it and the media to preach it. Feasibility will soon follow one way or another.

Keep the jokes coming!

Stupid is as stupid does.

Romania and other places in European have unlimited data for under $10/month. Meanwhile here in Canada an unlimited plan is over $100/month. God forbid you have a non-unlimited plan (which is still more expensive than an unlimited plan in EU btw) and you have a cap on your data, because with the way the internet is these days the amount of bloatware on every website will kill your data allocation in a week, and then you’re left with overage charges that double your monthly fees. You either get screwed now or get screwed later. Those are your choices when it comes to telecom companies in Canada.

When the umbilical chord is cut.

Dunno how it is everywhere else but in Toronto the FIFA preparations have also fenced off certain public parks around the stadium which were heavily used for through-traffic, forcing pedestrians and cyclists to have to take massive detours around them. It’s particularly annoying because they’ve just been fenced off for weeks now with barely anyone inside except for some half asleep volunteer guards on their phones. How this is legal, I don’t know, but I’m assuming it came with the bribes. Just stinks of classism and corruption and it makes me like this World Cup even less (among all the other reasons).

Seems to me the Township admin should be going after the private owner of the billboard sign that’s currently leasing the digital display to Morgan. Weird how this private entity has been kept anonymous in the reporting.

More like threw rocks at the bully’s little sister while she was at a concert and had nothing to do with the bully’s actions. Nothing wrong with resistance, but targets matter and in this case Hamas chose poorly and lost the optics advantage they could’ve had on the international stage. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

We can pump these numbers higher.

No need to interrupt your enemy while they make mistakes. Just let the US continue to make fools of itself while the government and populace divests further.

All part of the weapons industry plan. The myth that you need guns to be free, that you need guns to revolt, that the world is full of criminals waiting to launch an attack on your home, that global supply chains and regulations that disseminate the food you buy are not to be trusted and you need to drive 4 hours out of your suburbia to go hunting for meat - all an advertising scheme to sell you metal fireworks toys. Not negating their real utility in niche applications but those applications remain just that - niche. Civilized nations don’t need to kowtow to this predatory industry.

I just realized if Alberta separates Poilievre loses his seat in parliament again lol. It almost sounds worth it…but nah, there’s plenty of other ways Pierre can be humiliated.

Hello to all the new users!