• 29 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeh possibly a little early to pull that card, might make more sense for like “the internet” or something where it’s had about 30 years to become an essential part of people’s lives. Unlike a lot of the Lemmy audience who would clearly not be the type of people he’s thinking of, I actually do make use of some of those tools so I should really be exactly one of the types he’s thinking about but while I’ve developed that habit and would likely notice the absence of the tools for about a fortnight, it’d hardly make a massive difference.




  • I’m not sure I see the contradiction myself. It sounds like the theory is the towers somehow transmit the virus which creates the need and pretext for the vaccine that allows the secret nanobot injection right?

    Is it contradictory because the capacity to wirelessly transmit a biological virus through these 5g towers would mean they wouldn’t need to physically inject these nanobot things because they should be able to just transmit them the same way? Because if so, I can see what you mean but I suppose that doesn’t necessarily follow, like maybe for whatever reason viruses are different to nanobots and can somehow be transmitted through radio technology but nanobots can’t. Or also they might think, as so many conspiracy theorists do, that COVID is a “hoax” so that opens up all kinds of creative interpretations, maybe their 5g towers merely produce the disease known as COVID and there is no actual virus known as SARS-COV-2 and that’s the “hoax” part. That theory wouldn’t require virus transmission over radiowaves just radiowaves being “bad” for reasons that could be made up later.





  • Never seen one like that. The video store I worked at had one that was huge and looked like an alien ware PC. You put the disc in and after a deafening horrendous noise for what felt like a full 60s or more you’d pull out an astonishingly well cleaned near scratch free disc. I didn’t actually put 2 and 2 together that the DVD cleaner was of course buffing and so inherently destructive and I thought it was kinda neat so for a little while there I started buffing discs with only superficial damage that hadn’t had complaints 😳.

    The awful noise it used to make got worse and worse over the lifetime of the machine too. Crazy thing. Did it’s job really well though.



  • 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.