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.

That’s not just me?!? I have to IMMEDIATELY jump out of bed and stand up and rub my calf or the pain is going to intense.

There is so much context I’m not a party to here re: the text of this post. There’s a certain random weirdness to Lemmy sometimes that’s quite unique to the platform. You can be doomscrolling a bunch of news articles, memes, asklemmy questions, niche and specific posts that are specifically constrained to a community where it makes sense and has context and then suddenly out of nowhere it’s like you’re in a room of people who are all deeply involved in some weird cult or secret mission all speaking in a shared code they all understand except you, who’s suddenly just there with them eating chips asking “what are you guys talking about?”

Do not speak to me of the old magic, I was there when it was written.

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.

Oh ok nothing to worry about then

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.

MSN Messenger for the win!

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.

Looks like he’s wearing a shower cap

I mean they could be pretty happy, even joyful I suppose. The ideology is rooted in hatred but I do get the impression it’s rather a lot of fun for a good portion of these guys right up until they’re met with the leopard’s teeth.

The thing is, this would just be equivalent to leaving it on at all hours, because who would join such a chat room without the intention of switching it on. Even if you joined such a chat room and had some restraint and decided to wait till the moment you thought would be most amusing, someone else would definitely just decided that it should be on now and basically the only lull would be if the number of users was relatively limited and mostly in the same timezone so everyone is sleeping.

I tend to agree on that more flexible definition with a few core ingredients as baseline but it does seem to me that that core list needs to include at least one regional speciality item specific to the British Isles because I think that’s what the “full” part is really referring to as opposed to just a “fry up” as the other bloke suggested. I think in general in England that’s probably black pudding.

This thinking is because that minimum combination you listed is fairly common in a few places including Australia and while I don’t speak from experience, I think with the exception of the beans if wouldn’t be a totally strange or foreign combination in America either.

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.

I don’t tend to check individually every time I buy just to make sure, but from what I read and on occasions where source was actually identified so that I could check, almost all the garlic sold here in Australia is from China.

I have not really observed this phenomenon with the roots that you’re describing. Also, it’s kind of hard for me to say what particular characteristics Chinese garlic has because assuming that the garlic I’m buying really is coming from China, then it seems they grow several varieties that all gets sold as just “garlic” because in any given trip to the same supermarket you get noticeably different attributes to the size and appearance and physical characteristics of the garlic sold.

I don’t really notice much difference in cooking with them or eating them though. Occasionally you get some much stronger flavoured ones, but it’s just the same taste but stronger rather than detectably different and often this doesn’t really seem to couple with which type they happened to sell this week. Any attributes of the garlic’s appearance that seem distinct to what’s available this week, don’t seem to reliably signal what it will taste like the next time you see those same attributes again the next time they’re on sale.

The specific application in this instance was that it creates “progress notes”. Admittedly, as I have only the information from the article itself, having no background in this field myself, I can only make assumptions what those are like, but as the name implies it’s charting a client’s progress through therapy and would also imply to me a lot of summarising of information gleaned during sessions. I guess in as much as it also would necessarily have to create a transcript in doing this for you, I guess it also provides that too. This is portrayed as tedious and time consuming work by the creators of the service, who obviously have a vested interest in casting it in such light, but taken at its word, I would say in my opinion the advantage would be in automating some of the tedious and time consuming aspects of the job.

As I suspect you were driving at from the tenor of the question, there’s a lot of ways this could go wrong, in particular privacy concerns when this service is offered in the manner that it is here where it’s processed outside of the therapist’s own clinic by 3rd parties and information is shared with additional parties and used for many purposes with only the flimsy promise of “de-anonymisation” which appears to be hollow. It could also maybe affect how the therapy is conducted, making decisions about how to summarise this information that will influence what decisions a therapist makes and perhaps that therapist might have summarised it differently if doing the notes themselves, then again this all hinges upon how effective it is considered to be. If it can be evaluated and found to be generally good, then it seems tentatively like this could be a pretty helpful tool for a therapist. But in general, my comment was really more directed at what I feel like is a sad state of affairs across the board with recent tech advances including generative AI as applied in any aspect of life or work, that I think is often lost in these conversations where the technology really shows promise or is quite impressive but because of the manner of its development or the surveillance profit model, it’s basically tainted and ruined. I feel like I often come across commentary that fails to make the distinction between the negative aspects of how these techs have come about and are monetized and the tech itself where the latter is simply cast as inherently undesirable even when there’s clearly reason enough for people to find it appealing in the first place for it to end up in use.

You know, as with a lot of these tech advances that impinge upon privacy and put us at risk in the name of profit, the buy-in, the thing they’re offering in exchange, IS actually pretty worthwhile. This is extremely useful. It’s such a shame that all this cool Star Trek shit that I would have been giddy about as a kid has been realised, but at a sinister and often hidden cost.

Is there any way this can be done on local metal? Would it achieve the same level of accuracy and sophistication of the progress notes? Because if this can be offered to the therapists that wanted it enough in the first place that they either knowingly or unwittingly sacrificed their patient’s privacy for it, maybe they can be given an alternative.