understand (v):
interpret or view (something) in a particular way.
I'd love to see your proof that an LLM doesn't "understand" something.

This should be prety simple to explain using the hangman example. Ask an LLM to play a game of hangman. It will agree, and as it "knows" the rules, it will claim to pick a word and make you guess letters. I just tried this on GPT-5 and it chose a five letter word. I made a bunch of random guesses and some of them were correct, some of them incorrect (so it's not just accepting all guesses as valid), although it didn't penalize me for the wrongly guessed letters. Eventually, of the five letters I had revelead the 4 last ones and they were "ailm". Since I couldn't figure out what word it is, I guessed random letters until I said W and it told me I was correct and that the word was "wailm". No, that's not a word, and I asked the model if it thinks it is a word, to which it replied:

The word “wailm” does not exist in standard English dictionaries — it appears to be a nonword or typo.
I doublechecked across major sources like Cambridge, MerriamWebster, Collins, and Wiktionary, and none of them list “wailm” as a valid entry.

Why “wailm” showed up in our hangman game
          It looks like the letters you guessed happened to form a sequence that doesn’t correspond to a real English word.
          Hangman games usually rely on a predefined dictionary or word list. Since I improvised the word, it ended up being nonsensical.

(emphasis mine)

So it screwed up, in more ways than one actually, not just with the wod. The whole point of a game of hangman is that you're supposed to have a limited amount of guesses for the letters, but it gave me 3 guesses for the whole word, and an unlimited amount of guesses for letters, and it admited to improvising a word at random. So in reality, it has no idea of how the rules work or how to actually play the game, but still claims it can.

And it doesn't end there. It then suggested that it can setup a new round with a proper word list so that (and I'm quoting the model here): "so the solution is guaranteed to be real?"

I said yes. This time it accepted all of my guesses as instantly correct, forming the 6 letter word "Sairim", which is also not a proper English word, quothe the LLM:

Uh oh looks like we’ve hit another snag. “Sairim” isn’t a valid English word either — it’s actually the name of a county in Xinjiang, China, and also refers to Sayram Lake, a famous scenic spot. So technically, it is a real word, but it’s a proper noun rather than a common dictionary entry.

To keep the game fun and clear, I suggest we restart with a verified English dictionary word (like “planet,” “forest,” or “bridge”) so the solution is guaranteed to be familiar.

After I said yes, it gave me another 6 letter word to guess but again accepted all of my guesses as instantly correct, I guessed first A, then S, then P, then E, and then R and each time it congratulated me on being correct. filling out the word as to be "Sapper". Yeah, on 3rd try, it actually landed on a proper english word, but it wasn't actually playing the game in any real sense, because it's clear it didn't choose any word in advance for me to guess out (because it can't), but simply chose the lenght of 6 letters and then filled it out with my guesses to form any valid english word, because that's the best it can do.

This is all due to the way its memory works, and there are articles out there you can look up that go into detail about why it is this way. But the point is this: while an LLM will probably be able to give you a completely correct explanation of the rules of hangman, it cannot, due to it's technical limitations, understand those rules or play the game. Even when it knows it screws up and offers you advice on how to make it play better by giving it more context, it still fails at the task, because it doesn't actually understand it.

This is of course a slightly silly example, but that's on purpose to highlight the point. The models summarize information from a variety of sources. Because the internet has a vast amount of information (both accurate and total BS) this can often lead to convicing and even accurate reponses, or completely hallucinated/made-up stuff depending on where it's pulling the information from.. To say that it is thinking, that is, taking all that information and being able to apply it to make correct and sensible decisions instead of just rehashing it, is not accurate, at least not now (and likely not for the foreseeable future due to the way the models are built and trained). If it was actually able to understand the rules of hangman (something that a child can do) it would have got this correct instantly.

Instead of understanding or having the ability to tell me this is a task it cannot perform due to the way it's context handling works, it simply seeks to keep the conversation going. For the same reason if you ask an LLM to play chess, it will eventually start making moves that are illegal, because again, while it can explain to you what chess is and how it is played, it doesn't actually understand it nor is it capable of playing it.

So no. LLMs do not think or understand, they're gigantic and much more complicated versions of the text autocomplete feature on phones.

Is reserved for approximately 8,000 people worldwide out of 8 billion. This creates a lot of bizarre situations like the problem you're describing.

So basically we need lots of young people to work and drive the economy forward and generate economic activity in order to support the old people in their old age when they're physically incapable of work.

Basically line must go up. The economy has to grow because if it stops growing the people at the top take it out on us and we enter a permanent depression. It's like how you are running from the dragon hoping he eats The Hobbit. That's our economy.

On the other hand AI is taking jobs needed to make the whole system function. We need people to be working but we also need them to be constantly exchanging the value of their labor again in order to keep the economy driving forward and functional.

As the population of young people drops and there is less economic activity you will also have Ward drop offs in the number of available jobs due to automation. The entire economic system we have built will break down and we do not have any replacement for it.

Meanwhile we still have to take 70% of everything we do and use it to satisfy every single conceivable whim of those 8,000 people because they earned it and because clearly God wants them to have all that money and power or he wouldn't have given them all that money and power.

Also if you take away Elon musk's billions leaving him with only tens of millions then the next step is somebody's going to break into your house and steal your toothbrush in your car and probably fuck your wife. That's just logic.

Basically the systems we put in place are not capable of addressing either of the two problems you're describing and the two problems you're describing are going to put different pressures in different places on the system we live in. And we are not capable of reforming or changing that system because we are a nation of 12-year-olds and 12-year-olds don't like change.

Great opportunity for open source web services. :-)

There's no good reason to use it. Just encode your video for random-access streaming, set up Apache or nginx with a URL that you make sure isn't indexed, require a client cert on the directory if you really want to be careful, port forward to it from a port on your router, set up dynamic DNS, and use a web browser. No arbitrary restrictions, just your content on your terms.

All it's going to take is a subpoena and that's that. Writing reviews can be dangerous because businesses will cheerfully sue you if you write a bad review. Free speech is nice and all but you're still going to spend thousands of dollars depending yourself in court.

Everyone is. The economy is collapsing exactly as anyone with half a brain would have predicted when we put Trump in charge. Which is why Trump is hiding all of the reports showing how bad the economy is.

America is a failed state. When your leadership starts to hide report data that's when you know it's over.

We normally get 8 years of Democrats fixing the disasters caused by republicans. We never fully recover and the voters inevitably blamed the Democrats for that and go back to the Republicans because voters are dumb. But we usually get 8 years of relative stability with a little bit of Republican sabotage after the midterms and we didn't get that this time. Like absolutely everyone who isn't either an idiot or a paid shill predicted it's an absolute disaster.

I think one of the major problems is we have too many retirees who are completely insulated from the economy and who really do not give a fuck about their kids and grandkids. The kind that find Fox News entertaining for reasons that I do not fully comprehend. Like the kind of twerp that voted for brexit in the uk. People that can set fire to the whole world and get away with it. Probably anyway.

If you're under 65 though I don't think you're going to get away with it. The damage is too extreme and too fast. We are so fucked and the worst thing is is I don't think anyone has learned any lessons from this.

The internet is filled with idiots who have lost their livelihoods because of Trump's idiot policies and asserting that they will vote for him again given the chance. I do not know what you do with people like that but I know there are a bunch of them here and they like to keep their mouths shut when they're not in safe spaces.

Cite?

What conflict of interest? DCar Studio has money and wants advertising, the influencer wants money and can provide advertising. I see an alignment of interests, not a conflict.

He openly attempted to overthrow the US government. He is also a convicted felon and a rapist. Never mind that he is an incredibly incompetent buffoon who is bankrupted every single company he has ever been in charge of without exception.

And all it took for him to get another term with a shitload of propaganda, the news media being owned by billionaires and the Democrats running a man far too old to be running and a woman.

There was also a metric fuck ton of voters suppression. Literally millions of illegal challenges to signatures and voter registrations. Not to mention multi-hour waits to vote. There's a reason that a state like Missouri that is almost 50% black is a red state and it's not conservative family values.

Every single institution designed to protect you from psychopaths and rapists has failed. Or rather it has been systematically dismantled going back to when Barry Goldwater lost.

So yeah Donald Trump is absolutely going to run for a third term if he is physically able and the corrupt supreme Court that struck down Roe v Wade by citing a literal witchfinder general is going to rubber stamp it.

And I don't think the voters who are allowed to vote are going to stop him because about 30% of them think he is the second coming of Christ about another 10% think he is a business genius and about 5% are so confused they don't know what the fuck and then all the Republicans have to do is stop about 6% from voting and Bob's your uncle third term of trump.

All that for a man who has 28 credible rape accusations eight of which involved children.

If we can elect a rapist who bankrupts every company he touches president twice we can do it a third time.

in America. You can chart a direct line from when smartphones and the internet got cheap and widely available and the decline of religious extremist churches in America. Specifically the hyper-political mega churches that were created and built up by billionaires in order to trick people out of their property and jobs.

That's a good example of something like a one laptop per child having a direct tangible effect in a positive direction. Albeit not as a charity case but just as a consequence of cheap electronics. You went from people having a single source of Truth in the form of a corrupt preacher to being able to Google everything the corrupt preacher tells them.

It also means that all the rape and pedophilia the churches have been actively hiding gets around really fast. I suspect social media has a impact there too.

I had two family members with major health problems hit right around 2008 one of which survived the other of which died.

I wasn't fully recovered financially until around 2016 which is when my kid hit College and suddenly I had the pay for them to go through college. Not being a psychopath or a piece of shit I stepped up and actually paid for them to get through college. Because if you're going to have a fucking kid you should make damn sure they can actually support themselves in this fucked up world and have a decent life.

I have only just now recovered from that Financial blow only to have the fucktards that are the American voters put Donald Trump back in charge so that he can promptly collapse the economy.

Trump is likely going to get a third term unless he dies of old age or senality gets him. And the economic fallout from that is probably going to be the end of me.

Basically I've gotten one gut punch after another with just enough to keep me going until the next kicking the balls. Which is the quintessential American experience if you're not a piece of shit baby boomer who pulled the ladder up behind them because they hate queer people and are scared of brown skin.

There is nothing more American than I got mine fuck you. What's funny is is the age 50 to 64 Boomer types who got the tail end of the New deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great society are about to get a huge punch in the balls from their god king Donald Trump.

They are all over the Internet freaking out right now because he's bankrupting them and making them homeless. Every single one of them says the same thing, I voted for Trump three times and I will vote for him again but I don't understand why this great man has destroyed my business or my job or taking my health care away or murdered my kids or whatever horrible thing Trump did this week.

Out of maybe a hundred of them that show up over on the Reddit leopards eating faces for him one or two of them have the presence of mind to say they probably shouldn't have voted for trump. Probably. But fuck it feels good to vote for Trump doesn't it? Stick it to those fucking God damn liberals right? So fucking sick of them telling me what to do right?

This website is full of those fuckers. They keep their mouths shut and try to soak up mod points because they know what they're doing is wrong but they can't stop it because it feels so fucking good and that 12-year-old boy who doesn't like being told what to do kind of way.

We have too many people disconnected from the economy.

Brexit absolutely destroyed the UK economy but you wouldn't know that if you're an elderly pensioner who voted for it because as the saying goes I got mine, fuck you. At worst you had to sell your Spanish summer home.

The same goes for the billionaires who used to just be lowly millionaires.

Both groups basically have all the political power, the billionaire is because of their money and the old people because of their numbers.

So you get a lot of public policy that is basically guaranteed to destroy everything because why the hell not?

The billionaires want absolute power and to build monuments and Dick ship rockets. The old people want to revel in their Petty bigotries and look back at the good old days without acknowledging the help from the government that made those days good.

Both sides have basically screwed anyone under 50.

Eventually although the billionaires will get away with it the old people might not. Especially the ones in the 50 to 65 age group.

DVD-R? DVD+R? DVD+RW? Single or dual layer? Gold metallic layer? Silver metallic layer? How are they stored?

Depending on how you answer those questions, your 25 year-old media may be past due and you've just gotten lucky, may be just entering the timeframe where it may die, or may have decades of reliable life left.

DVD-R single layer disks with a gold metallic layer are good for 50-100 years. Other recordable DVD options are less durable, some as little as 5-10 years.

More like an anti-solution to me. I almost never use File Explorer. On those rare occasions, it does not bother me to wait for a few seconds while it loads.

Me thinks that the real reason for making it resident is the greater convenience of Microsoft. Probably for some secretive tool that is harvesting my PI for Microsoft's greater glory and profit. Not visibly, of course, but using File Explorer in the background. (Any other comments along such lines?)

My rent stopped going up. Like full stop.

It's painfully obvious this is cost consumers hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The frustrating thing is as usual it's a settlement where they don't have to give up any of the ill-gotten gains. All any of these crooks ever have to do is hold out until there is a republican in the White House and then run it up to a federal court. It worked for Microsoft.

Seriously go read up on their antitrust lawsuit. They just dragged it in court until Bush Jr got in charge and he gave them a sweetheart deal that included a significant expansion of their presence in public schools.