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Comment Re:uh (Score 1) 25

That's interesting to know. I never spent a lot of time with NeXTStep, though I have played with it a little bit. I think I have a VM for an x86 version around here somewhere, but it was a little crashy in a way that the 68k machines weren't and I don't know which piece's fault that is. I spent more time with OS X, but not a whole lot, so I didn't get that far into it.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 120

None of your examples are examples of "not thinking." They're examples of things that you think don't think.

The problem with that is it's entirely useless for extrapolating, as much as your prejudice would like you to think the opposite. It's also generally agreed that rocks don't do arithmetic, but if you arrange them in just the right way they're actually awfully good at it.

Comment Re: Really? (Score 2) 120

Funny, but the entire human population spends most of their time not "thinking."

From coordinating complex movements like walking through routines like driving to work to, yes, knee jerk reactions to most things, most of what our brains do is subconscious. Only the weird justifies the effort of actual executive control. Whatever it is that we call "conscious thought" is even rarer.

Comment Dumb (Score 1) 120

Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research.

Well, you can stop reading there. I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, but the supporting arguments seem to range from wrong to kind of dumb.

Comment Re:It WILL Replace Them (Score 1) 35

Funny, today I was forced to deal with a phone tree system that wanted to hang up on me at any whiff of a plausible path to hang up.

Point being that even without LLM magic, they have already been making it supremely hard to get things done. The old standby of hitting zero or saying representative over and over again would not budge this system. I thought for sure when I got it to prompt for payment information and if I screwed that up, *surely* that would escalate to a human, surely they want my money. Nope, hung up when I failed to provide the payment info in a timely fashion either.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 4, Insightful) 120

As much as I agree with the statement that contemporary LLMs certainly differ a lot from what we experience as "thinking" from other human beings, the problem with this line of argument remains that there is no consensus on what exactly manifests "thinking",

The problem with this line of thinking is that you are ignorant of the fact that we CAN say what is not thinking, and we've narrowed down the problem quite a bit.

It is generally agreed that chocolate bars do not think. Rocks do not think. Pocket calculators do not think. We know what thinking is not, even if we can't define it fully.

Comment Re:Better if... (Score 1) 148

I'll stick with them, as long as they aren't that iPhone17 orange abomination.

I'm with you on this one....WTF was up with that orange color???

That AND...no Space Grey or Black?!?!

That's pretty much one of the only things keeping me from upgrading my 12 pro max to the 17 pro max.

I'm hoping in a few months maybe they'll offer better colors....?

Maybe that is why they made that Borat Manikini iSock - to hide the phone. I suppose I could go for the deep blue. But why not the black color like on the base iPhone 17?

I mean, it's a matter of personal taste, but it reminds me of attention seeking behavior. And it looks like recycled plastic from those orange traffic cones. It looks cheap.

Comment Re:Not so odd (Score 2) 31

It's pretty important if you're working in a developing field. The original TPU couldn't do floating point so it wasn't really useful for training. IIRC they also work best with matrices that have dimensions that are multiples of fairly big numbers (128? 256?) with later generations working best with bigger matrices.

That's great for the current focus on gigantic attention matrices but not so great if the next big thing can't be efficiently shoehorned into that paradigm.

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