Sure do :) I can provide more if you want, but start there, as it's a good read. Indeed, blind people are much better at understanding the consequences of colours than they are at knowing what colours things are..

That's why I would never lock myself into a limited smart tv. Id rather grab an old laptop and use that.

Or just get a streaming "box" like FireTV or AppleTV....those generally seem work fine, have a remote and an easy to use interface.

The congenitally blind have never seen colours. Yet in practice, they're practically as efficient at answering questions about and reasoning about colours as the sighted.

One may raise questions about qualia, but the older I get, the weaker the qualia argument gets. I'd argue that I have qualia about abstracts, like "justice". I have a visceral feeling when I see justice and injustice, and experience it; it's highly associative for me. Have I ever touched, heard, smelled, seen, or tasted an object called "justice"? Of course not. But the concept of justice is so connected in my mind to other things that it's very "real", very tangible. If I think about "the colour red", is what I'm experiencing just a wave of associative connection to all the red things I've seen, some of which have strong emotional attachments to them?

What's the qualia of hearing a single guitar string? Could thinking about "a guitar string" shortly after my first experience with a guitar string, when I don't have a good associative memory of it, sounding count as qualia? What about when I've heard guitars play many times and now have a solid memory of guitar sounds, and I then think about the sound of a guitar string? What if it's not just a guitar string, but a riff, or a whole song? Do I have qualia associated with *the whole song*? The first time? Or once I know it by heart?

Qualia seems like a flexible thing to me, merely a connection to associative memory. And sorry, I seem to have gotten offtopic in writing this. But to loop back: you don't have to have experienced something to have strong associations with it. Blind people don't learn of colours through seeing them. While there certainly is much to life experiences that we don't write much about (if at all) online, and so one who learned purely from the internet might have a weaker understanding of those things, by and large, our life experiences and the thought traces behind them very much are online. From billions and billions of people, over decades.

Language does not exist in a vacuum. It is a result of the thought processes that create it. To create language, particularly about complex topics, you have to be able to recreate the logic, or at least *a* logic, that underlies those topics. You cannot build a LLM from a Markov model. If you could store one state transition probability per unit of Planck space, a different one at every unit of Planck time, across the entire universe, throughout the entire history of the universe, you could only represent the state transition probabilities for the first half of the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities.

For LLMs to function, they have to "think", for some definition of thinking. You can debate over terminology, or how closely it matches our thinking, but what it's not doing is some sort of "the most recent states were X, so let's look up some statistical probability Y". Statistics doesn't even enter the system until the final softmax, and even then, only because you have to go from a high dimensional (latent) space down to a low-dimensional (linguistic) space, so you have to "round" your position to nearby tokens, and there's often many tokens nearby. It turns out that you get the best results if you add some noise into your roundings (indeed, biological neural networks are *extremely* noisy as well)

As for this article, it's just silly. It's a rant based on a single cherry picked contrarian paper from 2024, and he doesn't even represent it right. The paper's core premise is that intelligence is not lingistic - and we've known that for a long time. But LLMs don't operate on language. They operate on a latent space, and are entirely indifferent as to what modality feeds into and out from that latent space. The author takes the paper's further argument that LLMs do not operate in the same way as a human brain, and hallucinates that to "LLMs can't think". He goes from "not the same" to "literally nothing at all". Also, the end of the article isn't about science at all, it's an argument Riley makes from the work of two philosophers, and is a massive fallacy that not only misunderstands LLMs, but the brain as well (*you* are a next-everything prediction engine; to claim that being a predictive engine means you can't invent is to claim that humans cannot invent). And furthermore, that's Riley's own synthesis, not even a claim by his cited philosophers.

For anyone who cares about the (single, cherry-picked, old) Fedorenko paper, the argument is: language contains an "imprint" of reasoning, but not the full reasoning process, that it's a lower-dimensional space than the reasoning itself (nothing controversial there with regards to modern science). Fedorenko argues that this implies that the models don't build up a deeper structure of the underlying logic but only the surface logic, which is a far weaker argument. If the text leads "The odds of a national of Ghana conducting a terrorist attack in Ireland over the next 20 years are approximately...." and it is to continue with a percentage, that's not "surface logic" that the model needs to be able to perform well at the task. It's not just "what's the most likely word to come after 'approximately'". Fedorenko then extrapolates his reasoning to conclude that there will be a "cliff of novelty". But this isn't actually supported by the data; novelty metrics continue to rise, with no sign of his suppossed "cliff". Fedorenko argues notes that in many tasks, the surface logic between the model and a human will be identical and indistinguishable - but he expects that to generally fail with deeper tasks of greater complexity. He thinks that LLMs need to change architecture and combine "language models" with a "reasoning model" (ignoring that the language models *are* reasoning - heck, even under his own argument - and that LLMs have crushed the performance of formal symbolic reasoning engines, whose rigidity makes them too inflexible to deal with the real world)

But again, Riley doesn't just take Fedorenko at face value, but he runs even further with it. Fedorenko argues that you can actually get quite far just by modeling language. Riley by contrast argues - or should I say, next-word predicts with his human brain - that because LLMs are just predicting tokens, they are a "Large Language Mistake" and the bubble will burst. The latter does not follow from the former. Fedorenko's argument is actually that LLMs can substitute for humans in many things - just not everything.

Greater Fool scheme finds Greatest Possible Fools (goverments) to keep pumping money into their zero-sum game.

If they're providing a proxy service to bypass NAT then it makes sense they charge for it. Providing this proxying has a direct ongoing cost for them, so providing it free or for a one off fee is is totally unsustainable.

No they have a proper IPv6 implementation, but legacy IP is tunnelled over the IPv6 core and has a reduced MTU.
There are a _LOT_ of ISPs out there which are IPv6-first and have some second class setup for backwards compatibility with legacy sites.

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....?

I tend to buy top of the line loaded ones....I'm currently on the iPHone 12 Max Pro...loaded storage available at the time...I think 1 TB?

Before that I had the iPhone 6 Plus (did they have a pro?)....and IPhone 3GS before that....

Right now, not seriously in the market....my phone still had plenty of space on it, runs as fast as I need, I don't see any speed or battery degradation on it yet.

I will admit I'm looking at the 17's camera and ability to shoot RAW video...that is starting to tempt me.

I guess my phones are not well over $1K, I generally just put it on Apple Pay, get my 3% cash back and pay it off interest free over 12 months.

I have the cash, but figure why not use "free money" if given the opportunity, eh? I keep may cash for it in an interest bearing account or invested, etc...

I frankly don't give a fuck what anyone thinks of my phone, if they think anything at all.

As I'd written earlier, I think in the US, phones are such a commodity, no one looks at them as any sort of status symbol and hasn't for a long time now...

GPUs are designed for graphics, for anything else they're basically a general purpose CPU that just by chance happens to be better than other general purpose processors for this specific task. Once the market becomes big enough, someone will expend the resources to develop ASICs which will outperform the general purpose GPUs.
Exactly the same thing happened with bitcoin.

In fact you HAVE to use external storage if you want to shoot video in RAW format.....

HTH.

Really? I would expect the opposite.

- Owners of flagship devices concerned with their image and having the latest tech would be more likely to replace devices more often to get access to the latest gear, perhaps handing the old device down to a spouse or child if they aren't getting a trade-in credi

I can't speak for places outside the US, but here....the cell phone has become some a commodity that no one here really uses or sees any of the phones as a "status symbol"....

No one pays attention to what phone you have....at least not in most of the US.

Maybe remove tariffs and have more good paying jobs, then Americans will be excited about buying a new phone, new laptop, and new car.

How about in parallel to tarrifs we have federal incentives (maybe from tariff revenues) to help businesses set up and manufacture back in the US again,with US workers with good paying jobs?

Kill two birds with one stone.....

May I ask why the fuck you seem to give as much of a damn as you do on how we live our lives here in the US?

And yes if we want things we get them.....CA wanted something...BUT they apparently didn't want it enough to secure the rights and to properly guard against overspending, etc. It looks to me that the politicians in CA wanted a boondoggle to funnel money from the public coffers more than they wanted a high speed rail system.

But that latter part is just my opinion.

But again....why are you so hyperbolic about how the US does things if you're not over here and part of us?

Live your own life...we really don't give a fuck how you want to do it....just leave us alone, you know?

If the server logged a decent amount of data, then this is potentially a useful ad hoc experiment.