It's mimicked intelligence. You're absolutely right that - under the hood - there's not the sort of traditionally cognitive processing happening that we might consider intelligence. That can be a distinction without a difference if the output is the same, and for quite a lot of things, they're becoming indistinguishable.

I think the real challenge for LLMs specifically is the training data. Between the limits placed technically and legally, malicious poisoning already happening, and the breakdown of function seen when LLM generated content is repeatedly added to its training data (i.e., "model collapse"). However, I also think that by the time we start to see major effects of this, the LLMs of today will have evolved to largely work around this limitation and the underlying process for generating output will be far less susceptible to the problems seen today. Time will tell whether that's overly optimistic, but there's a ton of development in this space toward better approaches.

Two decades ago, everybody and their brother were charging head-first toward six figure salaries (those used to mean something) and the easy life of playing arcade games at a startup waiting to become millionaires. Anyone who thought this was sustainable - particularly for the general population - was failing to think. Coding ability, like most things, is an innate skill advanced by training. You can take people with little innate talent and train them to get better just like you can take Average Joe and teach him to swim faster. But Average Joe swimmer and Average Jane coder are never going to be particularly valuable in that role long term. Once the stupid money turned off, value had to be reassessed, and lots of Galaga arcades went up on eBay.

Never play to the fads. Find something you're good at naturally that's valuable long term, develop your skills to become great at it, and market yourself appropriately.

That is not an entirely unfair observation.

#1 is basically already happening.

#2 sounds promising.

Have it break everything up into smaller chunks/functions/whatever, have it include debugging and error checking/handling, and test each code chunk. When one does have a bug, you get 2-3 cracks at it before ChatGPT eats its own tail. At that point, start a new session and feed the code block in or fix it manually. I do the same thing you're doing and it can cut a ton of time out of helping write utility scripts that help automate stuff so I can spend my focus elsewhere. But it doesn't act like a human and it doesn't adapt until the next model comes out, so we have to adapt to find how best to work within its limitations to maximize productivity.

Done right, it's a huge accelerator. I don't think more than 10-20% of people are using it right.

Take heart in knowing that most of the world isn't participating in this stupidity and others who have been are already pulling it back as research comes in to show how destructive some of these actions are to the mental and physical health of people.

To quote an old Despair.com poster: "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others".

Eww, those default cipher suites, MACs, and KeX?

More virtue signalling and white saviorism poisoning the African continent and compromising African sovereignty and self-sufficiency, all so more American tax dollars can get funneled to multinational conglomerates and self-serving "non-profits".

How about we take that money and instead hand it out as annual bonuses to the top 100 teachers in the US?

Irrelevant. He could draw minors in Photoshop all day long. We're talking about the most disgusting use of free expression here. And the DOJ is trying to criminalize it. I sincerely doubt it's going to fly given the broad, terrifying constitutional implications.

However, when it comes to distributing the materials to a minor, attempting to lure a minor, really everything relating to his actual contact and conduct with minors, dude ought to burn. But the creation and possession of artificial representations of imagined persons and situations? That simply cannot be criminalized in the United States of America. It is plainly, clearly, entirely protected conduct, regardless of how disgusting and terrible it is.

I'm using the Android app. It asks for permissions for notifications, microphone (to engage in voice conversations with it), calendar, contacts, and location.

I've allowed notifications, require it to ask every time about the microphone, and deny access to calendar, contacts, and location and the app works just fine for me. I haven't seen any evidence that it's gained any access to any personal data. Android should generally be preventing that anyway, and the responses I get certainly don't indicate that it's scraping anything to provide a personalized experience. But anything you type in or say to the app in voice chat is definitely fair game for it.

ChatGPT4 has also been getting steadily dumber and the reason is depressing: it's the users.

Everything people type into ChatGPT is added to its training data. The theory is that it will learn to adapt and respond more intelligently, but the opposite has happened. The people using it have made it dumber, lazier, and overall less useful. I can type the exact same prompt to output DIY construction plans or building perl scripts or whatever other complex task I've done before and the results are strikingly worse.

But even in its reduced capacity, ChatGPT helps me too much in my daily tasks to stop paying for it; let alone stop using it.

This isn't one weird guy making a nutty comment one time. This is written on signs and barked out as chants at so-called "pro-Palestinian" rallies around the world every single day. College campuses across the US are awash in students and faculty chanting these slogans. These are popular sentiments among the "pro-Palestinian" groups. And they're just outright open calls for genocide.

I actually agree with you about the West Bank settlements, especially after the October attacks. It's felt very much like taking advantage of the situation. My comment was reserved for Gaza itself, where Israel has actually gone above and beyond the Geneva Protocols. And doing things like providing advanced warning for attacks have cost them militarily.

A hospital is a valid military target if it's being used for military purposes (e.g., storing weapons caches and hiding military personnel).

Geneva Protocol I, Article 21: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org...
Additional Protocol, Article 12: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org...
Convention IV, Article 19: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org...

When your terrorist buddies stored weapons, ammunition, and military personnel in a hospital that Israel built for Gaza, it lost its protected status.

Quite often looks just like it though. Like, just like it. "From the river to the sea", "by all means necessary", etc. That's like the Hamas theme music. And if you're humming Hamas happy tunes, you're supporting Hamas and their methods. Further, support for Hamas remains widespread in all available polling in Gaza. So a lot of them are on board with the genocidal terrorists running their government and all their actions as well. Supporting them is also supporting Hamas.

False equivalence in the extreme. Israel attacks valid military targets, even when fighting terrorists who don't follow Geneva or any other convention on war. Israel goes above and beyond by broadcasting where and when they're going to strike so civilians can leave. Except Hamas often doesn't let them leave because as Hamas themselves have stated in television interviews: dead Palestinian women and children help their cause and they aim to maximize the dead civilians on their side. Meanwhile, you've got Hamas specifically targeting women and children for rape and murder and live-streaming the whole thing to the world.

So no, they aren't the same. And it would take one ignorant motherfucker to think they are.

Fingerprints specifically are a password you can never change that you leave copies of everywhere you go. It's the worst possible "security" imaginable. It's just convenient.