Oh time thy pyramids.

All questions sensibly. Without making garbled statements, social errors, strange comments, or evasive comments to suggest ignorance or deception. That is the bar, not omniscience. It does not require an infinite rule set. It does require a big one to mimic the way humans actually process language. Answering "I don't know" every time would quickly fail.

Understanding in this context can mean the emotion of thinking you have seen enough of a pattern to discern the whole pattern. It can also mean genuinely understanding a pattern. The emotion may not exist, may exist for correct reasons, or it may exist for incorrect reasons. This is the nature of the 'wall'.

What? I do not understand your problem with the thought experiment. I imagine the Chinese Room would output "I cannot see your hands." Or some other, sensible thing that a person could say to the question.

The thought experiment is of a system which can reliably parse a language, and output sensible replies in said language, without any component of the system being able to understand the language. Neither the books nor the individual within the room are able to understand. The books are inanimate and unchanging, and you are correct that the person is just a "pen".

An antiquated way of avoiding the earliest proto-slop content and many scam results was to just add "site:reddit" to every google search result. Not so long ago, Reddit was a fine destination if you had any random technical question and all things considered it was an effective work around. As related in the lyrics of the song "Google doesn't work right anymore".

Now of course, going to reddit for advice is flat out stupid, yes. We know it is stupid because Google is doing it.

I once referred to FTL a roguelike. The horror which followed has left scars I will forever carry.

Joking about crying on my way to the bank has honestly become kind of hollow now that there's nothing worth buying except frustrating and arbitrarily shitty versions of things I used to love. Computers incidentally very high on that scale. Could I go back in time, I would gladly pay for many of these folks to have never done anything with their lives.

I watched some stuff about North Korea and doctors going in to teach cataract surgery. According to the film, it's one of the easier and most life changing surgeries someone can learn. If this is the case, although it involves the eye, this would be a very safe and conservative surgery to attempt new and cheaper technologies with, and one of the ones that can benefit most from remote assistance. Thus the heavy emphasis on educational and "remote hand holding" situations.

I mentioned Manjaro with KDE specifically because I do not think Ubuntu's default ways of doing things are a good match for someone who used to like Windows. I do not know if it would solve some or any of a given person's problems with compatibility and usability, but I feel it is more like Windows was supposed to become than Windows itself currently is. The basic, elemental usability of the platform I unironically think is better than Windows right now. It gives a very Windows 7 pro power user vibe to me.

I honestly think Windows 11 is worse than Manjaro with KDE for most use cases, including novice and intermediate use. Honestly if Linux isn't there for you yet, buy a Mac mini. Windows is currently the operating system most likely to change things, to break things, to render itself unusable. Windows has been LOSING functionality, everyone else has been gaining it.

Opera provided enough functionality that I do not regret buying it circa 2000. If memory serves me correctly, it offered a clean and fast UI, a local email client that allowed you to block tracking pixels, and their implementation of RSS is something I got a lot of use out of.

The major alternatives were as I recall, IE 6, which was about 5 years old at the time and would gladly allow websites to open browser windows when you closed browser windows, and Netscape, which was somehow MORE abandoned than IE. I feel like that was AOL's doing, same as Winamp, but I've never researched it.

I think, on the whole, it was better. What you printed was what you printed, and what every customer would have in their hands for as long as they preferred. In a sense, every customer was a potential archivist. It is self evident why the whole thing was not going to compete with the internet, but the thing was, even a junk paper was something you could have, clip, and refer to. Which is exactly what everyone did, all the time. The problems of the news media were and are the problems of the news media, but I think it was better when writers knew their stuff would, physically, last.

I don't miss ink on my fingers though.

Oh, just curious about the thought process. It sounds like you want narratives that you can immerse yourself in as deeply as possible.

Were those the most recent good movies that came to your mind?

I'll throw you a bone here. I also forgot that the topic at hand was people who are already movie stars.

I'm sorry, I wrote that in haste. I meant to say that it appears you think the only productions worth seeing are highly polished and expensive affairs and that this seems strange to me.