Well, yes -- the lies and the exaggerations are a problem. But even if you *discount* the lies and exaggerations, they're not *all of the problem*.

I have no reason to believe this particular individual is a liar, so I'm inclined to entertain his argument as being offered in good faith. That doesn't mean I necessarily have to buy into it. I'm also allowed to have *degrees* of belief; while the gentleman has *a* point, that doesn't mean there aren't other points to make.

That's where I am on his point. I think he's absolutely right, that LLMs don't have to be a stepping stone to AGI to be useful. Nor do I doubt they *are* useful. But I don't think we fully understand the consequences of embracing them and replacing so many people with them. The dangers of thoughtless AI adoption arise in that very gap between what LLMs do and what a sound step toward AGI ought to do.

LLMs, as I understand them, generate plausible sounding responses to prompts; in fact with the enormous datasets they have been trained on, they sound plausible to a *superhuman* degree. The gap between "accurately reasoned" and "looks really plausible" is a big, serious gap. To be fair, *humans* do this too -- satisfy their bosses with plausible-sounding but not reasoned responses -- but the fact that these systems are better at bullshitting than humans isn't a good thing.

On top of this, the organizations developing these things aren't in the business of making the world a better place -- or if they are in that business, they'd rather not be. They're making a product, and to make that product attractive their models *clearly* strive to give the user an answer that he will find acceptable, which is also dangerous in a system that generates plausible but not-properly-reasoned responses. Most of them rather transparently flatter their users, which sets my teeth on edge, precisely because it is designed to manipulate my faith in responses which aren't necessarily defensible.

In the hands of people increasingly working in isolation from other humans with differing points of view, systems which don't actually reason but are superhumanly believable are extremely dangaerous in my opinion. LLMs may be the most potent agent of confirmation bias ever devised. Now I do think these dangers can be addressed and mitigated to some degree, but the question is, will they be in a race to capture a new and incalculably value market where decision-makers, both vendors and consumers, aren't necessarily focused on the welfare of humanity?

While I did miss your point at first, I do get it now. I just don't associate marriage with religion so the terminology doesn't matter to me as I consider marriage a government thing rather then a religious thing anyways. Difference in countries I guess though we have too many religious nut jobs who think religious freedom means forcing their views on others.

"TI already produces huge amounts of ICs in Texas"

The QC in Texas must be absolute ass. One customer of mine uses a 10-pin LED driver IC from TI on the BOM. The piece of shit blows itself out fresh off the reel one out of every roughly 20 times. You aren't even pulling a full fucking amp at 48V and this thing rockets off the board, taking traces and pads with it.

No, there isn't a short. On the boards where the pads and traces survive, replacing the IC (usually) fixes the issue.

That site considers things like getting a cold in the winter to be a death from cold rather then direct affects. Here in western Canada, I'm 50 odd miles east of Vancouver, a couple of people freeze to death every winter. The other year we had a heat dome, temperature here hit 44C, 49.5C a hundred miles east, in a climate where being over 30C is rare. It was horrid, never experienced anything like it and hundreds of people dropped dead over a couple of days, 550 IIRC, directly from the heat, not getting a respiratory disease or such. People in apartments without windows that open and such, and its not like people have air conditioning (actually since then air conditioning has become more common).
I've seen other figures where deaths directly from heat out number deaths directly from cold by a lot.

Eh, I still consider Vista to be the second-best Microsoft OS, just behind Seven. Not sure what is in third place, maybe Win2K? Or XP, but only if it has the service packs because it was lousy without them.

I want the sound the 20MB hard drive on my old ITT XTRA (an 8086 PC clone) made when the system booted up and started to load DOS.

OK, basically word games. I'm Canadian and for example, my marriage was what you call a civil union, get a marriage license, have a marriage commissioner do a small non-religious ceremony of exchanging vows and we were legally married.
I guess if it makes the religious extremists happy, could rename marriage but personally I'd still consider a civil union to be a marriage.

> it still doesn't seem like a meaningful improvement over KDE 3.5.

Have you tried LXQt?

On Debian just install it and uninstall connman and it's pretty good for most tasks, especially low-spec devices.

Marriage gives certain rights such as making medical decisions for your spouse if they are incapacitated or even simply visiting them in the hospital when they're in a bad way. This was a problem where I am with homosexual relationships when marriage was illegal.

Some neural nets have been good at solving sticky programming problems. Whether finding game cheats, doing voice recognition, modeling proteins, or other tasks humans haven't done well at.

But an LLM is more of an information retrieval tool, so tasking it with clever algorithm design is asking the wrong tool the wrong question.

Then there are the people who complete in programming challenges. In high school I would sometimes stay after to do the ACSL competition tests - no big deal, the school was a five minute walk, and it helped my buddies who wanted a high team score.

Then they implored me to go to DC on a trip for a national competition our score qualified us for. This seemed so bizzare to me as a fifteen year old kid - I could stay in a run-down motel and take tests this weekend or go camping in a state forest with friends. I let them down, in a way, but the ask was totally alien to me.

I have nothing at all against people who enjoy such things but it's a subset of the algorithm minds.

So we now have the results of some competitive coders vs. the wrong tool for the job.

OK, mildly interesting, but does it tell us much?

That's basically what he wrote. Linux now has a chance to become a more widely used desktop simply because Microsoft is apparently determined to sabotage Windows, but if the Linux community doesn't get their shit together, they'll keep publishing their own distros by complete inability to agree on anything (over 600 different versions this far and counting) where none of which are actually good enough to be used as a general purpose desktop operating system (instead of necessary but niche uses).

At this point in the story I think it's more likely that Android will take over Windows or maybe SteamOS (which is Linux, but actually usable and more or less stable)

Are any of the profits going to Gila Monster conservation?

So every international traveler could be searched to see if their meds contain any patent violations and seized at the border?

This is entirely unworkable.

Yea, when I went to school, I was taught a Republic simply had President or similar as head of state instead of a monarch. And today, democracy actually means representative democracy, sometimes with a bit of direct democracy.
Canada, and I think Australia and New Zealand, also no longer have lords and such and seldom interact with the Monarch.

"Then you do this "battery swap" and get a *used* battery pack that's been god knows where. "

This is what ISO documentation standards are for.