I too wish to rage at how bad an argument the chinese room is.

Searle's Chinese Room is a 3-card monty con. There's a room with a man consulting a book. Slips with Chinese characters comes in, he consults the book following it's instructions, writes out the lines of the characters, and passes the slips out, which is a legitimate conversation in Chinese. He argues the room on the whole understands Chinese, but the man in the room does not. And so AI is fake or some bullshit. This is a crock. The book is magic and obviously conscious and sentient. Such a book would have more pages than there atoms in the universe. That's the trick Searle pulls. In the original paper he's even dodgy about if it's a book or a filing cabinet. The man, the room? Who gives a fuck? You've got a magic book that can talk to you!

INSTEAD, let us imagine the same thought-experiment, except this time instead of a magical book, there's a box with a small child from Guangdong inside. This is the Mandarin Room. Now, nothing here is any different than Searle's bullshit concerning the room and the man. 100% identical on their end. The child tells the man what strokes to make on the paper. ooooo aaaaaah Does the man know mandarin or not? Let's debate this for 40 years! But it's all bullshit because the source of intelligence and the location of where the knowledge about mandarin language resides is obvious and definite. And talking about the room as a whole is a pointless waste of philosophical drivel.

Searl damaged the AI industry with this second only to that Perceptetron book that supposedly proved neural nets could accomplish much. We could have had TensorFlow in the 70's!

.....WHAT deterministic behavior? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle DICTATES that the physical components that everything is built upon is NON-deterministic.

Bruh, the fatalists that believed "it is written" still considered themself conscious beings. Do you get that? Non-deterministic consciousness. You've married consciousness to non-determinism for some crazy reason that makes no sense.

You are pretending it's some sort of magic soup that gets poured into the mix. There's no consciousness organ hiding in your brain. It's not a consciousness cell sneaking around and poking at synapses. It is a PROPERTY or a TRAIT that exists somehow in the 86 billion neurons in your head. OR you can just come out and say that you're not REALLY talking about consciousness and what you really want to say is "souls" but without sounding like you're an alchemist out of the dark ages.

You're confusing "life" with.... I dunno "consciousness" or "intelligence" or "aware" or something. Bacteria are most certainly alive and they don't do much more than just follow programming in their DNA. Not even complicated instructions. Goomba-level intelligence. You know, from Mario Bros. The first one.

"Self-conscious" is just a type of anxiety. Usually anxious about doing something wrong. Likewise "self-aware" is something we have a very good test for and it only kicks in for humans after about 18 months. The moment that you can reliably ask GPT if something looks like it was written by GPT, it's self-aware.

A fly is certainly alive, aware, intelligent, but not self-aware, and.... man, probably not self-conscious? hell if I know.

You're confusing consciousness with free will. These things will generally do what they're trained to do. Just like you.

And while you definitely shouldn't rely on these things as some sort of paragon of truth for all sorts of reasons, even fools who can't keep two words straight have their uses.

First off GIT YE TO THE SOURCE and read what he actually wrote rather than the mischaracterizations and interpretations and lies and propaganda about what people FEEL he said.

Second, I fully understand why this discussion is a mess because Unherd hides his paper behind a paywall. So practically NOBODY is actually talking about what he actually said, they're reacting to reactions and everyone is eager to shout over each other. ....but I do too: We've hit that philosophical moment where the words we're used to don't quite apply. Like an early astronaut talking about "down". I think everyone needs to remind themselves that ants, slime molds, and nematodes all display some level of intelligence, even if small. Every human with an IQ of 80 is most certainly a general intelligence. And that anything want to say about why this pile of billions of virtual neurons isn't this or that has to equally apply to the pile of billions of actual neurons in your head.

Wasn't reddit where the glue on pizza came from?

It uses a magic system called ext4. It can store and lookup stuff for a long time.

I strongly suspect that more adults are opposed to this activity than endorse it. It's getting attention but not much of the good kind.

When I heard "Scientology Speedrun" I was hoping it would mean getting to operating level thetan as soon as possible. That would have been more interesting than some jokers trying to quickly run through a building I've never seen.

Until Cursor starts enshittifying.

I've been wondering for a while what the steganography potential for AI generated music might be.

The photo side is awesome. Video is more awesome. Hide a whole movie in a movie you can.

If I have 50,000 AI generated songs in my albums, am I ever going to be asked to provide decryption keys?

You know, 'cause it doesn't sound quite right?

Like SETI. uuuggghh..... Like disco.

Where's a cryptography geek when you need one.

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

Why would anyone pay for a web browser? Seriously, why? In 35 years of web browsers, only dopes paid for them.

The ZIP won out over a superior technology - Imation Superdisk - because it was first to market. Iomega's ZIP disc was proprietary and more expensive per megabyte, while also almost never being bootable. Imation solved those problems with the Superdisk, which could also read 1.44mb floppies in the same drive. However by the time Imation released theirs, Iomega had a huge headstart and few people paid attention.

Later on though Iomega's reliance on their being first to (mass) market ended up killing off their product. They weren't able to hit a cost per mb that was even remotely close to CD-R, let alone USB flash drives - nor could they get anywhere near the speed of USB flash drives. If they had taken the time to innovate further we would probably be talking about new ZIP-related technologies in the 10s of GBs (or larger), instead they are in the dustbin.

Pretty sure that's not a new bug, but the old anti-unicode stance that the slashdot libertarians so boldly took 20 years ago in the name of the empire. Clearly that has turned out well as enrollment keeps climbing and everyone uses this site on a regular basis.