Cute.

Hijacking this to say that TFS is fucking trash. Half of TFS is about some completely unrelated bullshit and a quarter of it is on the environmental cost of this, with no sensible technical details included other than half a filepath. No hints as to how to disable it. Just whining.

TFA is not much better. Lots of stuff that nobody fucking cares about. Instead: give us the summary of why it is there, how to disable it if that is possible and what side effects that may have.

Yes, it does: What is 214235.0123 + 12234234.089? An incredibly simple question (and one of many conceivable equally simple ones; it's not some special or exotic case).
Humans can easily answer and work it out even if it takes a lot of time, regardless of the numbers used. That is: if they understand the system of arithmetic. A lookup table needs answers for all possible combinations, including different ways of phrasing the exact same question.

Understanding has fuck-all to do with emotions. You regularly judge whether somebody understands a concept by asking (multiple) questions on a subject without ever knowing anything about their emotions. In the question "How many fingers was I holding up ten seconds ago?", a correct answer (or rather, asking similar questions multiple times and getting correct answers) shows understanding of what "I" refers to, how time works, how counting works and that sensory information/empirical data is necessary to give the answer.

Teachers try to figure out whether their pupils truly understand the subject matter very, very often, so think about how they do it and what they're ascertaining. A way to describe it is "the predictive power of their model of the subject", where repeated queries give data points on, given a certain set of inputs, how often the expected output comes out. Now that sounds a lot like the rulebook could do that (matching inputs to correct outputs) and an infinitely large rulebook can indeed do that for some things, but note that for some things the set of inputs would need to be a simulation of at least parts of the universe to actually come up with correct outputs ("how many fingers was I holding up ten seconds ago?" requires such simulation as part of the inputs).

For human understanding the "predictive power" description works because we know that brains aren't an infinitely large rulebook and that there are limits to memorization. Whether that is employed rather than an efficient model that can be quickly ascertained with enough prodding. For determining non human/broader understanding it needs an additional dimension of storage efficiency/compactness of the model. Clearly, storage requirements of a model to perform arithmetic are much, much smaller than a shitload of combinations of input and output numbers. In a broader sense, this holds for models of any bit of reality.

There is another level to it and it pertains to a slightly different form of understanding, which is being able to explain how your internal model actually works, but I haven't been able to verbalize a good description of that yet. It might just be a special form of a model of reality, but I'm not quite sure about that.

Also, why the fuck is it news that Microsoft is posting about it? TFS or TFA give absolutely no indication as to why.

This is just a dupe, nothing more.

Apparently the original Chinese where they got it from can also be translated as "only expects to sell a little more than 5 million in the first half of 2026".

Yes, it is always wrong that the thought experiment is proof that computers can't have consciousness/understanding. It's not meant to be a proof, but people mistreat it as such.

What? How? Also, it is not my magic rulebook, but Searle's.

Bullshit. You just named some differences between AI and humans and then provide absolutely nothing that shows it has any relation to "understanding". Can a valueless purposeless psychopath human "understand" things? Yes, (s)he can. There goes your argument.

By your logic, the system can answer "I don't know" to all questions and be fine. The point of the example is to show clear limitations of the 'magic rulebook', which is handwavingly implied to be able to answer all questions flawlessly.

The thought experiment implies that you can answer anything without understanding, but doesn't actually show that for very, very many questions. In its basic form it only covers encyclopedic questions reliably, questions that are explicitly lookup questions.

Nobody would claim that a human that answers something by looking it up necessarily "understands" their answer. "Understanding" is shown through far more complicated means, the things that the basic form of the thought experiment just doesn't cover (without impossible physics). The magic rulebook is already inadequate for trivial non-encyclopedic questions and even moreso for questions you would ask a human to determine whether they understand some subject matter.

I agree, it is always trotted out as 'proof' that computers can't have consciousness/understanding and that is always wrong.

It is a thought experiment, not proof of anything. As a thought experiment, it is in interesting starting point, but no more. The core of the basic form is handwaving by making the 'rulebook' some magical omniscient infinite thing, which it can't physically be.

Ask a Chinese Room the answer to this question: "How many fingers was I holding up ten seconds ago?"

The basic form of it is incapable of providing a reasonable answer to that (and certainly not a 'flawless' one). There are many such questions that each require you to add some mechanism to the 'rulebook' until you have created all kinds of parts of a brain and body. For instance: Proper math capabilities are required to give mathematically correct answers for the infinite number of combinations of operators and numbers you can come up with. Just saying "well, the rulebook is infinitely large" is intellectually and philosophically lazy handwaving, nothing more.

Once you have created your now very complex system, it becomes very clear that the person in the room is just a red herring: the equivalent of a pen for the system. The interesting question about understanding was always in how the 'rulebook' comes up with 'flawless answers' exactly, and what "understanding" even is (go ahead, try to define it for humans and apply it consistently).

No one disputes that things may not work for you as they work for me. I don't have a car at all, and I am pretty sure that does not work for most other people. But in general, an EV might work for you because the reasons you cite might not really be valid, but based on misconceptions. And if someone who has experience with EVs tells you that you might not judge correctly, because you assume things about EVs you should not easily assume, you could try to listen instead of feeling attacked. It might be that in the end, you are really not a good fit for an EV (neither am I, hence no car at all), but it would probably not be for the reasons you think.

How long before it is AI cameras to detect forest fires and autonomous AI to find and extinguish forest fires?

How long before the company making the robots to traverse the difficult terrains autonomously, point fire fighting equipment at fires and put out fires is "conveniently repurposed" to drop into war zones and autonomously find and extinguish an opposing force's robots, vehicles and soldiers?

> this version updates the code to compile with C99, makes it much easier to cross compile the code for other systems than the one running, and now uses Lua for its dungeon generation.

It never ceases to amaze me that developer spend the time to upgrade ancient code to the latest C version, yet add dependencies on sure to be broken add-ons like ancient niche scripting languages.

Is the question "How much of this was vibe-coded?"

The plants are less nutritious because farmers, governments. and corporation have spent the last 250 years finding ways to speed up pant growth , reduce time to harvest, reduce the effects of pests, and reduce the number of varieties of food grown.

Check the organic versus not organic spinach leaf thickness (or lettuce) at the store next time you shop.

Norway and Mexico produce a large amount of oil.. Will they also be phasing out drilling, pumping and exporting oil, tar, natural gas and other oil based products?

I am in agreement that reducing USA pollution is important and the USA should reduce food exports to drastically reduce pollution.

Top 20 Food Exporting Countries
Https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-20-food-exporting-countries-122951352.html
August 27, 2023

Annual Volume of food exports (Million Tons): 133.2
Annual Value of food exports (USD Millions): 91.2

https://www.investopedia.com/a...
  The U.S. was the leading global agricultural exporter in 2025, with exports valued at $170.5 billion.15 Mexico, Canada, and China are also among the leading importers of U.S. agricultural products.16

California is the leading U.S. state for agricultural production, consistently generating roughly 11% to 13% of the nation's total agricultural cash receipts, and reaching $61.2 billion in 2024. Dairy, almonds, and grapes are among its top commodities.17

Valley Ag Voice. "California Ag Production Value Hits Record $61.2 Billion."
Other major agricultural-producing states include Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, and Illinois.

The protest generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s has largely retired from political, academic, corporate, media, nonprofits, and professional agitation groups.

The combination of these retirements is now, after decades of status-quo stagnation, allowing a more modern evaluation of government policies, political leadership, corporate policies, government budget priorities and everyday life.

The legacy building of not letting anything change for fear of it reducing the 1960s youth culture, anti-Vietnam, anti-nuclear, pro-(group X) rights, every crisis needs to be compared to Watergate, ... is/has ended.

Not all the changes are for the better. We can finally have reasoned discussion of issues without the cancel-culture of going against the orthodoxy and dogma of the 1960s protest culture tenants