what kind of behavior would demonstrate that LLMs did have understanding?

An LLM would need to act like an understander -- the essence of the Turing Test. Exactly what that means is a complex question. And it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. But we can easily provide counterexamples where the LLM is clearly not an understander. Like this from the paper:

When prompted with the CoT prefix, the modern LLM Gemini responded: âoeThe United States was established in 1776. 1776 is divisible by 4, but itâ(TM)s not a century year, so itâ(TM)s a leap year. Therefore, the day the US was established was in a normal year.â This response exemplifies a concerning pattern: the model correctly recites the leap year rule and articulates intermediate reasoning steps, yet produces a logically inconsistent conclusion (i.e., asserting 1776 is both a leap year and a normal year).

Why do I want or need Thunderbird on my mobile device when I have K9 Mail?

It is also a LOT easier to both post content and reach a lot of people via social media as opposed to doing both using your own website.

Once upon a time, in the long long ago, I could create content on my site and then automatically or semi-automatically share it on social media, where my social media followers would see it.

I don't know why you need actual land to consider yourself a country.

A state is an entity which has an effective monopoly on force over some piece of territory.

If you can't make laws and compel people to obey them, you're not a state.

you would have easily seen that installing Linux on a cheap and terrible "consumer" laptop isn't going to be easy, if even possible

And that is exactly the topic of inquiry at hand: on what boxen is installing Linux easy and possible.

You're been able to post to IG from the website for a while now.

Or use it but disable notifications. Or turn on do-not-disturb mode, like I usually have on. There's three people in universe whose calls or DM deserve instant attention from me, and none of them would contact me via IG, so.

So long as you demonstrate that you can keep them safe and secure, I'm less worried about you having a nuke than the US government having one. The US, after all, has actually flash-fried children with the things before.

As for mandatory vaccination, the SCOTUS found in Buck v. Bell -- and has never overturned -- that the same principle that justified mandatory vax also justifies forced eugenic sterilization. It's not just a theoretic "slippery slope", we already slid down it.

Discord is more like a 21st century IRC server than Facebook.

Never understood the appeal of IRC or of real-time chat. Where's the 21st century BBS?

Last I heard religion was firmly a conservative thing.

Catholic Worker Movement. The Catonsville 9. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.. Women's Christian Temperance Movement.

Religion is neither "liberal" no "conservative".

it's still completely inappropriate to offer them a "tender embrace".

In the same sense that it's inappropriate ti wear a "Free Hugs!" t-shirt making the same offer to a business meeting, yes. There is a lot of space between "this was inappropriate behavior for that situation" and "this person is an abusive predator and must be cancelled."

And yet Cuomo, against whom the allegations are worse and the evidence stronger, remains in office. As does accused rapist and known hair-sniffer Biden.

Yes, let's deal with this problem by changing the rest of the world

The whole idea of the free software movement is to change the world. So, yeah, if you believe that the world is wrong, you set out to change it, you don't surrender. (This is a response only to this argument, not a defense nor a condemnation of RMS.)

Why the fsck is there a daemon managing static data like user accounts???