MouldyCat

I guess you still have the issue of someone needing to pay for the huge number of downloads, most of which are going to come from users who make no other contributions to the site. Maybe you could combine a fedi site with torrents or something?

I commend this guy for sticking by his principles. I remember feeling shocked and let down when walking into my uni's computer department for the first time and finding out that the main lab was the Windows lab, with the Linux lab being smaller and hidden away.

He must have tried the patience of his professors though, with his refusal to even use non-free JavaScript - for instance he wouldn't use the Zoom video conferencing web client. Given that you don't have to install anything on your machine and JS is heavily sandboxed, that does seem a bit too idealistic!

But hopefully he made his professors think a little and maybe they'll even opt for true FOSS solutions in future. Like this Jitsi Meet that I'd never heard of before - I'm looking forward to trying it instead of Google Meet next chance I get.

In case you haven't seen it, the paper is here - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).

The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn't unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as "analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome".

They also don't provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.

What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they've seen, rather than genuinely working them out.

I think it's an easy mistake to confuse sentience and intelligence. It happens in Hollywood all the time - "Skynet began learning at a geometric rate, on July 23 2004 it became self-aware" yadda yadda

But that's not how sentience works. We don't have to be as intelligent as Skynet supposedly was in order to be sentient. We don't start our lives as unthinking robots, and then one day - once we've finally got a handle on calculus or a deep enough understanding of the causes of the fall of the Roman empire - we suddenly blink into consciousness. On the contrary, even the stupidest humans are accepted as being sentient. Even a young child, not yet able to walk or do anything more than vomit on their parents' new sofa, is considered as a conscious individual.

So there is no reason to think that AI - whenever it should be achieved, if ever - will be conscious any more than the dumb computers that precede it.

"We demand you voluntarily side with progress"

They have an interesting concept of voluntary to be sure

You must be able to see that giving your daughter your mother's name as a middle name is not at all the same as giving your son your own name?

Vanity isn't it? Pathetic male vanity. Never hear women doing it do you.

While true, why are you linking this comment in almost all the other comments?

I've been stuck repeatedly asking myself this question ever since reading your comment 😩 Please be careful about throwing infinite while true loops around! Now I need someone to Ctrl-C me.

I'm probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system's own handling of touchpad scrolling! here's the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren't looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I'd have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

Trees do actually improve air quality, by absorbing harmful gases like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide through their leaves. Additionally they can reduce particulate pollution by up to 70% - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200504-which-trees-reduce-air-pollution-best

I was puzzled by this too, so I took one for the team and clicked the link. Yes it does appear to mean that there were less users using the Chinese language in this survey than the one for the previous month, which implies fewer Chinese users: "Last month we saw quite a sharp drop for the Linux stats, which coincided with Simplified Chinese once again rising as the language choice on Steam. This is something that happens now and then."

Why there is a link between Chinese users and Windows is an interesting question. Could be related to a higher number of Internet cafés there - not sure if that's still true but it used to be - and/or greater acceptability and availability of pirated software in China compared to Europe and USA causing reduced demand for free alternatives.