Technically, yes. Practically, it’s complicated. It doesn’t really exist within the same ecosystem as other Linux distros.

It’s not as different as Android (which is also technically a Linux distribution), but running a normal DE and all the programs that come with it is very clearly still an advanced user thing locked behind knowledge of how bash and virtual environments work.

There are plenty of new age wuwu types that do define reality as a god. If I thought they had any legitimacy I wouldn’t be an atheist, but the core idea is that we essentially exist as constructs within the imagination of this god.

Hey, just went back to this conversation now that the UNESCO report claims that the highway construction project is putting Stonehenge in real danger. What’s your opinion on that?

Sorry, I edited in the stuff about deists and pantheons as you were responding. What’s your opinion on that?

No, but most people do think of Reality as a god.

But they don’t think He is a god

These two statements directly contradict eachother. Either you think of Reality as a god, or you do not. If you don’t think reality is a god, then you don’t think “he” is a god (wow, the tautology was weird to type).

Also, there are many examples of religious people who don’t think reality is a god. Deists, for example, believe that god showed up, made the universe, and left. Under that belief system, the deist god and the universe it created are two entirely separate things.

There’s also pantheons, where gods exist within their own higher reality with their own set of rules, limitations and powers that interact with our reality. Reality (either ours or the supernatural plane in these belief systems) are clearly separate from the gods operating under these rules.

People are perfectly capable of worshipping, praying to, and generally being religious towards someone they refuse to believe is a god.

What’s your opinion on people who do neither? That don’t believe in a god and don’t pray to anything either?

I’m not a lawyer, first of all! I’m not very knowledgeable either.

Mens rea, as far as I understand it, definitely doesn’t apply here. Bringing it into question undermines the case if you’re trying to build a conviction around it. Better to have a wide variety of provable smaller claims than one big ticket item you’re doomed to fail, as far as I understand it.

Never happening, but even if it was wouldn’t the correct charge be criminal negligence? It’s not like the companies killed those people in a calculated, pre-meditated way. They’re “just” externalities.

What normal people hear: “He took down the routers with some crazy complicated algorithms. He’s Neo in the matrix.”

What IT professionals hear: “He hired a bunch of people to keep sending spam letters to their tiny mailboxes until they were so stuffed that they couldn’t receive any legitimate mail.”

deleted by creator

Does it come with a coupon for their hitman service too?

destroying paintings and monoliths

But… they didn’t do either of those things. They threw soup at glass, and for the Stonehenge thing they used washable powder paint. They were publicity stunts with no damage done.

Yeah, that does sound very comparable to what I was talking about. Your example and mine both do not have the state deciding what university you apply to though, which is what I understood from “the state decides what you’ll study”.

No, I’m disagreeing. You could study anything you wanted, not what the state wanted. It was just hard to get a slot.

I guess it’s similar to how it’s incredibly hard to get a scholarship at a great university today. You’d hardly say that the modern scholarship system “forces you to study what the state wants”.

This is not true. At least here in Romania, the issue with colleges under communism was that there were VERY limited slots, so you had to either be the best of the best or have a high up party member in the family or as a close personal friend.

to have this relationship between A and B you have to make a third database

Probably just a mistake here, but you make a third table, not a new database.

Apart from that (and the fact that one to many and many to one is the same thing), yeah, looks correct.

Even the question of “who” is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the “who” doing the thinking in the first place :))

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

That’s a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That’s what they are.

I’m happy with the Oxford definition: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”.

LLMs don’t have knowledge as they don’t actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

If asked to answer 10*5, they can’t reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren’t in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.