They are remarkably useful. Of course there are dangers relating to how they are used, but sticking your head in the sand and pretending they are useless accomplishes nothing.

It models only use of language

This phrase, so casually deployed, is doing some seriously heavy lifting. Lanuage is by no means a trivial thing for a computer to meaningfully interpret, and the fact that LLMs do it so well is way more impressive than a casual observer might think.

If you look at earlier procedural attempts to interpret language programmatically, you will see that time and again, the developers get stopped in their tracks because in order to understand a sentence, you need to understand the universe - or at the least a particular corner of it. For example, given the sentence “The stolen painting was found by a tree”, you need to know what a tree is in order to interpret this correctly.

You can’t really use language *unless* you have a model of the universe.

That’s 1 in every 50 desktops. Anecdotally I can think of only 3 people, including myself

Can you name 147 people using Windows? If you can, then that’s 1 in every 50. Of course, people you know are probably the technical sort that are more likely to pay attention to their OS, but still you’d need to be able to individually name 147 Windows users just to match the 1 in 50 stat. Point I’m trying to make is that one in 50 really is not very many!

they, in fact, will have some understanding

These models have spontaneously acquired a concept of things like perspective, scale and lighting, which you can argue is already an understanding of 3D space.

What they do not have (and IMO won’t ever have) is consciousness. The fact we have created machines that have understanding of the universe without consciousness is very interesting to me. It’s very illuminating on the subject of what consciousness is, by providing a new example of what it is not.

They absolutely do contain a model of the universe which their answers must conform to. When an LLM hallucinates, it is creating a new answer which fits its internal model.

I don’t have Subnautica but it is on my wishlist because you can play in VR, which is what I mostly play these days. PCVR is not as reliable on Linux as standard games, but nevertheless more than 50% of titles do work flawlessly now. Subnautica is definitely one of them - you should check for other people who’ve got your problem on ProtonDB. If you actually care, look into it more, you should be able to get all of those games running.

Hmmm? You can run Subnautica on Linux through Steam, as you can run most games written for Windows.

They had a veto and they also had the Tories

I think it’s possible that internal language did exist before it could be vocalised. That is, before we evolved the necessary structures in the throat to make words, we were thinking according to basic grammatical rules e.g subject-verb-object. Words in human language are like labels for internal concepts, and those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing.

What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it’s not necessary for logical thought.

Yes it totally does. My teachers got a load of disembodied teeth when I was about 6, and we tied them to string and left them suspended in various drinks. The ones in coca cola had completely disappeared by the end of the experiment.

privacy on that site was horrible, and I stoped de-selecting vendors who want permission to track me after two minutes.

Just open the page in a private window at that point, and click the “yeah sure track everything bro” button.

It’s not the image, it’s a normal image. The server does the hard work when you make the request, and then it just builds the image accordingly.

Tramways and Light Rails are much more silent

From inside, maybe? Berlin, where I live, has lots of trams all over the city. I admit I rarely use them as I much prefer my bicycle, but they are seriously noisy. During the day the noise is somewhat lost in the general cacophony of city life, but in the evenings you can hear them rattling and crashing along from streets away. And if you live on a road with a tramline, you just have to accept this horrible metal-on-metal screeching and rattling at almost all hours.

How would I even know if this is correct?

You’re gonna have to go to a lot of parties

Those poor Iranians

I suggest you try to analyse the data. Iranians have a very high energy usage per capita - at least as high as any EU country and probably higher. The country is a major oil and gas producer, and the population is accustomed to cheap petrol prices due to heavy subsidisation by the government. You won’t find many Iranians opting to use public transport for the good of the environment. Like Americans, they would rather sit in their own air-conditioned vehicles in interminable traffic jams.

I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I’ve not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it’s made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.

Same. I had an Nvidia 960 for about 5 years on arch with very few problems. Maybe twice over that time I had to rollback to an older version temporarily due to some incompatibility with wine or such like.

Towards the end of last year I finally decided to upgrade (mostly to play RDR2) and I went with AMD. I love the feel of using a pure open source gfx stack, but there is no real functional advantage to it.

… just don’t tell them it was with yourself

I find your comment interesting because you are implying that some people believe being stupid or clever is a permanent unchangeable state. Presumably one is born as either one or the other?

I would say that some ways of thinking are stupid. In particular when one does not challenge one’s assumptions. It’s possible to build a whole world of stupid on top of bad assumptions. If someone’s entire worldview is built in this way - a whole load of bad assumptions held together with poor logic and wishful thinking - I don’t think they’re even living in the real world any more, they’re living in a fantasy land.