terrific

Using phrasing such as “necessarily implies” is exactly what makes me call your conversation style “lecturing”.

Is it normal to talk like this in your circles? In my culture it’s a certain way to antagonize anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.

It’s a fair point. Your assessment is missing one crucial piece of context: my last conversation with CowBee. It was really quite painful and I’m just not in the mood for another treatment.

I’m sorry if I’m dismissive but I gotta tell you, last time we talked felt an awful lot like being lectured. You didn’t really engage with anything I said but rather regurgitated endless theories and facts.

And you are a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, is that not true? Subscribing to a particular narrative is IMO exactly what “dogmatic” means. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s truer than most dogmas. But still a dogma.

Oh it’s you again. Last time we talked you lectured me about imperialism. I’m not really interested in a lecture today, or any day. We can have a conversation if you want, but I’m not going to subscribe to your dogma.

Americans think that the US is the centre of the universe 🙄

One can hope. The UK is a few revolutions behind.

I would much rather send my children off to a school run by the CCP than one run by the bastard elite that has been sucking the UK dry for centuries. They are run with a Machiavellian philosophy that generates ruthless, lonely psychopaths.

I also absolutely hate everything Thatcher did, but I think most British private schools were private long before she selling off Britain’s assets.

Britain has been an oligarchy/kleptocracy for centuries. And like all such systems it’s vulnerable to takeover from very big fish.

So Palantir sells a data management tool and deployment support. That shouldn’t really surprise anyone who knows the first thing about data science.

The interesting thing about Palantir isn’t what they sell but how they sell it and who buys it. They clearly market their unremarkable software as an autocrat’s wet dream.

And police and military departments across Europe and the US buy their shit, which says more about those police and military departments than about the software.

I agree but that’s a somewhat different discussion IMO.

Even if Palantir’s software was just a simple interface for a database, the fact that it’s proprietary means that there could be secret backdoors for the US Intelligence community to look at the data. There almost certainly are. That makes it an issue of national security on top of one of personal liberty.

There. Fixed it for you.

Man I hope the EU is going to wake up to software sovereignty soon.

Stuff is moving in the right direction in some places on the local level, but I would love to see a blanket ban on foreign subscription services for safety critical sectors.

Honestly, ban the use of proprietary software in any public, tax-funded organisation.

Anti-communism is a fancy name for fascism.

I think the greatest concession made was that von der Leyen allowed Trump to frame this as a great victory for him. He has a fragile ego and always needs to look good. She is a much more diplomatic politician and allowed him to appear victorious. But the actual, realistic concessions are pretty limited.

I thought this was a pretty convincing argument why it’s not as bad for Europe as it looks https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sundown-on-the-potemkin-empire-trumps

As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!

What AI revolution? All I get is fancy spellcheck and crappy image generation.

It’s hyperbole.

I too could have won it! I just didn’t want to. It’s too easy, you see?

I think that’s a very generous use of the word “superintelligent”. They aren’t anything like what I associate with that word anyhow.

I also don’t really think they are knowledge retrieval engines. I use them extensively in my daily work, for example to write emails and generate ideas. But when it comes to facts they are flaky at best. It’s more of a free association game than knowledge retrieval IMO.

That’s true in a somewhat abstract way, but I just don’t see any evidence of the claim that it is just around the corner. I don’t see what currently existing technology can facilitate it. Faster-than-light travel could also theoretically be just around the corner, but it would surprise me if it was, because we just don’t have the technology.

On the other hand, the people who push the claim that AGI is just around the corner usually have huge vested interests.

I’m not sure I can give a satisfying answer. There are a lot of moving parts here, and a big issue here is definitions which you also touch upon with your reference to Searle.

I agree with the sentiment that there must be some objective measure of reasoning ability. To me, reasoning is more than following logical rules. It’s also about interpreting the intent of the task. The reasoning models are very sensitive to initial conditions and tend to drift when the question is not super precise or if they don’t have sufficient context.

The AI models are in a sense very fragile to the input. Organic intelligence on the other hand is resilient and also heuristic. I don’t have any specific idea for the test, but it should test the ability to solve a very ill-posed problem.