> You can upgrade Windows from 1.0 through 11 without Microsoft saying "nah, this is impossible"
Have you tried that lately? It was probably true for Windows 10, but not 11. There is no supported path to install 11 if you don't have the Microsoft-approved hardware with TPM etc, which would certainly include Raspberry Pis. Installing Windows 11 on non-Microsoft-approved hardware seems to require levels of jank at least as bad as anything I've seen in Linux. Advice is all over the place, usually involving full reinstalls, setting random registry keys, running Powershell scripts downloaded from a random Github repo as Admin, or something along those lines. And no telling which if any work at any particular time, since Microsoft is constantly fighting them apparently.
Do you know how we are "pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction"? Genuine question. The only thing I know of is repealing the tax credits.
Personally, I think EVs are neat, but I also think the industry has grown enough already that they should be able to compete with ICE vehicles on as close to a level playing field as can be arranged. Let them beat the ICE industry by making vehicles that are actually better.
Well, if we were going to have government support anywhere, it should be through encouraging L2 charging availability in new homes and apartment buildings, ideally at a more local level.
Yep. No need to subsidize what end up being luxury priced vehicles. The technology is there and if the already spent billions of dollars on subsidies haven’t incentivized enough of a bootstrapping of the supply chain tossing more billions at it is just going to be diminishing returns.
I’d also be ok with diverting that spend towards building out proper charging infrastructure. But not subsidizing rich folks tossing a charger in their garage like it has been up to this point. I would like more towards chargers in public parking lots, rapid chargers deployed along interstates at current truck stops who will commit to actual binding deliverables, etc.
Basically anything but sending more tax money to the top 30% homeowners in the country like pretty much all EV and home solar/etc. tax programs have been designed towards.
I think I would model it sort of like how governments subsidize(d) the infrastructure for the automobile vs everything else by building out roads, local ordinances for parking mandates, etc. vs direct subsidies to end-users. Build the commons.
EPA standards for fuel mileage goals in the future were scrapped.
Current fuel mileage standards are no longer enforced.
The Trump Feds sued to stop California’s fuel mileage standards goals.
Tariffs on EV / battery imported products.
The administration paused the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program and cancelled over $7.5 billion in funding for green energy projects, including grants meant to convert manufacturing plants to EV production.
And Musk participation in the fraud that was DOGE sure did push EV buyers away from Musk / Tesla.
I can't help but think, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows as something they can leverage to get themselves in front of whatever the latest tech trend is, never mind what it does to their users' ability to get stuff done.
They may say they're backing off now, but it's hard to trust them. Will they just do the same thing with whatever the next tech trend is?
I used to argue in favor of Windows with basically the same argument. But honestly, using Windows nowadays seems to require even more hacking than Linux. Particularly if you don't have the newest hardware made to Microsoft's standards. Or don't want to deal with regular full-screen ads to update to Windows 11, or don't want Copilot jammed into every app.
I installed Linux instead, Fedora specifically, and everything just worked. It actually cleared up some weird hardware issues I had on Windows that I could never manage to track down. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to do any CLI or config file tinkering for anything that wasn't getting an actual CLI app I wanted to use running. Beats the dozens of different registry hacks and powershell scripts downloaded off random Github repos people kept telling me I needed to do to make Windows 11 work and not be too annoying.
I think this is a "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good thing". It's technically possible to get around, but adding more speed bumps in the way of scammers tends to drastically reduce the number of people who get scammed.
I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.
Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.
There doesn't seem to be a super-rigorous definition of the Turing Test, but I don't think it's reasonable to require it to fool an expert whose life depends on the correct choice. It already seems to be decently able to fool a person of average intelligence who has a basic knowledge of LLMs.
I agree that we don't really have AGI yet, but I'd hope we can come up with a better definition of what it is than "we'll know it when we see it". I think it is a legitimate point that we've moved the goalposts some.
The real answer is that once LLMs passed a "casual" application of the Turing test, it just made us realize that the "casual Turing test" is not particularly interesting. It turns out to be too easy to ape human behavior over short time frames for it to be a good indicator of human-like intelligence.
Now, you could argue that this right here is the aforementioned moving of the goalposts. After all, we're deciding that the casual Turing test wasn't interesting precisely after having seen that LLMs could pass it.
However, in my view, the Turing test _always_ implied the "rigorous" Turing test, and it's only now that we're actually flirting with passing it that it had to be clarified what counts as a true Turing test. As I see it, the Turing test can still be salvaged as a criteria for genera intelligence, but only if you allow it to be a no-holds-barred, life-depends-on-it test to exhaustion. This would involve allowing arbitrarily long questioning periods, for instance. I think this is more in the spirit of the original formulation, because the whole idea is to pit a machine against all of human intelligence, proving it has a similar arsenal of adaptability at its disposal. If it only has to passingly fool a human for brief periods, well... I'm afraid that just doesn't prove much. All sorts of stuff briefly fools humans. What requires intelligence is to consistently anticipate and adapt to all lines of questioning in a sustained manner until the human runs out of ideas for how to differentiate.
ELIZA fooled plenty of people (both originally and in the study you just linked) but i still wouldn't say Eliza passed/passes the turing test in general. It just shows that occasionally or even frequently fooling people is not a sufficient proxy for general intelligence. Ofc there isn't a standardized definition, but one thing I would personally include in a "strict" Turing test is that the human interrogee ought to be incentivized to cooperate and to make their humanity as clear as possible. And the interrogator should similarly be incentivized to find the right answer.
Turing gave a pretty rigorous definition of the Turing Test IMO. Well, as rigorous as something that is inherently "anecdotal" can be, which is part of the philosophical point of the Turing Test.
First of. The Turing test has a rigorous definition. Secondly, it has been debunked for almost half a century at this point by Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment. Thirdly, intelligence it self is a scientifically fraught term with ever changing meaning as we discover more and more “intelligent” behavior in nature (by animals and plants, and more). And to make matters worse, general intelligence is even worse, as the term was used almost exclusively for racist pseudo-science, as a way to operationally define a metric which would prove white supremacy.
Artificial General Intelligence will exist when the grifters who profit from it claim it exists. The meaning of it will shift to benefit certain entrepreneurs. It will never actually be a useful term in science nor philosophy.
>Secondly, it has been debunked for almost half a century at this point by Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment.
Searles thought experiment is stupid and debunked nothing. What neuron, cell, atom of your brain understands English ? That's right. You can't answer that anymore than you can answer the subject of Searles proposition, ergo the brain is a Chinese room. If you conclude that you understand English, then the Chinese room understands Chinese.
> Searle’s response to the Systems Reply is simple: in principle, he could internalize the entire system, memorizing all the instructions and the database, and doing all the calculations in his head. He could then leave the room and wander outdoors, perhaps even conversing in Chinese. But he still would have no way to attach “any meaning to the formal symbols”. The man would now be the entire system, yet he still would not understand Chinese. For example, he would not know the meaning of the Chinese word for hamburger. He still cannot get semantics from syntax.
> The man would now be the entire system, yet he still would not understand Chinese.
Really, here the only issue is Searle's inability to grasp the concept that the process is what does the understanding, not the person (or machine, or neurons) that performs it.
That seems a bit contrived to me. Okay, that particular place is pretty deeply nested, but it's clearly a regular menu tucked away in there, with a option to show the menu bar. If you turn that on, then those options are half as deep. Or if you don't need to adjust those options, you don't go that deep.
The sibling comment, meanwhile, is complaining about extra space devoted to explicit controls for all of the extra options. Well, you can't have it both ways. If you want to have a lot of features and options, you have to either devote some space in the main UI to them, or have a lot of deeply nested menus like that.
Or I guess you could do a config file somewhere, but IMO that's even worse. If we're going to complain about bad UIs, isn't it even worse than some deeply nested menus to need to open a separate file somewhere else with a separate program and learn whatever config file syntax they happen to use.
Have you tried that lately? It was probably true for Windows 10, but not 11. There is no supported path to install 11 if you don't have the Microsoft-approved hardware with TPM etc, which would certainly include Raspberry Pis. Installing Windows 11 on non-Microsoft-approved hardware seems to require levels of jank at least as bad as anything I've seen in Linux. Advice is all over the place, usually involving full reinstalls, setting random registry keys, running Powershell scripts downloaded from a random Github repo as Admin, or something along those lines. And no telling which if any work at any particular time, since Microsoft is constantly fighting them apparently.
reply