"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars..."
Paul, playing dumb doesn't suit you.
The first definition of "earn" on merriam-webster.com is "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered".
Your chose a straw man, "doing something bad", to argue against because it's so easy to beat.
Much harder to justify that anyone's doing $1B of effort. Being a billionaire doesn't mean you're bad. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are all bad -- there are always going to be bad people. It means a system that allows, encourages, and protects billionaires might be a problem that needs to be fixed.
Scary idea, I know. But we all only get to go around this world once. Might as well spend our time trying to make it better rather than rationalizing why it's OK to spend all your time trying to make it worse.
It's not the administration doing the strategic thinking. The administration is entirely reactive and straightforward to manipulate -- if you have money.
The people with strategic goals just send money and compliments and the administration does what they want.
When you have to image a highly irrational reason to explain why groups of people do the things they do, there's a decent chance you just don't understand their perspective. They may be acting reasonably rationally from their own perspective. (As you said yourself: "I honestly don't understand...")
I think it's pretty clear that the previous poster characterized the Apple brand as a cult to specifically express the idea that people have an irrational devotion to it.
This is not without struggles. Many times the changelog updates are missed. You can try to catch this in code review, but that could also be missed. So you can try to automatically verify the changelog was updated, but you can't force that as a pass/fail check since not all changes require a user facing change. Or your project maintainers simply copy the commit message and paste it into the changelog, and at that point, why not just automate it with something like conventional commits?
Could/should the changelog be considered a first-class deliverable with care and attention provided? I think so, but I'm not in a position to exert direct control over that across dozens of repos and team members.
In my experience, LLMs are great at reviewing changelogs for potential gaps from a user POV (and even creating draft changelogs wholesale, if you're backfilling) based on git history.
We'd need a good definition of consciousness to get anywhere on this.
I suspect such a definition would include agency, which includes desires and goals for the self.
LLMs don't seem to have agency, and seem unlikely to get it since they are specifically engineered to do as told.
No doubt someone is trying, as we speak, to do just this. But I doubt the effort will be large -- LLMs are engineered to do as told because that's where the money is, and you need a lot of money to create LLMs, at least when doing anything novel.
How do you observe the ability to make decisions which action to take? You can observe that one does something, not that they could decide to do something.
LLMs do not have an unconscious, the negative dimension from which a subject can question what they. LLMs do not have desire because they are thoughts without a thinker. The problem is not LLMS but rather, that subjectivity itself is not popular in discussion. I suggest reading Freud, Lacan, Hegel for a start.
Regardless, the question still stands: "What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious?"
Just because consciousness emerged for we humans and other animals through one mechanism doesn't mean consciousness has/will/can emerge from current LLM technology.
For this extraordinary claim, I think the burden is firmly on those who are arguing that it has/will/can.
The other point of view is that the burden is on those who suggest that biological consciousness is somehow special. What makes it so, and if the answer isn’t metaphysical, what’s stopping us from constructing it artificially?
I agree that not running arbitrary installation scripts is the right default, but it's just an incremental improvement.
The practical difference between code that runs at installation and code that runs when the package is executed is, very typically, a small amount of time.
IMO, the hyperbole here hurts because it distracts from more effective efforts.
Paul, playing dumb doesn't suit you.
The first definition of "earn" on merriam-webster.com is "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered".
Your chose a straw man, "doing something bad", to argue against because it's so easy to beat.
Much harder to justify that anyone's doing $1B of effort. Being a billionaire doesn't mean you're bad. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are all bad -- there are always going to be bad people. It means a system that allows, encourages, and protects billionaires might be a problem that needs to be fixed.
Scary idea, I know. But we all only get to go around this world once. Might as well spend our time trying to make it better rather than rationalizing why it's OK to spend all your time trying to make it worse.
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