Since yours was the first reply I came to that didn’t just ‘react’, I’d like to challenge 1 point in your list (the rest I pretty much agree with), and that is the first one. For context, I worked in AI (or ML as it was known then) in the 1990s. The models were very much based on ideas from neuroscience (my CS PhD supervisor was a biologist). Saying “they can’t think” requires a precise definition of what “thinking” is, and I’ve not seen one so far.

For sure, the most current LLMs are not what we might call human-level sentient, and have only seen a fraction of what a human baby would be exposed to in terms of training data. But as far as the way they process that data, perhaps they are “thinking” in the same way a brain would think if all it ever ‘saw’ was text. Perhaps they think in the same way an insect or small rodent thinks. And as they grow larger / more sophisticated, the same as a dog or cat? Or a small primate? You can see where that’s going.

Anyway, I enjoyed The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby. My PhD was based on the early work of Yann LeCun, and putting all those names and the motivations behind them into a full picture was eye-opening.

Well the headline on the article is very different now. I even get a slightly different version between reader mode and full website.

I think Hugo Rifkind nailed it back in 2018 with his shit cheese submarine.

It does—portable app too.

It already is—it’s been much easier for Australians to move freely round Europe for some time. We have friends with dual uk / au passports, and they always use their au docs when travelling in Europe.

Not like the good old days.

Those IP addresses were about the most believable thing in that episode. It’s occasionally amusing nonsense, requires about 1% concentration, and if you fall asleep in one episode and wake up in the next, you won’t need to reach for the remote.

It’s from FUBAR. I think they took the show’s name as a general directive.

Told

The character was created specifically because when we write we use different length dashes to mean different things—subtraction through to a pause for thinking.

The automated test will have no difficulty telling them apart. Are you saying it’s hard looking at the results of this tests? You might need to use a font that makes that easy (I agree many monospaced fonts don’t, but that’s not the character’s fault. Or include a step that replaces en with 2 hyphens and em with 3.

It’s more that they used to be shipped 2x4 unfinished, and would be planed smooth on site. Once the equipment and distribution was able to do the planing before it got to the customer, they had so much established practice that the installed timber would be smaller, they had to keep to what people were used to.

2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)

Among this chart’s many other issues raised elsewhere, Ada is in totally the wrong place. Probably more system than Rust right now, and definitely not obsolete.

Geez did they build that page with asp? Is janky-scroll a default setting?

I’m almost more irritated by the use of two hyphens instead of a colon after the first definition. They just didn’t give a shit really.

If you take a finished product and gradually take away pieces, you can make a progression out of pretty much anything.

You can find many discussions about that online, and it’s basically a BE / AE thing. In BE, it’s not correct, hence I’m annoyed a lot of the time.

I’d just like to thank you for writing “how big a deal” instead of the now ubiquitous “how big of a deal”. That would have really annoyed me.

I remember hearing a story of a UN or EU real-time translator working German to English suddenly stopping, the English listeners looking a bit confused, and after another 15 or 20 seconds of hearing the German speaker continue with still no translation, just heard a whispered “the verb, dammit, the verb!” through their headsets.

‘Get her!’–that was your whole plan?