Honest question about the difference between US and UK English: I know that in UK English, companies are plural, so it's, "Microsoft are releasing a new ..." But you wrote, "The Daily Mail are losing [its] shit [...]" Is that correct? I would've expected, "The Daily Mail are losing their shit(s)," or something like that.

Applause.

Haha maybe. Sometimes I have to say, "Oh right they're still at my computer." Anyway, it is what it is. I still like having a physical key on my keychain, as it's guaranteed to be with me, at least nearby.

I look at this as a feature, not a bug. Well, and also: I always put my keys in exactly the same place when I enter my home.

Reading your response, the reason I characterized it as semantic is that it seems like what I'm chasing is terminology for two kinds of things, but using the single word, "intelligence". I would like to offer that I am not trying to twist it, but to explore the meaning and my understanding. There are two concepts I'm balancing here:

1. The capacity for learning which is maybe expressive of intelligence. An LLM can acquire knowledge during its context window as can a person with retrograde amnesia. In a sense they both have a context window.
2. The further ability beyond (1) to also persist learning in a lossy or lossless way such that it's possible to "get smarter" over some "lifetime".

I suppose one could go back and argue that, for an LLM, the "lifetime" is the context window, and so (2) still applies. For me, (2) is representative of my desire for a grouping that contains things like a dog or a human (operating without disability), or an AGI from science fiction. Maybe it's okay to use the word "intelligent" for (1)! But if we do that, then what do we use for (2)?

I guess if "acquire knowledge" does not implicitly include any assumption that the acquired knowledge persists, you're right. My personal interpretation of that dictionary definition is (unsurprisingly) a more-human one. Acquired knowledge is expected to persist in some way. In humans, it does not persist perfectly, but it does persist well enough for humans to become experts at stuff.

An LLM is pretty similar to a virtual machine that has been configured to reset to its initial snapshot after being turned off. It remembers things while it's "on" (the context window) but reverts to its initial state (the training) when starting a new conversation. It is possible to add more to the training, but, in my opinion importantly, it cannot do that autonomously.

Interesting semantic argument, anwyay.

My career is littered with examples where I'm the only one who spoke up, despite many people having concerns. Sometimes they'll even talk to me privately afterwards to thank me for speaking up. I'm not completely socially fearless, but I feel social pressure differently than many do, and to some degree, I feel like this is a Good Thing (TM) -- both for me, and for employers. If they don't think so, that's just a signal I can read.

[...] because some people claiming to work for the FSF were condescending dickholes to me on IRC in 1994 and it'll be a cold day in hell before I use anything that's derived from Debian.

This is one of the dumbest things I've read all week. I can't imagine still being bent about shit that happened to me 30 years ago.

We should start treating them like they're in a Boeing plane above the common human...

Exactly. The technical portion of my career as a software engineer has never been the greater challenge; it was the social part that has taken me decades to work out and finally get proficient at. I made so many mistakes at my first job learning what professionalism is and how to navigate social situations that I didn't even intuitively recognize as complex. I stayed there 10 years, packed all those mistakes together, then left and applied what I learned at my second job. It was night and day, though I was still learning.

I think I'll always feel that the social aspects of my work are harder than the technical ones. One of the results of all of this time and effort is that I have had people tell me that they perceive me as more socially aware than many people they've worked with. Me! Holy shit, what is that? But it does make me extremely proud of how far I've come.

Washington D.C. public schools are a serious mess. My partner is a teacher there, in one of the calmer, less-insane schools, and it's still a mess. I'm surprised the expense is that low, considering how many administrators, deans, vice principals and police patrolling all day in and around the school it takes to keep the kids from going completely insane.

It's an Android app, so it runs on anything you can sideload one of those onto. FireTV used to be Android, but I think it's some Amazon-specific thing now? Apple TV is not. It's a completely separate app that interacts with the YouTube API directly. As far as usability and features, it's 10x the app the official one is.

My intuition says that the number of people who already fell for this would not be reduced significantly by the prompt saying "copy this text and paste it" ... it's already semi-insane that this worked on people who use GitHub...

Bell Atlantic, the heart of communication.

https://youtu.be/g5uZ3kGv2dw?s...

This thread escalated quickly.