Russ

Your son and daughter will continue to learn new things as they grow up, a LLM cannot learn new things on its own. Sure, they can repeat things back to you that are within the context window (and even then, a context window isn’t really inherent to a LLM - its just a window of prior information being fed back to them with each request/response, or “turn” as I believe is the term) and what is in the context window can even influence their responses. But in order for a LLM to “learn” something, it needs to be retrained with that information included in the dataset.

Whereas if your kids were to say, touch a sharp object that caused them even slight discomfort, they would eventually learn to stop doing that because they’ll know what the outcome is after repetition. You could argue that this looks similar to the training process of a LLM, but the difference is that a LLM cannot do this on its own (and I would not consider wiring up a LLM via an MCP to a script that can trigger a re-train + reload to be it doing it on its own volition). At least, not in our current day. If anything, I think this is more of a “smoking gun” than the argument of “LLMs are just guessing the next best letter/word in a given sequence”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who completely hates LLMs / “modern day AI” (though I do hate a lot of the ways it is used, and agree with a lot of the moral problems behind it), I find the tech to be intriguing but it’s a (“very fancy”) simulation. It is designed to imitate sentience and other human-like behavior. That, along with human nature’s tendency to anthropomorphize things around us (which is really the biggest part of this IMO), is why it tends to be very convincing at times.

That is my take on it, at least. I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist or philosopher.

I mean, sure - but if you really don’t trust Apple to keep their word, then it wouldn’t matter if their Health app was FOSS or not. iOS itself is still (and probably forever will be) a closed source operating system. That gives them the power to do anything, including hijack the data from FOSS apps.

I have zero interest in Recall, but I thought it was already done on-device? IIRC it always was that way, which is why it’s only available on new computers containing dedicated “neural coprocessors” I believe was the term.

Now given that it’s closed source, you have to trust that they aren’t silently sending data back to themselves - which is where my problem lies, I don’t trust them in the slightest.

Jesus christ, that is absolutely disgusting. Texas has plenty of issues they should actually be working on.

I’m glad I managed to get out of there years ago.

How is that the case? I’ve got pretty much zero experience with decompiling software, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone who does say that before. I genuinely can’t imagine that it’s easier to work with say, decompiling a game to make changes to it rather than just having the source available for it.

I suppose unless the context is just regarding running software then of course it’s easier to just run a binary that’s already a binary - but then I’m not sure I see where decompiling comes into relevance.

This can sometimes come at the cost of intuitiveness however. As an example that just happened to me the other day, I was using Pinta which uses libadwaita and had opened an image to make some modifications to it.

All was going well until I wanted to save a new copy of it (and not override the original). The toolbar has all of these functions on it, open, save, undo/redo, etc… but not Save As.

Apparently there’s a tiny little overflow button on the far right side, click it and you get a whole bunch of functions - one of them being the holy “Save As” option I was looking for. I almost went down the route of making a copy of the image outside Pinta and then just overwriting the original.

Apparently the idea of making a copy of an image is blasphemy. Even Microsoft Word when they had first moved to the Ribbon UI made the save button have a little dropdown right under the save option to reveal Save As.

Don’t get me wrong, I love how some libadwaita apps look. Mission Center for example? Chef’s Kiss - but it’s a very simple application that all I need to do is open it to have a quick look at the very pretty looking graphs. Although the latest update seems to have gotten rid of being able to have the sidebar open persistently (now taking an extra click to change between performance graphs)… But I still need to double check to see if that’s intended vs being a bug before I judge that too harshly.

If you hit Ctrl Alt Delete very quickly in succession (I believe it’s 7 times in a row) it will bail out from a stop job and proceed with shutting down

Learned that trick because I was so tired of seeing that occur ha. Along that research I swear I recall seeing that it’s a KDE/SDDM issue but I might be getting some wires crossed on that (and thus, don’t quote me/take my word on that 😅)