Delk

> Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe

My company's policy is that retired laptops are destroyed. (I suppose properly wiping them or removing storage devices should be enough but for some reason it's not considered sufficient.)

There are indeed lots of second-hand former company laptops being sold, and some companies even specialize in refurbishing and selling them. I don't know what percentage ends up being recycled but it's definitely not 100 %. I'd assume the more security-oriented the organization gets, the more likely it might be to avoid recycling devices intact.

With that said, I haven't seen two-year-old high-end devices getting retired. But if there are only a few of them, and a large fleet is being renewed, I suppose it can make sense from a fleet management point of view to renew the few perfectly current ones as well.

> In the last decade, keeping my OS on a different volume from my data in `/home` has saved my work at least 5-10 times.

Mine is of course just another anecdote, but despite seeing some crashes or hangs over the years, I can't remember the last time I've even had to manually fsck my ext4 filesystems, and I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen any unrecoverable corruption on ext4 or ext3. (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, as it certainly can, but I wouldn't think it's that common unless you're operating on a fairly large scale. And before journaling filesystems, crashes were of course a whole different deal.)

I used to keep /home separate on my personal devices (and maybe some other partitions as well because it was "a good practice"), but for more than a decade now my personal devices have had everything on a single large root fs, save for /boot and swap.

I've stuck with rather conservative fs choices and haven't used btrfs much, so I don't know if the story is different there.

What you gain with a single large root partition is of course that you don't need to know in advance how much software you'll want to install under /usr or how much space you'll need for /home or /var.

Multiple partitions can certainly be a good idea from a system management point of view, for cases where people either want to actively manage the system, or when their needs are demanding enough that it's warranted. If I were deploying a server for any kind of real use, yeah, the database or the server logs would certainly not be on the root volume.

But in case of desktops or laptops, most people, even engineers, don't really want to be meticulously managing their personal computers. Nor are most people's personal computing needs that demanding. The convenience of not running out of space on a single partition because you guessed the your future needs wrong wins over.

> Swap on a different physical drive is faster.

> Spread the load across multiple media for performance. That is how server OSes do it, because it is faster.

Of course it is, but in contrast, laptops don't really tend to have separate physical drives on which to put swap. I doubt most people would care enough about swap performance to install a separate high-performance drive for it even in desktops.

With that said, I also do keep a swap partition even on personal computers, and hibernation can be useful. (I think there are some issues with hibernation and encrypted swap in Linux, though, so I haven't bothered with it in a while).

I think the first release of Windows 95 did include TCP/IP networking support. I remember using it. But I think it wasn't installed by default, so you had to go and install it separately via the control panel.

I remember at least Civilization II, Descent II, Settlers II, Outcast, and I think some rallying game I had as using Redbook audio. The industrial soundtrack of Descent II was actually pretty good.

The interwebs also mention G-Police, which I remember playing, but I have no recollection about the soundtrack.

The sandboxed application would be something you explicitly chose to run. When the browser is the platform, every web page you visit has access to the general-purpose runtime. (Of course permission checks e.g. for microphones exist.)

It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD.

I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well.

I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.

That has been the trend for decades in lots of other developed countries as well. It doesn't have to be in any way because of increased means of surveillance.

> There is no objective evidence of qualia.

You can argue there's no objective evidence for qualia in others than oneself, but I'm sure you know you have subjective experience just as I know I do.

> All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics.

I don't claim that ANNs or other computational models are fundamentally different from brains in computational capacity (although AFAIK biological neurons are a lot more complex than those in ANNs, so drawing a parallel just because both are "neural networks" would be erroneous as well.) I'm claiming that language alone cannot represent qualia, so an ANN trained on the level of language alone cannot have subjective experience.

> This assumes a lot.

Perhaps, but so does the idea that "intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories", including the rather elusive concept of intelligence itself. And that today's AI models could possess intelligence in whatever form that sentence requires.

If forming natural categories alone were enough for sentience, clustering algorithms could be sentient.

It has traditionally been assumed that only humans are sentient. Present understanding leans more and more towards many animals having some kind of sentience as well. Some of them are probably even self-aware. Language in animals is a lot more controversial, though.

Nobody knows how (or even why) sentience emerges. But since it seems to exist in other animals as well, including those that probably don't have language or abstract concepts, it would seem to be a product of something else than language. It might even be some kind of a spectrum, with different animals having different levels of sentience and, ultimately, even awareness.

Sure, but those internal states could then exist for just about any program, or at the very least for any ANN. Nobody in their right minds would have suggested that those might have been aware before the rise of generative models.

When people get the idea that a LLM (or some other generative model) might be aware, surely that impression is because of human-like output. I don't think there's any objective basis for that thinking.

I just don't think linguistic (or other symbolic) representations alone can contain the information, in any sense of the word, of what e.g. human subjective experiences actually are like. The concepts we express with language get their meaning from our physical reality, even if quite indirectly in case of some abstract concepts.

Hunger as a concept doesn't mean anything without the physical need. Politeness or bluntness, even in writing, don't mean anything without social dynamics. And we have social dynamics (and neural structures that directly process social cues and associated feelings) because we've evolved into social animals for whose survival that was important.

I see no reason to believe that a model trained only with symbolic representations, with no connection to the physical world phenomena that those symbols represent, could contain the subjective experience itself.

Neural network models may be able to derive novel (or at least novel-looking) output rather than just an obvious rehash of their input, but I don't think any set of bytes can fundamentally contain information that was never entered into it. (Even if e.g. a model produces previously unknown mathematical results, those results can in principle be derived from the information that they were trained with.)

I'm not saying that artificial neural networks couldn't, in principle, be aware. ANNs and biological neural nets may be equivalent in the sense that any information and processing structures represented by a biological one could in principle be represented by an artificial one. If that's the case, and awareness is purely a product of our neural systems as materialism would imply, it should be possible for an ANN to be aware, too.

But when the model has been trained with only language, and IMO the subjective experience can't be derived from the symbolic representation alone, I can't see how the model could include the actual subjective human experience.

An AI model could of course have an awareness and subjective experiences that are totally different than our human experience. But then the fact that it happens to produce output resembling what humans find meaningful shouldn't be considered indicative of such awareness.

This is of course more of a philosophical argument than a technical one, and I'm happy to hear counterarguments, but not on the level of off-hand dismissal.

I wasn't trying to give a model. The point was that I don't think it's necessary to give one.

You didn't address any of what I wrote, let alone provide any counterarguments. Which part of what I wrote do you think was wrong?

I honestly don't think a language model is enough for self-awareness, regardless of the exact model of awareness.

A language model (or an image model or whatever) cannot even be sentient, and I think sentience is a prerequisite for awareness.

Even if we express a lot of our subjective experience with words, the language is just a symbolic representation of those experiences. The qualia themselves, even those that are quite abstract, are rooted in our physical presence and evolution.

You can't have an understanding of what hunger or physical pain feel like if you have no need for food or a sensory capacity for feeling pain. You can't understand what loneliness or pride at an achievement mean if you don't have a neural network wired to value social connection or status. We value connection because we're social animals that have needed each other for survival.

Even the more abstract of our subjective experiences are in some way rooted in our physical evolution.

I see no reason to believe that a neural network built entirely based on the symbolic level of language could have the features needed for the subjective experience itself.

AI awareness might actually be more believable if that awareness manifested itself in an entirely different way than in humans. But if we assume awareness because outputs resemble what we consider meaningful as humans, yet the neural network has had no inputs or evolution that could form the actual basis of human-like experience, I think we're seeing something that isn't actually there.

16 GiB was good 11 years ago but laptops were also sold around that time that maxed out at 8 GiB due to limited slots or soldered memory. And lots of laptops are still being sold today with 16 GiB of memory soldered in, with no upgrade possible.

(Some are still being sold with only 8 GiB, too, but I think those may be becoming outliers, or purposefully intended for only light use such as the MacBook Neo.)

Of course it also depends on what you use the computer for. For browsing and streaming 16 GiB is absolutely fine. For other uses 16 GiB can easily become constrained, though, even for tasks that a laptop can otherwise handle fine. And if the RAM in a recent laptop is non-upgradable, will it still be good 5 or 10 years from now?

Police do need authority and respect in order to do their jobs, of course. But at the same time their position of power and their role as maintainers of public peace mean they should have a thicker skin rather than thinner. They should be able to keep their professionalism and composure in the face of adversity better than the average person, and someone being verbally disrespectful towards them is at the lower end of that.

Police officers who think their pride needs to be put first in the name of authority may be common around the world but that doesn't mean reactive cops are a good thing.

> a tiny minority of people care about [...] You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)

The complexity and realism of some particular regulation aside, I honestly don't understand dismissing other people's opinions on the grounds that not a lot of people care about them. Should people not have an opinion because lots of other people don't share it? Or should those opinions just not be expressed?

Everybody's got their own personal interests and values. It's natural to express and even vouch for them. If they aren't shared by enough other people, they probably won't make it to the top in a democracy. That's how it works and it's fine. But I don't get the idea that someone shouldn't express an opinion about X because lots of other people don't care about X.

> I experience some habituation actually.

I suppose it can be quite different for different people. I stopped using it because it often (not always) made me still feel tired and unfocused in the morning, something that apparently also doesn't happen to everyone.

> But my actual doctor went like "wtf is this?"

Different country, but where I live, prescribing low-dose mirtazapine for insomnia appears to be fairly common practice even though it's off-label. I've had it suggested or mentioned by three or four different doctors, including GPs. I also know several other people who have been prescribed it.

The doctors here seem to prefer low-dose mirtazapine as safer over typical CNS depressants such as benzodiazepines for insomnia nowadays, at least if the problem may be longer-term.

So it's not really something particularly weird. Of course different countries also have different medical cultures so I guess it's not surprising if it's not that common in other places.

AFAIK mirtazapine shouldn't cause habituation the way actual "sleeping pills" or benzodiazepines do. That's one of the reasons it may be preferable as a sleeping aid, especially in the longer term.

Anecdotally, when I took mirtazapine for sleeping problems, it did sometimes seem to have a stronger effect the first time I took it after not using it for a while. After that the effect stayed stable. Overall it shouldn't cause habituation, and my doctor said as much.

Of course trust your doctor and not strangers on the internet, though.

Shortcuts, mostly.

The shortcut for toggling fullscreen in Firefox is F11.

Many default shortcuts in JetBrains IDEs also use function keys. The keymap can be changed, of course, so you can design your own keymap to avoid F keys, but that's still a bit of a chore.

Maybe it's the advice that's usually right.

I'm not asking for LLM tools to be similar to compilers, or saying that they can't be useful if they aren't. I know rather well that the two are different, and that's the point.

Because LLMs aren't deterministic in terms of producing semantically correct output, that just means they aren't similar to compilers. That means you probably can't just start blindly trusting that their output matches the input and thus ignore understanding the code, as most people mostly can with compilers.

I think that's what people mean with "determinism" when they compare LLMs to compilers, or in response to other people suggesting LLMs are no different than compilers.

> From what I've seen in these HN discussions, most people are using "determinism" when they really mean "prompt sensitivity", i.e. minor variations in framing leading to different results. This, in turn, confuses people who do understand what determinism is supposed to mean and where it's necessary (build reproducibility for example).

For lack of a better word, I'd also have used "determinism". But to borrow a bit from TFA, what I'd really mean by that would some kind of "semantic determinism": for any input source code in a well-defined language, a correctly working compiler will always produce output that's semantically correct for the input.

Let's say a compiler implementation internally does something random or nondeterministic but that the nondeterminism does not affect the semantics of the output. You could argue that the compiler is technically nondeterministic, but in terms of program semantics it would still be deterministic.

I assume that's what people mean when they say compilers are deterministic in comparison to LLMs.

So in some sense the post is correct, but I think the author is somewhat pedantically misinterpreting the way people use the word "nondeterminism".

IMO prompt sensitivity is something different. A prompt does not unambiguously describe full program semantics in the first place, and the neural network would not contain an explicit mechanism for producing semantically matching output even if it did. Prompt sensitivity comes on top of that but isn't the core matter.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, a verbose and elaborate writing style is also traditionally more common in humanities whereas scientific or technical writing favours a rather more terse and matter-of-fact style.

I don't know about the structures you mention specifically but if you compare an article on humanities or social matters against the style that's common in science and technical writing, chances are it's going to look more verbose in any case.

I don't necessarily have the best AI-dar but TFA didn't ring any LLM bells to me.

Sounds like the short answer is "because there was no standard for the variable set by MS-DOS from the get go".

The background is that the issue hadn't existed in CP/M because there hadn't been environment variables. Perhaps if the issue had already been seen in CP/M, the developers of MS-DOS might have defined a standard variable to avoid it. Maybe. Other than that it doesn't seem to have much to do with CP/M specifically.

I think #2 is actually circular, or perhaps rather contradictory. In order to be able to have an illusion one would have to be conscious in the first place. Or how would you have an illusion of something if you're not aware enough to experience that illusion? So I don't think the concept of "illusion of consciousness" makes much sense. (It does make sense for others to have an illusion that an AI or some other entity is conscious, but not for the entity itself.)

> Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.

Perhaps, but I think a physical presence is still required for consciousness, at least for any kind of consciousness that resembles ours.

It's perhaps easier to talk about qualia rather than consciousness, but I think qualia are a prerequisite for consciousness anyway.

Basically all of our qualia are somehow related to our needs in the physical world. We feel physical pain because it signals that our body is in danger of being damaged. We feel emotional pain from social rejection because for most of our history humans have needed other people for physical survival. (Or in some cases perhaps because our genes make us want to procreate and we failed at that.) Either way, our needs in the physical world are not being met. Evolution has produced genetic code that produces a brain that somehow makes us feel that subjectively, even if nobody knows how.

Those subjective experiences of course get processed by neurons, assuming you accept materialism. (Neurons are AFAIK significantly more complex than the "neurons" in ANNs, so equating biological neuronal activity with ANNs is wrong. But I suppose in principle any physical process may be represented or at least approximated by some symbolic representation, so in theory that probably doesn't matter.)

We can also express those subjective qualia in terms of language. However, I don't think it's possible to have our qualia (or consciousness) based on language or symbolic manipulation alone if it doesn't have some kind of a connection to our physical needs.

If you could directly simulate an entire human brain and feed it artificial sensory input, I suppose it would actually be conscious without having a physical body. In principle an AI could also evolve consciousness based on survival needs even if it were not biological.

But for example LLMs have been trained only on the symbolic level. Their "neural" structure is not simulating a brain and they don't have a connection to physical needs. I think that makes them incapable of consciousness even if the output they produce successfully mimics human language -- that is, symbolic representations of our qualia and conscious thought.

I'm not sure if that's the point the author is making. But I think the distinction between the purely symbolic "map" and the "actual thing" sort of makes sense.

You could do all of those things on an OS with proper security separation as long as you have full root access.

There's no megacorp stopping you from reading and writing kernel memory. Unless, of course, the computer refuses to run software not signed by the megacorp or some software refuses to run without a digitally signed chain all the way down to the firmware like some game anticheats do.

But that's not really because of things like permission boundaries for processes. You can have those and still be in full control of those boundaries. It may be more convoluted than in a barebones system like DOS, of course.

> I’m still at where when I connect external hard drive or SSD via USB, use it and then eject it, I shut down the MacBook Pro completely before I unplug the cable. Just in case.

That sounds... a bit paranoid? At least on Linux (Gnome), if I click to "safely remove drive" it actually powers off the drive and stops external mechanical drives from spinning. No useful syncing is going to happen anyway once a hard drive no longer spins. A modern OS should definitely be reliable enough that it can be trusted to properly unmount a drive.

> For the laptops that I actually carry around and plug and unplug things to etc, normal amount of time between reboots for me is somewhere between every 1 and 3 days. Cold boot is plenty fast anyway, so shutting it down after a day of work or when ejecting an external HDD or SSD doesn’t really cost me any noticeable amount of time.

I personally don't reboot my laptop that often, but it's not because of a boot taking too much time. It's because I like to keep state: open applications, open files, terminal emulator sessions, windows on particular virtual desktops, etc.

A lot of that probably came down to the motherboard chipset. IIRC Intel made their own chipsets for the Pentium III and they were good and reliable. Athlons were coupled with chipsets from VIA and whatnot.

Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.

I almost never get Firefox crashes on Linux, and I don't remember seeing significant slowdowns with text boxes either, at least not simple ones.

How long are the inputs that you get problems with?

If running low on memory seems to matter less now than it did a couple of decades ago, I'd rather say that's because fast SSDs make swapping a lot faster. Even though virtual memory and swapping were available even on PCs since Windows 3.x or so, running out of memory could still make multitasking slow as molasses due to thrashing and the lack of memory for disk cache. The performance hit from swapping can be a lot less noticeable now.

Of course compression being now computationally cheap also helps.

What do you do to address health concerns before they become ER-level?