chordalkeyboard

I was issued a Brother by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and it burned through ink cartridges, I took a semester off and the ones in the printer went bad without me printing anything; when the yellow ink ran out it refused to print in black and white even though I had plenty of black ink. Eventually it stopped working because of something to do with the drivers even though I never changed anything.

I'm glad your experience, and the experiences of others here, seem to be better but I can't help but reflect on the variance every time I read an HN poster relating about their positive Brother experience since my own experience was so different.

> But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards.

I think we should arrange our society to favor humans and program computers in such a way to accommodate humans rather than the other way around.

> The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done

Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).

> and render some folks unemployable

If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Scrubbing Bubbles contains microplastic abrasives.

Yes to 1. and 2.

I'm not sure because I've never read anything about cartoon characters in this context but it probably has to do with whether the person recognizes that the cartoon character is an animated drawing or a person.

"process" includes storing/referencing memories etc.

>> Our brains treat on-screen faces the same as in-person faces, explains Bradley Bond. He is a communication researcher at the University of San Diego in California. “We assign personhood to people we see in-person and on screens,” he explains. And we “process them in a similar fashion.” We are a social species. So we crave connections to other people. “It’s human instinct,” he says, and parasocial bonds help fill that need.

https://www.snexplores.org/article/imagine-friends-parasocia...

The ape brain doesn't have a separate category for 'people you see on TV' and 'people you work with', celebrities are stored in the same place as your friends except the nature of parasocial relations seems to polarize their status; such that these people are seen as very high or very low status.

> Housing is an asset not inflation.

Inflation causes asset prices to rise.

> If inflation was running hot persistently at like 6% then long term interest rates would be higher

This is not true.

> housing prices would fall in nominal terms compared to wages

I suggest you reconsider your assertion that 6% inflation would result in lower housing prices.

> The low-inflation, low-interest rate environment has produced high asset valuations due to the cheapness of borrowing money.

The high asset valuations as a result of low interest rates is textbook monetary inflation.

> There is an important distinction on the spectrum between consumable things bought with wages and investments bought with borrowed money, and the rise in prices in those categories are different.

The prices in both those categories are affected by dilution of value as a consequence of monetary expansion and that increase in prices has a name, 'inflation'.

> If you want to play the semantic game that all rises in any prices are inflation there is a real distinction that you're missing -- in which case we should talk about asset inflation vs. price inflation vs. wage inflation as being different inflations and stop talking about it like its the same thing (which economists would tell you it isn't by arguing that you're talking about assets and not inflation, but now we've just gone in a circle talking past each other because of definitions).

The point of semantics is to enable us to communicate by having mutually understood meanings for the words we use. If you want to talk about price increases that are not a result of monetary factors, then you can just talk about the price of things going up without misappropriating the word 'inflation' and making it seem like you don't understand what the word even means.

> 85% of phone users choose Android.

Indeed, seems they are not "happy" to buy Apple.

> There is an alternative

I mentioned this twice, it is also notoriously inadequate and user-hostile as well. Do you have anything to add to the discussion?

> So if Apple products are “user hostile” then why are enough users happily spending twice as much on iPhones and more on Macs

They aren't all "happy" about it, but as I mentioned in the post you replied to, there is not a decent alternative.

> Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.

Certainly not but one would have to be interested in the fact of the matter to realize it.

I think it is reasonable to assert both that distraction has been a problem for hundreds of years and that it is considerably worse now than it had been.

> That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…

Apple products are popular among consumers and developers in spite of their many user-hostile decisions precisely because there are few alternatives, all of which have substantial disadvantages as well.

In the Marine Corps, honorably separated Marines are entitled to use their rank as a courtesy title in civilian life. Wearing jewelry to celebrate and pay homage to one's service is hardly influencing the public.

I'm not aware of a military tradition against retirees wearing jewelry that is a throwback to their service, quite the contrary in fact.

I would infer that it is likely that there is a connection.

> Flesh and understanding are separate concepts. The experience of being human is a separate concepts from understanding.

The experience of being human is what allows me to infer meaning from the words, phrases, sentences, etc. that a human generates. This is what allows me to make the leap from text to understanding (or lack, or incomplete understanding, or confusion, or deception) with human-generated responses. This is what I have in that case of humans, which allows me to interpret their statements one way; and what I lack with machines, which means I have no basis for inferring understanding the same way I do with a human. If I was not human, I would not be able to infer meaning from the noises a human makes, except by observing correlations between those noises and their behavior. This is well understood in cognitive science and animal behavior.

> To understand something means that one can create novel answers to questions about something. Those answers however must make sense with the rules that govern the "something" at hand. This answer must also not be "memorized" in some sort of giant query-response lookup table.

chatGPT is functionally equivalent to a lookup table with randomization.

> For example if I ask chatGPT to emulate a bash terminal and create a new directory it can do so indicating it understands how a filesystem works. That is understanding.

It replies with a text output that is a probabilistic representation of the text that one might find on the internet in response to such a query. The emulation occurs in your mind when you read the response and assign meaning to the words and phrases it contains.

> However understanding things is an aspect of being human and chatGPT captures a part of that aspect.

You have not shown that chatGPT is anything different than a fancy lookup table with some randomization.

'conspiracy' is a loaded way to refer to http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> This is what the human brain does.

The human brain is embodied in a human flesh and uses language to exchange models and data about the real world with other fleshy vessels. This provides a basis to assign meaning to the language. Furthermore we know that humans understand to a greater or lesser extent because we are human and have insight into the human experience of language and reality.

These machine learning algorithms lack this fundamental basis for ascribing meaning to the symbolic tokens they deal with. Furthermore we lack the common experience for inferring meaning and understanding, we have to interpret from the output whether there is meaning and understanding on the machine's end. Without access to internal experience we must always harbor some doubt but given some level of nonsensical outputs we can say with confidence that there is no indication of understanding.

> A human can be inconsistent and even lie. It does not mean the human does not understand you. Thus because your logic is applicable to humans it is akin to saying humans don't understand you. That is why your logic is incorrect.

Like everyone else, I interpret statements from humans differently than statements from machines. This is because I know that humans and machines are different, and therefore the meaning assigned to the symbols involved is also different.

> No. You're wrong. chatGPT only knows of text. It derives incomplete understanding of the world via text.

It doesn't understand anything. It combines symbols according to a probabilistic algorithm and you assign meaning to it.

> Why are you so stuck on this stupid concept?

Because you keep replying with statements indicating you are yet to grasp it.

> This is a bad analogy. I'm not claiming sentience. My claim is that it understands you.

There is just as much evidence for sentience as understanding.

> But it doesn't prove that the machine does not understand everything period. It just doesn't understand the topic or query at hand. It does no say anything about whether the machine can UNDERSTAND other things.

No, the type of errors are indicative of a complete lack of understanding. That is the point. They are errors that a thinker with an incomplete understanding would never make. They are so garbled that not even a true believer such as yourself can find a way to shoehorn a possible interpretation of correctness into them; such that you are forced to admit that the machine is in error. Otherwise you and the other believers find an interpretation that fits and you conclude that the machine understands; revealing you yourself do not understand what 'understanding' really is.

> This is easily done. The possibility is eliminated through the sheer number of possible compositions of assembled words. It assembled the words in a certain way that by probability can only indicate understanding.

Thats nonsense. The machine assembles words in roughly the same probability that they occur in the training material. That is why it resembles sensible statements. The resemblance is superficial and exactly an artifact of this probability you find so compelling.

> By composing words in a novel way that can only be done through understanding of a complex concept.

You haven't eliminated the possibility of autopredict, merely ceased to consider it.

> Harry Potter is obviously not self aware.

There is more evidence for the sentience, self awareness, and understanding of concepts of Harry Potter than of chatGPT.

> The problem here is that yes the occasional errors demonstrate certain flaws in it's understanding of some topic.

No, they demonstrate that the machine does not understand.

> The issue is there are many times where it produces completely novel and creative output that could not have existed in the training data and can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given.

What have you done to eliminate the possibility that it assembled the words algorithmically and the solution generated is something the reader constructed by assigning meaning to the text response? If the answer "can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given" then you must have eliminated this possibility.

> Understanding of the world around us is not developed through the lens of a singular model or a singular piece of understanding. We build multiple models of the world and we have varying levels of understanding of each model. It is the same with chatGPT. The remarkable thing about chatGPT understands a huge portion of these models really really well.

Where is the evidence that chatGPT understands a thing?

> There's literally no way it could do the above without understanding what you asked it to do. Read to the end. The end demonstrates awareness of self, relative to the context and task it was asked to perform.

Thats an interpretation of the text output that you assigned based on what the words in the text mean to you. I could just as easily say that Harry Potter is self-aware.

> Yet people illogically claim that for some other topic because chatGPT failed to correctly model the topic it therefore MUST be flawed in ALL of it's understanding of the world. This claim is not logical.

I don't think you understand what we're discussing.

> The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism. It is not that chatGPT is unreliable because chatGPT makes occasional errors. It is that chatGPT is not intelligent because the type of errors chatGPT makes are indicative of the fact that it is assembling text into forms that humans assign meaning to, and has no understanding of the relationship between the symbols and their referents, and therefore is not 'intelligent' qua intelligence.

> It seems obvious to me that if you never intend to sell a bond, the maturity value is a measure of interest.

The reason this matters is because in the case of a bank who needs the funds to operate then they very much might need to sell the bonds, or revalue them at NPV because of statutory requirements.

This entire discussion is because the NPV of HTM assets is now relevant.

> Initial time for real dollar caluculation can be anything. You can ask what your real dollar salary is relative to 1950, or relative to 1951, or yesterday.

Regardless of which day's dollars we use as a baseline for comparison, a bond issued under at a lower interest rate is discounted relative to the same bond issued later at a higher interest rate. Quibbling about how we express this valuation suggests you don't understand this difference, but this difference is important to understanding the current day banking crisis.

> While I meant to write real dollars, I wish I wrote nominal, based on how much confusion it caused.

You still seem unaware that these meanings and words are a very well understood convention that you violated. The only confusion was the confusion you had in the meanings you assigned to the words.

> I still stand by the idea that it is silly, and not very useful to put a future return on investment on an asset list in to 2023 dollars using a 10 year inflation projection.

The main thing is that these valuation rules exist for reasons and while we could debate which rules are good etc., understanding the basics of bond valuation and the common terminology we use to discuss them is a minimum prerequisite and I'm still working on getting you on board with the basic terminology every one else is using.

There isn't much discussion to be had without a common vocabulary.

As Schumpeter predicted, the complexity of our economy is has outstripped our language and consequently our ability to understand it.

> What will the real value of a $1 bond be on your balance sheet the day it matures? exactly $1

The real value in future-date dollars will be $1. In present-day dollars it is likely to be less, the ability to refer to which distinction is the purpose of the formal difference between nominal and real value.

> In real terms, you will get back exactly a hundred million. In the npv at that date will be exactly 100 million.

you wrote 'real terms' when you meant 'nominal terms.'

> $1 after inflation is still $1. It is just that the value of $1 is now different.

That is why we distinguish between 'real value' and 'nominal value.'

> I think the difference is effectively negligible.

The difference is categorical, humans are responsible whether they are held to account or not. An automated system effectively dissipates this responsibility over a system such that it is inherently impossible to hold any human accountable for the error, regardless of desire.