somewhereoutth

Ah indeed - actually 2 years ago. I believe 21.2 (Victoria) was released in 2023:

https://tuxcare.com/blog/is-linux-mint-based-on-ubuntu/

Doesn't time fly!

Ah I think what is happening is that a brand new laptop may not have had its drivers added to the latest download/image version of your chosen distro. Hence the need to connect and update to get those drivers.

For me, it was a ThinkPad X1 Gen 11 and Mint 21.2 (MATE) about a year ago.

Wifi never seems to work 'out the box', so be ready to connect to the internet using ethernet to download the latest drivers and thus get wifi to work.

Interestingly, in the Lambda Calculus, where everything is a function, a standard representation for a natural number n (i.e. a whole number >= 0), is indeed a function that 'iterates' (strictly, folds/recurses) n times.

E.g. 3:

(f, x) => f(f(f(x)))

My understanding is that the 'extra thing' is control flow - blocks can force a return in their calling scope. For example a loop that calls a block may be terminated/skipped by a break/continue statement in the block itself. However I'm not a Ruby programmer, so please check my working.

> the claims that it's not useful

There are many credible claims that not only is it not useful, but that it is actually causing serious damage.

> The development of AI will clearly have society-changing effects, just as the arrival of the internet and mobile communication did.

Or, maybe the economics can't be made to pencil out, and AI is abandoned (again).

> The impossibility lies in knowing the speed of adoption, and which lumps of capital will earn extraordinary returns and which will end up getting torched.

Almost certainly all of it will end up getting torched.

I've often idly conjectured that a 'perfect virus' would quietly replicate, and then occasionally flip a one or zero here and there. The damage would be imperceptible to begin with, but then eventually critical 'ones and zeros' would be affected, and it would be too late to try to figure out what systems were clean.

Never in my wildest imaginings did I come up with something as diabolical as LLM generated code.

If I understand correctly, the cost of training each next model is the biggest cost - and much of why so much capex has been required. I have also seen it stated that e.g. OpenAI could be profitable right now if they stopped spending on the next model (not sure I'm convinced of that though).

Given that a half (or 80% or whatever) trained model is worthless, there is a threshold for each new model cycle to continue. As soon as the anticipated ROI fails to justify that cost, new model production stops. Dead.

Old models will still be used, but will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful. This will be the end of AI.

(sorry, paraphrasing/developing my comment on an earlier thread)

My understanding is that the cost of training each next model is very very large, and a half trained model is worthless.

Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts.

My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop' will be a step function to zero.

Assuming you are living in a modern economy - including the US - around half of it is owned/run by the government, i.e. half of it is socialist (social ownership of the means of production)

One of the pressures causing migration is global warming screwing up agriculture, particularly in poorer regions.

> Give an LLM a Jira ticket and a codebase and it can push a PR

Not really though can it, unless that codebase and Jira happens to pattern match correctly somewhere.

I'd say that the difference is just that LLMs have a natural language interface (for good or for ill).

But we didn't do this with spreadsheets or word processors - and those tools really did replace small armies of clerical and secretarial workers.

> developer somewhere between junior and mid-level

Why the insistence on anthropomorphizing what is just a tool? It has no agency, does not 'think' in any meaningful manner, it is just pattern matching on a vast corpus of training data. That's not to say it can't be very useful - as you seem to have found - but it is still just a tool.

The highest body of the EU is the Council. Nothing happens without the approval of the Council. In comparison, the Commission is merely the civil service or secretariat, answering to the Council.

Each member state has a seat at the Council, and for almost all issues a veto. Each member state is democratic, therefore the EU itself is entirely democratic. That doesn't of course mean the right decisions are always made!

One extra 'thing' to need - at the moment I know that I can play music through anything that has a line-in, with just a cable. However Bluetooth seems to work ok - for devices that support it.

In modern economies, banks create money by originating loans. The government controls this process with various policy levers.

Samsung Galaxy A40 checking in.

It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.

I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.

The EU Council is the highest body in the EU (not the Parliament, especially not the Commission - who are basically the civil service or secretariat for the EU).

The EU is founded on the pooled sovereignty of the member states (unlike in the US, where the reverse is the case). The Council represents those member states (each has a seat), and so holds this pooled sovereignty.

Completely not true and in fact dangerously (willfully?) misleading.

Housing is much more complicated than supply and demand - for a start houses are not fungible. Local conditions are extremely important.

A lot of high house prices is due to financial engineering - for example long mortgage periods at low interest rates. Just one of many mechanisms to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. Any momentary affordability benefit is soaked up by higher prices, and those mortgages have to be paid off for longer with much higher total payments.

High house prices are also caused by demand elasticity - things like AirBnB, 2nd, 3rd, 4th homes for the super rich, and housing as a place to park funny money (regardless of whether the house is actually being used to home people) mean that normal people can't compete with this non-home demand.

We could go on.

> you build a world model

The foundational conceit (if you will) of LLMs is that they build a semantic (world) model to 'make sense' of their training. However it is much more likely that they are simply building a syntactic model in response to the training. As far as I know there is no evidence of a semantic model emerging.

In the UK we have, not an 'owning a property tax', but instead a 'living in a property tax' (Council Tax). At one point there was an attempt to impose a 'living/breathing tax' (Poll Tax) but even we couldn't stomach that, and rioted until it was got rid of.

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?” Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

> genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy

Having spent some time in the US, my theory is that things have got so complicated over there (or more precisely nobody is incentivized to make them simple), that it has fried people's minds. They just respond to the last stimulus, having given up trying to make sense of anything, as they attempt to get through each day as best they can.

Healthcare is the obvious example, but I'd say that that is representative of most things in the US, in terms of being a minefield where one foot wrong can wreck your life.

Yes, programming is basically crack for creative people.

The deeper issue this site highlights, is that failure modes for these kinds of complex automations (and LLMs are automations, not intelligence) are not only non-linear, non-local - but unbounded and 'super-causal' (I'm trying to reach for some proper terminology to say that output y may have no relation at all to input x).

But this signalling (and connections) may be more complex than connected/unconnected and on/off, such that we cannot completely describe them [digitally/using a countable state space] as we would with silicon.

Our silicon machines exist in a countable state space (you can easily assign a unique natural number to any state for a given machine). However, 'standard biological mechanisms' exist in an uncountable state space - you need real numbers to properly describe them. Cantor showed that the uncountable is infinitely more infinite (pardon the word tangle) than the countable. I posit that the 'special sauce' for sentience/intelligence/sapience exists beyond the countable, and so is unreachable with our silicon machines as currently envisaged.

I call this the 'Cardinality Barrier'

As ever, it is the cover-up that is the real scandal.