Same here, though I went to Linux first for several years. WSL file speeds, especially when running npm install, were the impetus that ultimately got me to switch off of Windows.
Either you run npm install from Windows if you are operating on the Windows file system or you run it on WSL if you are operating on the WSL file system both cases will be very fast
Well before Windows I spent years with both Linux and Mac and I found Windows to be a good mix of stability and suitability for development now that WSL is a thing. Also for gaming it's the best by a long shot so just all around I've found it to be best and WSL made me never miss Linux.
Unlikely due to the better and more stable NVIDIA drivers available to Windows and the greater compatibility with every game without having to mess around with configuration files or other hacks. But you do you.
Linux drivers are now first class and are faster and easier to install than any Windows drivers. There's no bullshit extras with them. They just work. Plus steam launches games in containers so there's zero configuration. If you don't know what you're talking about it is in fact better to say nothing than to just make shit up.
Here's a pre-configured Fedora based distro that is zero clicks. You sign into Steam and go. Drivers are preinstalled. You literally sign into steam and hit play.
> better and more stable NVIDIA drivers available to Windows
Huh? It's the same driver. It works the same on every platform. There's no consistent difference in performance (at least not between FreeBSD and Windows, it's been a while since I ran Linux).
Believe it or not, there's plenty of people that specifically choose windows, not just out of fear of getting fired or inertia. The idea that all devs use a mac and that windows is garbage for any kind of development is purely a silicon valley bubble thing.
And there's still a big niche that Windows is your only choice since the move to Apple silicon. If you need both a dGPU and access to commercial software, its literally your only choice. Game dev especially comes to mind if you're jumping between maya, after effects, etc. Windows is also huge in finance.
That could be easily fixed by providing the AI with a constant stream of input.
For humans, part of the input of the human mind comes from the continuous processes and clocks within the human body, so it’s questionable whether the brain could “think on its own” without such input either.
The continuous input for the human arises naturally, it doesn't arise naturally for an LLM unless we direct it so. Our consciousness is bootstrapped, the LLM isn't.
We have virtually no idea how consciousness arises in the human brain. Furthermore, what is “natural” supposed mean here, and why should it matter for consciousness whether some prerequisite arises naturally or not?
I was literally only responding to "Is that any different from an LLM having a context window" lol. Let's keep that in our context windows. I'm not interested in discussing how human consciousness is different from supposed LLM consciousness; it's enough for me to know that humans are conscious, and in an obvious, clearly distinct way, even if we can't define it. Sniffing our own farts about whether LLMs are or aren't is just that – nerds larping as philosophers while practicing fart sniffing. It's a machine, periodt, we can quit roleplaying.
I think you have grazed my stance on this topic in the sense of what separates LLMs from complete human (or any other biological life) sentience.
It's the constant sensory input of the world and the realization and drive to survive as the second order effect of it. Mortality, vulnerability to external factors codified as input could in fact allow the LLM to independ as sentience.
Of course besides the sensors, it would also need a way to affect the physical world, and to be able to monitor the degradation if its own hardware, but when that barrier is crossed, it would be much closer to full sentience than whatever we have right now (which is nowhere near sentience or AGI).
- A motor is something that create a force to push a vehicle.
- Oh yeah? My neighbour car does not have wheels and sit on concrete blocks, the vehicle does not move and yet we all agree it has a motor. So it means that I can claim that this other thing that does not move has a motor too.
Sure, human can _some times_ not do some stuffs, but the fact that they can do these stuffs sometimes is the point.
Doing these stuffs is the hard thing. Doing these stuffs is the proof that the machine has what it takes. It does not matter if someone cannot do that stuff, it does not imply that their internal system is not complex enough to potentially do it. But the fact that some people can do that stuff is the demonstration that inside a human skull, there is a system that is complex enough to potentially do it. Unless you can prove that people who don't do it have a fundamentally different system inside their skull, then you cannot pretend that they should be considered as having a less complex system.
Human _can_ check themselves. They don't _always_ check themselves.
Motor _can_ move vehicle. They don't _always_ move vehicle.
LLM _cannot_ check themselves. They _never_ can. It is not that some don't, they just cannot, they are not a system complex enough to do so.
So, yes, it is a refutation. If you have something that _never_ can move a vehicle, this thing does not qualify as a motor, even if some motor, sometimes, don't move a vehicle.
And if your next argument is "yeah but I would argue you don't need to check yourself to be conscious or to understand things", then you just redefine the definition that is owned by your interlocutor. Your interlocutor is saying that this is a criteria they are expecting. Good for you if you are not expecting this criteria. But the problem is that the answer is not "this criteria is not expected", the answer is "I change the criteria from 'being capable to in some circumstances' into 'does always do it in any circumstances'".
Yes, LLMs don't think on their own, for one; they think when you invoke them.
My rebuttal is that people only think when invoked just the same and can enter states where there is no consciousness just the same. The OP has already accepted that LLMs think, but it seems that you are arguing they do not? This car business is confusing and the LLMs not checking themselves is also wrong, there’s even a benchmark for this
https://correctbench.github.io/
What you said: I have example where, sometimes, human think when invoked.
That's the difference: human brains are intrinsically different because they are built to be able to think without being invoked, even if there are situations where they think when invoked.
There are tons of obvious examples of human thinking without being invoked. Just take a bath and you will see :)
To be clear: the person I was replying to asked if the way a human thinks was any different from an LLM with a context window. That's the context of my answer. An LLM is a machine, it can't do anything unless we invoke it or give it the instructions and capabilities to do so. It has no free will, it can't just decide to compose a symphony one day unless those are part of its instructions. It can't do anything unless we tell it to do so and give it the capabilities to do so, it doesn't even exist unless it's loaded into memory. That's obviously different from human consciousness, and that's the whole of the point that I'm making.
You can argue that humans are just biological machines reacting to external stimuli, but that's a philosophical argument that I'm not interested in having and frankly, I think it'd be selling yourself short a little bit.
> LLM _cannot_ check themselves. They _never_ can. It is not that some don't, they just cannot, they are not a system complex enough to do so.
All modern agentic harnesses can do this. Nobody uses raw LLM for anything remotely complex. There's always some external system in place. That system is part of the "thought process".
Adjacency doesn't matter here, only what the result of the system of pieces is.
It means having self-control on their action and being aware of them. If you ask a system, it will respond, it cannot choose to not respond (even if the response if "I don't want to response", it still "run", still do the work). If you don't ask a system, it will not respond.
Adjacency is the point of the thread here. Saying "you say X is important to decide if the thing is intelligent/understanding/conscious, so let me just change X in the middle of the discussion and say that X does not matter".
That is exactly my first comment in this thread: I don't care if AI think or whatever, my reaction was about these "counter-arguments" that totally miss the point and make the person who push them ridiculous. If you want to have a counter-argument, you first need to understand the interlocutor, not just spew whatever rebuttal you constructed that answer something unrelated to what the interlocutor brought to the conversation.
In my thought process, I quite literally stop myself, and say "ok, think about what you just said" to check myself. I literally initiate that loop. If I don't, then I'm not using my own mental agency, and just using my firm coded priors.
I will say that I do seem to have a stop, what you said is wrong logic check voice that pops up without me initiating it. But, it's unreliable, and not too much different than all the content monitoring system used for the streaming clients, that will terminate with "content violation" immediately after the "incorrect" words are sent. I don't think integration is important, just the behavior of the overall system.
There is no "loop" in the brain, it is all part of a same line of thought. This is visible because, while you can sometimes have a "two voices / dialectic" way of thinking, you can have the exact same thinking in one-go that does not look like a loop at all.
In fact, in the large majority of the time, you don't process "as a loop" at all, you just continuously progress in your reflection without needing a "second voice" to retrigger you. The fact that sometimes we do this is just something we can do, not the result of something needed for our brain to work. For AI systems, this is something needed because the "answering" part is not able to do the loop on its own. And building a bigger system that combine an "answering" part and a "loop" part does not fit this, does not create a self-reflective system, it just makes a non-self-reflective system and a workaround bundled together.
It's a bit like if the "answering" part was unable to provide only one answer and was always producing plenty of different possible answers, including contradictory ones. Then, you can add an external part that will just pick one answer (and add it to the context so the next large set of answer will not be inconsistent), without any intelligence to it. The whole system will look like a human. But we know that the system is not "living" and "aware", because a "living" or "aware" system has its own opinion, while this system is just generating convincing sentence without seeing any hierarchy or value or meaning in each one.
I would claim that, if you think without introspection (that loop), then there is virtually no self check. I'm not sure what "self check" you see that the brain has. Could you describe this "self check in a line of thought"? How do you perceive the check there? This is a genuine question. It definitely doesn't align with how I think about things. I ponder and talk to myself to iterate verify and test my understanding of my own thoughts.
Maybe a good analogy is "throwing a paper plane in real life" and "throwing a paper plane in a video game".
In real life, the paper moves "by itself". It does not need an external loop that update its position in a loop manner.
In the video game, you need an internal loop, a step-by-step tick, that update the plane position based on its current position and its momentum. And this is why a video game paper plane is not a real object. It is a very good simulation, it looks like it, but it is missing some intrinsic properties that we expect from a real object.
Yet you can analyse the paper plane trajectory and see it as a Markov chain, with quantified step-by-step progress (for example one position point every 0.1 second). The same way you can look at your though process and identify a step-by-step progression. But it does not mean that it works like that intrinsically, it does not mean that the paper plane "jumps" from position point at time T1 to position point at time T1+0.1 second.
For the human brain, there is no "loop centre" in the brain. There is no one (to my knowledge) who got a brain injury and suddenly were unable to keep a single line of thought without having someone else having to feed them the previous thought in order to feed the next thought.
In the brain, the fact that the previous thought feeds the next thought is "how it works", it is intrinsic, it is by design. And this mechanism of thoughts feeding the next thoughts is what creates "consciousness" or "awareness": self-reflection is based on the fact that thoughts are intrinsically linked together, that they "flow" continuously, without needing an external system to update them.
You cannot take away the "loop" part of the paper plane so that it suddenly would be unable to move on its own once thrown away.
Now, you can always say "well, the paper plane in the video game is a very good simulation, it does not matter if it is a real object or not", and that is fair enough. But in this discussion, some people have arguments to support that this property matters, that it is one condition for consciousness or awareness.
Is your argument that, because they're external to the Llm, rather than integrated, they don't count, not even in a practical sense?
I think the result of the system is all that's important. Where/how it's implemented doesn't matter for practical results.
If the argument here is that LLM don't have this built in, you should know that nobody has a practical use for plain LLMs these days. Nobody uses them this way, except for debug. All interesting use is through some kind of harness, with all sorts of systems bolted on. I think these conversations are only meaningful in this "agent" context that people actually use LLM, where they stop when they think they're done.
LLM don't have a some self contained loop, like we do, sure. Who cares though. The actual AI system that we use every day definitely do.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
They added a second right-click menu in Explorer now. IDK if this is Windows 11 or if 10 had this. When you right-click a file, you get a shorter menu with a larger font. But it might not have the option you want -- you have to click "Show more options" at the bottom. Then it lags for 1 second (this is a Core Ultra 9 with 64GB of RAM btw) and opens a new one, with the old font metrics, and that one also has all the things the original ones did.
This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.
I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.
I'm on win11 at work and when I right click in explorer it loads the normal menu but then immediately populates the menu with more options. It takes just long enough before it populates more options for you to maybe click on something which has then moved to somewhere else. Extremely annoying.
That has been my experience too with family, and most people outside of tech circles don't even know about butterfly keyboards I never heard a peep during that time.
This tweet should be a case study in anthropomorphizing AI. It has a name, a gender, a backstory. If you overheard this guy talking about his pet AI and missed the context that it's a machine, you'd think he was talking about a real human person. Very strange.
> And if you ask some of them about the contradiction, it comes out that (to them) the phrase only means "never again ... to Jews".
Who have you actually asked about this? I defy you to name a real Jewish person that you've asked this question, who has given you that answer. I want proof.
There are entire class of them ("neocons" ... and those are from the only Jews who don't give a crap about another Holocaust happening to Palestinians).
I don't know what you expect me to do, introduce you to one?
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