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Cake day: November 25th, 2024

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  • In case you haven’t seen it, the paper is here - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).

    The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn’t unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as “analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome”.

    They also don’t provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.

    What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they’ve seen, rather than genuinely working them out.


  • I think it’s an easy mistake to confuse sentience and intelligence. It happens in Hollywood all the time - “Skynet began learning at a geometric rate, on July 23 2004 it became self-aware” yadda yadda

    But that’s not how sentience works. We don’t have to be as intelligent as Skynet supposedly was in order to be sentient. We don’t start our lives as unthinking robots, and then one day - once we’ve finally got a handle on calculus or a deep enough understanding of the causes of the fall of the Roman empire - we suddenly blink into consciousness. On the contrary, even the stupidest humans are accepted as being sentient. Even a young child, not yet able to walk or do anything more than vomit on their parents’ new sofa, is considered as a conscious individual.

    So there is no reason to think that AI - whenever it should be achieved, if ever - will be conscious any more than the dumb computers that precede it.



  • I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):










  • MouldyCat@feddit.uktoLinux@lemmy.ml$HOME, Not So Sweet $HOME
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    4 months ago

    fraid I generated a tl;dr for this rather verbose article:

    “Home directories are a mess because too many apps ignore XDG spec and dump dotfiles everywhere. The problem isn’t just legacy software—new apps do it too, often out of ignorance or laziness. Windows has similar issues with profile folders. Fixing it requires devs to actually follow standards, but many resist due to inertia or ‘my way is better’ thinking. Users should push back and demand proper XDG compliance to keep $HOME clean.”