I’ve been extremely happy with my windows surface book, which I got over a decade ago, still use regularly, and I can even still develop on it without a huge headache. I think visual studio is the best ide I’ve used. Vscode has replaced pretty much every other basic text editing tool I use (windows based, at least). I’m not a big fan of windows adding more and and tracking shit to the os, but I can’t remember the last time ive had a bsod, and even then I was fighting with hardware problems.

They definitely have their crap and shit that drives me nuts, and like all the big companies they are trying to slurp up as much data as they can get, which is enough reason for many people to move away, but this idea that they “suck at everything” is just circle jerking.

You think most people are reading things with their fingertips?

We’re talking about something most people’s minds are not used to interpreting, so I fear that this would just add a layer of mental load for most drivers that would be actually less safe.

I disagree because you probably use the entertainment buttons more than anything. For instance, my wife’s car has the volume control on the touchscreen, which is super annoying because it’s something I like to manually adjust a lot.

I honestly can’t think of what I would prefer be touch screen…really it should just display on a touch screen so I can use it if I want, but everything should be controllable through physical buttons too.

Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!

So I moved to foss probably about 20 years ago and have been going back and forth between libre office and open office.

A couple of years ago my wife wanted me office, so I got the subscription…and man it’s so much better than either of those two, and to suggest that maybe it hasn’t changed since 1997 is mindboggling.

I’m a big proponent of not signing up for these services, but this paragraph really misses the mark for me.

“we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.”

How do you even get that from the comment I was responding to?

This is not what the article is about at all. I’m not even sure how you would get that from reading the headline alone.

Lol this is the same argument I’ve heard from climate change denialists for years: we can’t possibly change the climate!

Now doomers are saying the same thing, but even more ridiculously because they almost certainly believe we have changed the climate already.

They’re are decent people in this world who want things to be better. Sometimes they even have money.

Also, because we can only really see the world as ourselves, we tend to think everyone else thinks like us. So it’s very telling when people think everyone else is evil.

We shit on redditors for being arrogant and having grating personalities.

Yet it’s ridiculously common to come into a thread here and see it flooded with low effort “well duh!” Comments.

Lemmings apparently know everything and everything is obvious to them.

Which doesn’t even make sense here. A lot of smart people are dumping money into carbon capture as a way to offset what we’ve done. Yet here you are, so smart, that this is obviously wrong.

Yeah for me it’s less that I rage about getting downvoted, its just when I see a massive number of downvotes for posts that are simply pointing to the facts, or being logical and rational…and they get a massive number of downvotes because it contradicts the circlejerk or what people want to be true.

I dont personally care about downvotes, but those data points sure do shake my faith in humanity sometimes.

IMO, one of the best QoL updates for Lemmy is to make the votes invisible.

It’s a weird world and cool to think about. Thanks for the civil and interesting discussion.

I’m not saying it’s 99.9% of human intelligence, I’m saying you’re describing 99.9% of human thought.

This is what humans do, we hear about something thing and then we learn how to apply it to another. You even mention here “stacking balls” and then making the connection that eggs are also round and would need to be stacked in the same way to prevent rolling. This is reasoning, using what you’ve learned and applying it to a novel problem.

What you are describing as novel problems are really just doing the same thing at a completely different level. Like I play soccer, but no matter how much I trained, there is no way I would ever reach Messi’s skill, because he was just born with special skill in that area, but still just human like the rest of us.

And remember I’m mostly just pointing to the “text predictor” claim. I’m not convinced it’s not, and I think that appeared true for early models, but not so easy to apply to current models.

how could they tell it was truly a new thing

Sure, there is a chance the exact question had been asked before, and answered, but we are talking remote possibilities here.

that any description provided for it didn’t map it to another object that would behave similarly when stacking.

If it has to say ‘this item is like that other item and thus I can use what I’ve learned about stacking that other item to stack this item’ then I would absolutely argue that it is reasoning and not just “predicting text” (or, again, predicting text might be the equivalent of reasoning).

Stacking things isn’t a novel problem.

Sure, stacking things is not a novel problem, which is why we have the word “stack” because it describes something we do. But stacking that list of things is (almost certainly) a novel problem. It’s just you use what you’ve learned and apply that knowledge to this new problem. A non-novel problem is if I say “2+2 = 4” and then turn around and ask you “what does 2 + 2 equal?” (Assuming you have no data set) If I then ask you “what’s 2 + 3?” that is a novel problem, even if it’s been answered before.

I mean, I can’t dismiss that it isn’t doing something more complex, but examples like that don’t convince me that it is. It is capable of very impressive things, and even if it needs to regurgitate every answer it gives, few problems we want to solve day to day are truly novel, so regurgitating previous discussions plus a massive set of associations means that it can map a pretty large problem space to a large solution space with high accuracy.

How are you convinced that humans are reasoning creatures? This honestly sounds like you could be describing 99.99% of human thought, meaning we almost never reason (if not actually never). Are we even reasonable?

I listened to a podcast (This American Life, IIRC), where some researchers were talking about their efforts to determine whether or not AI could reason. One test they did was asking it to stack a random set of items (one it wouldn’t have come across in any data set, plank of wood, 12 eggs, a book, a bottle, and a nail. . .probably some other things too) in a stable way. With chat gpt 3, it basically just (as you would expect from a pure text predictor) said to put one object on top of another, no way would it be stable.

However, with gpt 4, it basically said to put the wood down, and place the eggs in a 3 x 4 grid with the book on top (to stop them from rolling away), and then with the bottle on top of that, with the nail (even noting you have to put the head side down because you couldn’t make it stable with the point down). It was certainly something that could work, and it was a novel solution.

Now I’m not saying this proves it can think, but I think this “well it’s just a text predictor” kind of hand-waves away the question. It also begs the question, and based on how often I hear people parroting the same exact arguments against AI thinking, I wonder how much we are simply just “text predictors.”

Agreed. It could absolutely be that this person just likes to complain. But this whole “talking about banning things you don’t thing belong in this community is really just talking about it too” is a ridiculous “gotcha.”

It’s a meta discussion about the direction they want the sub to take.

Sitting down and discussing something that you don’t like, so you can avoid it more in the future, is not the contradiction so many people in this sub seem desperate to make it.