Ah, so Seagate still sucks!

I would suggest the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig. It’s a good overview of the field and has been in circulation since 1995. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach

Here’s a photo, as an example of how this book approaches the topic, in that there’s an entire chapter on it with sections on four approaches, and that essentially even the researchers have been arguing about what intelligence is since the beginning.

But all of this has been under the umbrella of AI. Just because corporations have picked up on it, doesn’t invalidate the decades of work done by scientists in the name of AI.

My favourite way to think of it is this: people have forever argued whether or not animals are intelligent or even conscious. Is a cat intelligent? Mine can manipulate me, even if he can’t do math. Are ants intelligent? They use the same biomechanical constructs as humans, but at a simpler scale. What about bacteria? Are viruses alive?

If we can create an AI that fully simulates a cockroach, down to every firing neuron, does it mean it’s not AI just because it’s not simulating something more complex, like a mouse? Does it need to exceed a human to be considered AI?

I think you’re conflating “intelligence” with “being smart”.

Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are “intelligent” because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and “decide” when to switch the light.

Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it “reads” a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it’s making is much more complex than “stop or go”.

I don’t know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I’m talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they’re talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don’t. That’s essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it’s got context for a bunch of things. It doesn’t care if it’s right and it doesn’t look things up before it says something.

But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That’s incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it’s been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it’s impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

That’s odd! I had no issues with the stock Ubuntu install. Installing CUDA on a Windows machine requires WSL2 now, but I didn’t really use it for anything more than that, so I could’ve just not used it enough to find problems. As soon as I finished the semester that required proprietary software, I got rid of Windows entirely though.

IMO, as long as you get comfortable with the basics like navigating directories and moving files, installing and updating software (first through something like apt, compiling stuff manually isn’t necessary at first), and managing some basic bash settings like aliases, you’re pretty much set. At least, from a programmer’s standpoint.

I dunno how well versed OP is in computers overall is the thing. The above is a good baseline, but you need a general understanding of how operating systems work in general to be really comfortable with something like Arch. Like you gotta know what a driver is before you can troubleshoot issues with your hardware, or if you’re managing disks it’s good to have an idea of how filesystems work. But that all comes with experience.

I suggest trying Windows Subsystem for Linux. You’ll get a simpler way to get familiar with the command line, which is the important part if you’re interested in development.

That or dual boot, you don’t need to set aside a large partition for messing around.

I imagine this commercial/personal art dichotomy has existed ever since the first time someone paid for art. Like how there’s always been folk music played around campfires in contrast to the operas and orchestras where the local lord’s funding goes.

Nope, I’m playing DOS2, since that’s been sitting in my steam library for way too long!

THEN maybe I’ll BG3. If my laptop can handle it…

I consider computer RPGs to be more in the vein of tactical RPGs rather than Pokemon/Final Fantasy style turn based RPGs tbh. It’s turn based, but positioning is key. Or, at least they scratch the same itch for me.

And Fire Emblem, XCOM, FF Tactics, etc have never exactly had mind blowing sales.

So what’s a better solution than reusing grocery bags?

Would reusable grocery bags suddenly be ok if they were free? Because honestly I feel that would just fuel forgetful people’s bad habits.

I’m not the original person you replied to, bud. I just wanted to find something peer reviewed for you on getting images from brain scans, since you doubted that’s a thing.

But like, you could also just look at the scene in the computer science field overall, if you’d like something more recent. Like the full journal from the IEEE, or maybe that little journal called Nature.

What do you think computer science departments at universities even do??

Decoding Brain Representations by Multimodal Learning of Neural Activity and Visual Features, DOI 10.1109/TPAMI.2020.2995909

Published in 2020 by the IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9097411

Why can’t something be both for profit and for the environment? Because frankly, after living with a plastic bag ban for years (Canada started the process in 2020), I haven’t seen random nasty plastic bags being blown around on the street. So it’s helped my immediate environment.

I feel we gotta reduce plastic use on all fronts. Yes, individual consumers pollute less than corps, but that doesn’t mean that consumerism as a culture doesn’t produce unnecessary waste. Think about a single store and just how much packaging there is in that one place, and where all of that will ultimately end up.

So like, I’m personally for bringing reusable containers to stores to fill up on things like say, shampoo or milk. Milk delivery was a thing for a long time, so there’s nothing saying our cultural approach to these things can’t or shouldn’t change, especially if it means less waste is generated.

And if reusable containers become a thing, I promise you there will be people whinging that it’s profitable for the groceries that they’re selling bottles that you used to get for free with the soap or whatever.

Yeah, which is a generational issue at worst. One guy in my family keeps forgetting his bags and buying new ones, but he also has a mindset where he resists change. The rest of us have gotten into the habit of remembering them, leaving a few in the car, etc.

Kids growing up after the ban are just gonna see it as normal. You go buy groceries? You bring your bags, just like you need to remember to bring your wallet.

I don’t think you need to wait years for user friendly Linux tbh! I recommend checking out Linux Mint. It’s basically designed for people used to Windows and handles the technical stuff for you.

You can do almost everything through the GUI rather than the command line, so for things like updates, it’ll show you a little notification in the corner by the clock like you’re used to, you open up the software manager, and click the update button.

And most software nowadays can either be downloaded through an app store like interface, or by downloading an executable file from a website.

And if you’ve ever used a mac, there’s a time machine equivalent built in (timeshift). So you can set up an automatic backup daily/weekly/etc and if you mess up something, in most cases you can revert back to a point when it wasn’t messed up.

I say give it a shot, you can always go back if it’s not for you! But usability has improved so much in the last few years.

For laymen who might not know how GANs work:

Two AI are developed at the same time. One that generates and one that discriminates. The generator creates a dataset, it gets mixed in with some real data, then that all of that gets fed into the discriminator whose job is to say “fake or not”.

Both AI get better at what they do over time. This arms race creates more convincing generated data over time. You know your generator has reached peak performance when its twin discriminator has a 50/50 success rate. It’s just guessing at that point.

There literally cannot be a better AI than the twin discriminator at detecting that generator’s work. So anyone trying to make tools to detect chatGPT’s writing is going to have a very hard time of it.

God I want to do that but for some reason Prime Video on my laptop is locked to like 480p on “highest quality” but when I cast to my TV on my phone it’s full HD. Like what gives??

Do they hate that I’m on Linux using Firefox or something?? I tried Chrome and had the same issue.

Tried searching for the answer but all the Reddit posts say “it’s just your slow ass Internet”!! Nah man I’m on fibre.

(Edit: though I do use my HDMI for videos I have on my hard drive ofc, but sometimes I don’t want to bother looking for alternative sources…)