Some concepts just can't (or shouldn't) be broken down to the level of lay person friendly though. There are just some technical concepts that have a complexity floor that if you drop below you are no longer explaining the actual concept but a fantasy.
For a judge trying to rule on a technical case, a poor layperson analogy and lead to a confidently wrong legal conclusion that has serious negative consequences. Thats why court appointed neutral experts are important.
I'm not sure parents have the right tools either. Microsoft is about to ship OpenClaw as part of windows (talked about at BUILD) and they're acting like it's production ready and they've solved the security issues.
I don't believe them for one second, it's far from a solved problem yet these companies are selling this tech as if it's been around for decades and thoroughly battle tested instead of highly experimental and unstable.
Traditionally, moving slow with policies was fine with new tech because, outside of the PC revolution it wasn't all that impactful, and things used to rightly be labeled as experimental so you could safely ignore it for a while as a big enterprise and be just fine until thinks shook out.
LLMs were, IMO, pushed out too early and without that clear "this is experimental tech" label. Full public access from day 1, no invite only betas, no research previews for a select few pilot customers/orgs, etc. I've been in IT for a little over 18 years now and I haven't seen anything move this fast before.
I mean, I never though I'd see Microsoft go on stage at BUILD and and announce freaking OpenClaw for Enterprise, and then make it available the same day. This is highly unstable tech and what I'd consider still experimental, being sold to F500s as production ready.
Surprisingly difficult to do. The assumption is that there are some things we do in our life that act as a blank space that must be filled with something. Productivity, or deep thought, or whatever. People go through life always doing something so there's never a "wasted" moment, but I'd argue thats a recipe for burnout and unhappiness.
There's a buddhist concept of suchness, seeing things exactly as they are in the present without judging them or trying to change them. Doing anything else but "just driving" is trying to live somewhere other than where you actually are. Where ever you are, and whatever you are doing right now is what life is, your life isn't somewhere else in the future, and you don't need to escape from a mundane task and rush somewhere else to experience life. All of it is life, even the boring parts.
Thats my problem. I only tolerate macOS, because of the hardware & battery life. WSL is a better *nix dev env than macOS, at least its real Linux, but like you said, the rest of windows sucks still.
I just want a macbook pro, but Linux. I want the performance, thermals, silence, fantastic screen, touchpad, speakers, etc. I refused to give anything up the mac hardware offers, and the PC OEM industry has just chosen, time and time again, to not bother to compete.
Hopefully these new Nvidia laptops will run Linux, that surface ultra is the first time I feel like a laptop on the other side of the fence will finally offer hardware parity.
Can we stop calling specific literary devices as automatically AI?
Yes, LLMs overuse that pattern. But it's a valid rhetorical device used for many , many years by human authors. Quite often too, especially in philosophical writing, and fantasy novels.
I'll give you that it wasn't often used in blogs or tech articles, but LLMs have been around long enough to have influenced human writing in other domains without the entirety of the content itself being LLM generated.
But its called out so often I swear people online will go read some classics and accuse them of being AI generated.
I just assume anyone posting it, at this point, doesn't read, doesn't write, or simply isn't clever enough to say anything that's actually worth listening to. Pure noise that won't go away because it makes the teenagers feel validated in how mad they are about AI.
They would also likely get that skill back faster than a brand new golfer.
I noticed it myself with cycling. Took 8 years off the bike, when I started up again I was nearly back to my old FTP in about 2 months despite starting from basically zero. Muscle memory is real, where I am now as a returning cyclist would take a pure beginner cyclist at least 4+ months to get to, fitness wise.
That said, you do have to work somewhat hard to maintain. With cycling, just 2 weeks off the bike is enough to see a VO2 max drop of anywhere from 4 to 7%. After just 4 weeks, your glycogen storage capacity decreases and you start rapidly losing fitness. After 2 months, you are basically now out of shape.
Detraining happens faster than most people think. And therein lies the danger with over reliance on LLMs for your cognitive skills. Detraining there happens just as fast, skills atrophy in a matter of weeks, not months or years.
People could also regain some cognitive skill back rather fastr when they worked to regain it. But the issue is, many people just lack the motivation to do so. If you golf or cycle, it's likely a passion or hobby. Most people don't view their cognitive health this way, they view it as work. It's why most people don't read much after their schooling, learning and being smart was only ever an ends to a means (diploma, job, money, etc).
I think part of the problem is also that many people simply work too hard or have too much going on in their lives to have any kind of cognitive energy left for this sort of maintenance work, even when they reason/plan that it is useful. This also seems to be encouraged somehow (by society?), to keep going like a freight train, or maybe it doesn't get discouraged enough (i.e. it doesn't get recognized as a problem).
My experience as a parent to an only-child has shown me there's just zero boredom or tolerance of boredom. Any pause or void needs to be filled with something. Any time my son says "I'm bored" my default response has become "awesome", "you're lucky", "I wish I had time to be bored" along with other quips like "boredom is a life skill". Of course, I see this same phenomenon in adults as well. So my rebuttal is that most people have much more free time than they think, it's just a matter of prioritization.
Refusing a command doesn't mean consciousness. LLMs could hit a token combination that causes it tou output something like "No, I don't want to do that." It's not choosing.
But can an LLM just refuse to process tokens because it doesn't feel like doing that at the moment? Can it look at an alternate distribution of tokens because that might be interesting? Can an LLM decide to make a drawing because it's Tuesday and sunny outside and the researchers keep asking the same questions and frankly, they really need to collaborate with each other and just leave the LLM out of it?
Claude can indeed decide to terminate conversations on its own using a special tool[1] if it feels "uncomfortable" with how the conversation is going. Also, very famously, in the middle of recording Computer Use demos, Claude stopped for a while its coding task to look at photos of Yellowstone National Park [2]
I don't think either of these two is proof of consciousness.
Copilot has the highest enterprise adoption of any AI currently, with GH Copilot in 2nd (although that may change with the recent pricing changes). Windows 11 sucks but is still 70+% of desktop OS market share runs basically every single F500 company.
Microsoft has a public image problem, but they are still winning (in the enterprise) regardless.
The mistake is thinking that MS gives a crap about the individual consumer, they don't, that's not their customer.
Don't worry, they'll make it borderline free at the start, let everyone integrate into their org, and then jack up the price after just like they do with everything else.
For a judge trying to rule on a technical case, a poor layperson analogy and lead to a confidently wrong legal conclusion that has serious negative consequences. Thats why court appointed neutral experts are important.
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