as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.
If I picked a human off the street and asked them to "count first two hundred numbers in reverse while skipping every third number and check if they are in sequence", I bet most would screw up.
my point is not that current LLMs are sentient, or even that LLMs ever could be. My point is that it's very difficult to come up with a way to test consciousness, and it makes me a bit nervous to see people suggesting that something could never be conscious just because it's technological and not biological.
It's very easy to say, "well, of course, a thing that looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is not necessarily a duck." But when you're presented with something indistinguishable from a duck in every way, how do you determine whether it's a duck? You can't just say "well I know it's not a duck". It's dodging the question.
I use Windows and macOS both daily and it's truly baffling to me that anyway could consider Windows software quality to crush the Mac -- either first party or third party. macOS has no shortage of bugs but compared to Windows it works like a dream.
As one example of many, Night Light (Windows' version of adjusting your screen to be warmer at night) has been broken for me, for 5+ years. I mean literally it just never works on its own. The only way to kick it into working is toggling HDR on and then off, every single time I wake it up.
I would guess it's just my configuration but I built a second PC from totally new parts, and got a different monitor, and installed Windows 11 instead of 10, and it's still broken.
The GP's use of the word "impose" didn't seem perjorative to me or suggest that Anthropic is the offender and the government is the victim. I think you're reading a lot into a simple word choice and this response seems way too hostile.
The beginning describes the formation of an intelligence and it is indeed very dense. You can figure out what's going on but it takes some slow reading, and probably best to revisit it once you have some more context from later in the book.
The whole book isn't like that. Once you get past that part, as the other commenter said, it gets much easier.
That's the real reason the conversation seems pointless. Every thread is full of comments from one group saying how useful AI is, and from another group saying how useless it is. The first group is convinced the second group just hasn't figured out how to use it right, and the second group is convinced the first group is deluded or outright lying.
All of this is written with a sense of anger and sarcastic invective that doesn't seem appropriate. This is part of learning any new language or API. Going in with an attitude of "I should already know how all this works, why am I forced to do research or look at docs?" seems unfair and will spoil the experience of learning anything.
> Why was that so hard? Why are the models here separate from the ones in the right click menu? Too many questions.
The very screenshot above this paragraph actually answers this, in what admittedly might be an uncharacteristically clear UI: "Siri and Safari will always run translations online."
There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case.