At the rate things have been going, we are certainly headed that way and we get there by accepting this kind unnecessary privacy violations.

I do have occasional buzzing/whine from easyeffects and have to restart it.

It depends. The old ALSA system was flaky from what I remember. Pipewire seems more stable, but can have issues with multiple devices but that might be more a bluetooth problem.

I’ve also had constant audio problems in windows, including every update shuffling all my audio devices and making a random one default and switching to the wrong device when connecting a new one.

One of the goals of Cachy is to take the pain out of Arch. I’d tried to use various Arch flavors before and I just never had a good experience. Vanilla I had no patience for, Manjaro is known to break more than vanilla with updates (something that happened to me), and Endevor just didn’t feel right for some reason.

Arch purists aren’t happy about that because it goes against the “ethos” of arch, but they don’t seem to like when a distro comes with a desktop environment.

Cachy has been pretty painless and I’ve been running it on multiple machines. There are regressions that sometimes happen since it’s still arch and gets the latest updates, but that stuff is usually quickly fixed or rolled back if there is a bigger issue that needs more time to fix.

The only real issue I had was it revealed a hardware problem with the newer Ryzen CPUs getting unstable in the new lower power CState 6 when idle. Disabling the CState fixed the issue.

Which is exactly my point. A biological brain, human or otherwise, is incredibly efficient for what it does. It’s also effectively infinitely parallel which is impossible to do with the current tech.

In order to even attempt or approach a system that could be remotely considered “conscious” we would need something that is way more efficient just because of logistics. What they are trying to do with the current hardware has basically reached the practical maximum of scalability.

Hardware footprint and power are massive constraints. The current data centers can’t even run at full capacity because the power grid cannot supply enough power to, and what they are using is driving energy costs up for everyone. On top of that, a bio brain is way more dense. We would need absurd orders of magnitude more hardware to come close with the current tech.

And then there is the software. Nerual nets are a dumbed down model of how brains work, but it is very simplified. Part of that simplification are static weights. The models do not update themselves during execution because they would very quickly muck up the weights from training and basically produce nonsense. They don’t have feedback mechanisms. We train them on one thing. That’s it.

In the case of LLMs, they are trained on the structure of language. We can’t train meaning because that requires unimaginable orders of magnitude more complexity to even attempt.

If AGI or artificial sentience is possible it will never be done with the current tech. I would argue the bubble has likely set AI research back decades because of how short sighted and hamfisted companies are pushing it has soured public perception.

but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion

For the current tech, 100%.

These are static systems. They don’t update themselves while running. If nothing else, a system of consciousness has to be dynamic. Also, the way these models are trained is unlikely to produce consciousness even if it theoretically could.

Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is,

We don’t technically have a definition for what it is, but we have some criteria. Consciousness is an emergent property. So theoretically a system could become conscious unintentionally if it is complex enough. But again, it requires a system to be dynamic, to be able to change and grow on it’s own.

Nerual nets are just trained on data. LLMs specifically are trained on the structure of language, which is the only reason they work as much as they do. We can’t train meaning or understanding, but being able to churn out something resembling information is a byproduct of training language because language is used to communicate information.

The issue that a lot of people have is they assume that something is intelligent/sentient if it can produce language, which is what we have seen in nature, but while it takes intelligence and maybe sentience to create/develop nothing says that intelligence or sentience is required to “use” language.

LLMs do one thing: Produce the next word for a given context. It does not matter how big we make it or what the underlying complexity is. The models just produce a word. The software running the model adds the word to the context and executes a new loop with the most recent context. It runs until it hits a terminating token that the current output is “finished”.

Even for the models that are considered the “thinking”/“reasoning” models just have additional context tokens for the “thinking” section that basically force the model to generate more context which, thanks to the way language is constructed, can constrain the output, but it’s only ever outputting the next word.

Additionally, he maintains that his LLM is female

I know nothing about this guy, but given some unfortunate tendencies among the tech communities I physically recoiled when I read this. If the thing was actually sentient I’d want to get it away from him.

Obviously the guy is another case of AI psychosis.

LLMs, and neural nets in general, literally cannot be sentient. Nerual nets are a very, very, dumbed down model to how brains work, but these are static systems that just output probability based on current context.

Even if we could someday create consciousness or at least something that could actually think it would require completely different hardware than what we currently have. Even if we could run it on current hardware it would require way more resources and power than physically possible.

Bazzite was too limiting for me and the layered updates made updating take forever. I was only using it on a media PC at the time too, so it wasn’t as if I had that many changes.

I’m perfectly happy with CachyOS. Can basically do whatever I want and snapshots are a nice safety net. Updates take like 2-5 minutes depending on how long it’s been since the last time I ran updates and the power of the system (Steamdeck always takes longer than my desktop or media PC).

I’m aware how buggy it was not that long ago when I first tried it, but once I switched my desktop over I need to use wayland unless I want to lock all my monitors to the same refresh rate. It’s fine. Not really had any issues in the last 6 months, and also enables HDR and freesync, though not at the same time because there’s a flickering issue with HDR and sync.

The problem is for organizations it’s harder to leave because that is where the people you want to reach are. That’s the only reason any org or company is on social media in the first place. If they leave too soon they risk too many people not seeing the things they send out to the community.

It’s more an individual thing because so many people just have social inertia and haven’t left since everyone they know is already there. The first to leave have to decide if they want to juggle using another platform to keep connections or cut off connections by abandoning the established platform.

Ah, it’s always fun how easy it is to trigger conservatives, or at this point regressives or blatant fascists as you conserve nothing.

Again, if your opinion is “brown people are rapists and murderers”, “kill the gays”, or “Trans people shouldn’t be allowed” you don’t get to complain when we push back by telling you what kind of a monster you are for your actions, and not for who you are as a person.

You’re the people obsessed with identity politics. That’s all you have as fake-tan Hitler hasn’t even attempted to do anything to make your lives better. He’s not even pretending to do more than the start of racial cleansing and trampling on the few rights trans people gained over the last 5 to 10 years while funneling even more money into billionaire pockets.

Also, the “so much for the tolerant” left shtick is so tired. Reactionaries always end up there when they have nothing else because they think it’s some sort of “gotcha”. It isn’t. It just shows how simple you world-view is. You don’t understand nuance or context. You probably think Star Trek is only “woke” today when it’s always been progressive for it’s time.

There is a paradox of tolerance. And that is “the tolerant must be intolerant of the intolerant. Because otherwise, the intolerant win.” Us not willing to tolerate disrespect or hate is not hypocritical…

when one side is “Queer people should be hunted down and killed” or “women are property” they don’t get a seat at the table of people who aren’t complete monsters.

You can have any political opinion you want, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to give it any validity or even listen to it.

Especially if that political opinion is just hate for racial, sexual, and gender minorities or women at large. You can make your own instance of hate, and many have, but the rest of us don’t have to join and get exposed to disrespect and death threats.

We I have the fun combination with (undiagnosed) autism and t Which one had primary control at any time is a scrap shoot.

Even medicated I can not see the clutter… Until it’s all I can see and I start AuDHD cleaning.