Canonical have had it in Ubuntu for years, but it’s taken them a while to get it to a point where it could be upstreamed. That’s what this news is: that Canonical’s patch is finally all clear to be merged.
Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about "artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what’s the most likely next word that you’re going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant.
It’s not simple to come up with coherent statements on such a wide variety of tasks.
It’s not just stringing random words together like predictive text. It understands context in a way that is very complex.
It is more knowledgeable than the average person by a huge amount.
For example I asked it to write songs about squidmas, an imaginary holiday I made up to irritate my children. It was able to rewrite Christmas songs but with a squid theme. That’s way more complex than predictive text.
At least my definition of intelligence is thinking. Otherwise a simple pattern matching algorithm like a regexp is also intelligent, or a sorting algorithm that puts things in the right order.
But I agree it’s very efficient and has more data than any single person ever could. It’s a computer, they are great at storing and processing information.
I’ve heard the argument that we don’t really have a good definition of thinking or intelligence and if it can complete a task or do things…what does it matter if it’s “thinking” or not if the outcome is the same.
Bro the AI neural networks have been shown to be building internal world models to be able to do what they do. How is that not thinking?
I am so sick of this anthrocentrism, as if we are special because we are humans. The computers are now doing the same mathematical processes our brains are doing. The LLMs can be compared to a small subsection of our brains. String enough neural network based AIs together with different tasks and youll get sentience.
Sentience isnt required for “thinking” to happen, thinking is one of the building blocks for sentience.
While I mostly agree, I’d like to point out that GOFAI (good old fashioned AI) exists, and at its core it is basically just pathfinding like a* or something similar. And we still call that AI, because it “intelligently” finds a path quickly.
So my main point is that I agree that it isn’t magic or sapient or anything, but in a sense it is definitely intelligent.
I think the defenders of human intellect are heralding our language and thinking to be a much higher standard than for MOST people they are.
A chess champion might be executing critical thinking beyond normal comprehension but I’d say a lot of my interactions with others, my daily experience is just pattern matching the next thing to say or ask.
I think this type of anthropocentrism extends to chess too actually. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve heard that chess AIs are finding success doing unintuitive things like pushing a and h file pawns in openings. If, 10 years ago, some chess grandmaster was doing the same thing and finding success, I imagine they would have been seen as creative, maybe even groundbreaking.
I think the average person under-rates the sophistication of AI. Maybe as a response to the AI hype. Maybe it’s because we’re scared of AI, and it’s comforting to believe that it’s operations are trivial. I see irrationality and anger cropping up in discussions of AI that I think stem from a fundamental fear of its transformative power.
Yes it’s going to transform everything. It’s about the same as the transformation from typewriter to computer for society. But I still don’t think any machine that predicts the next word is intelligent. However, this is only the beginning. We are not going to be able to keep up with AI soon, and it will work around the clock to get better and better.
We will have those high tech societies from the movies where robots are everywhere and people are quite sad.
You say that however we might have stumbled on the groundwork for a GI. Because language is core to our evolutionary advancement. We needed language to build the mental constructs that then enabled logical work.
Imagine if an LLM was able to coordinate the usage of these “logical” AI’s like Deep mind etc.
ChatGPT already enabled Internet search and it’s better than if I asked someone to Google something for me.
It’s that these models have leveraged so much data they’ve been able to map out relationships between words (or images) in way as to be able to generate what seem like new versions of those things.
I grant you that an LLM has more base level knowledge than any one human, but again this is thanks to terrifyingly large dataset and a design that means it can access this data reasonably reliably.
But it is still a prediction model. It just has more context, better design and (most importantly) data to make predictions at a level never before seen.
If you’ve ever had a chance to play with a model at level where you can control some of its basic parameters it offers a glimpse into just how much of a prediction machine it can be.
My favourite game for a while was to give midjourney a wildly vague prompt but crank the chaos up to 100 (literally the chaos flag at the highest level) to see what kind of wild connections exist but are being filtered out during “normal” use.
The same with the GPT-3.5 API in the “early days” - you could return multiple versions of the response and see the sausage being made to a very small degree.
It doesn’t take away from the sense of magic using these tools. It just helps frame what’s going on under the hood.
There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.
I would have liked for Linus to maintain his angry-man-finger-thrusting self against evil corporates like Nvidia. I suppose I’m asking for too much, but his mild-mannerisms towards developers is a welcome change. Towards such corporates though, not so much. I would have liked some more motivated cursing against Intel and Nvidia and IBM. Oh well.
Other than that (which is a minor gripe from me at the most), touching message from Linus. Indeed, the maintainers are graying, and the current generation isn’t that interested in kernel programming. I’m sure there will be talent around (as long as the big companies need Linux to run their servers, I’m sure someone will turn up), but someone to rise to the helm with a fiery approach to openness is very important to my heart. I don’t think we will ever see another Linus in our lifetime, and I will personally grieve the day Linus and his core set of maintainers pass away.
I am not a programmer, and the best I can do is provide some funding to people who can/would engage directly with the kernel. But if the situation becomes so dire, I too will get my hands dirty, if nothing but to help the cause. Long live FOSS!
Linus was himself a major contributor to making people steer well clear of wanting to work on the Linux kernel. I didn’t need that kind of abuse in my life.
So while he is identifying a problem, it’s a bit like a recovering arsonist homeowner bemoaning the scorch marks on his house.
As I said, his change in behaviour towards fellow developers is a welcome change. There’s no doubt about that.
I just wish he would continue to rage against companies up to no good, especially for FOSS. I never want him to get mild with Nvidia, and I want him to praise AMD a bit (they deserve it, and his opinion holds value).
Hell will freeze over before he accepts a pull request on GitHub or uses Issues for discussions. I believe his behaviour serves only to scare away contributors and embolden elitists.
YES THERE IS, THERE IS A TOOL FOR LINUX THAT TURNS KEYWORDS INTO WHATEVER YOU WANT THEM TO BE, I just need to find it again so hold on FOUND IT, IT’S espanso.org
If you plan on using windows only for games and absolutely nothing else then there isn’t much of a point in making a shared partition between the two OS’es. Just keep them separate, to each partition its own. (So your first example win 100gb, Linux 400gb is what I personally would go with)
I just did this with my desktop pc when I added a second drive for additional storage. Instead of using it as additional storage for windows like I initially intended, I decided to dual boot with Mint on the second drive.
So far, I haven’t had any issue with gaming on Mint, either! Granted, most of the games I play are through Steam and either work with Proton or are native Linux to begin with. I did install a few games with Lutris, though, and works fine so far. Sea of Thieves, Astroneer, Slay the Spire, Deep Rock Galactic, are all working out of the box.
Only thing I haven’t attempted yet are multiplayer games with active anti-cheat, like LoL or CS:2. If those are the sorts of games you regularly play, you’ll probably be better off in the Windows partition/drive, but have fun experimenting in Linux!
Main game rn is BG3. And ofc want to get back into playing modded Skyrim. There are definitely other, pc only games that are on my list, coming from a Mac. But nothing like LoL or CS:2
I plan to look into this ofc, but if the games are on an external hd, would Linux use the same files as Windows? I.e. you don't need two copies of the game so long as it's on a format like NTFS that both can read? Was wondering whether to partition the external HD to have a Windows side and then a Linux side, with the latter formatted to ext4
In theory you should be able to do that! I think Proton has some issues with NTFS, mostly when installing or updating, but with a little research and tweaking you should be able to get it to run smoothly. I opted to keep them fully separate and just installed certain games twice, but am also using this as a test run before diving into full daily driver Linux when I build a new system in the spring, so longevity of my storage drives wasn’t a concern.
I think that's where I'm at, too, where I don't mind have to re-do certain things down the road if I switch approaches or commit to a certain direction
Default boot to Linux! I had dual boot set up for years and never actually booted into Linux. Once I changed the default to Linux I never booted into windows again (and eventually deleted that partition)
So it’s a “gaming” machine with only integrated graphics, in a small and presumably not-that-well-cooled, albeit retro, case? I don’t see the appeal, and the article reads like ad copy, not a genuine opinion.
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