Well no one can prove they have a mind to anyone other than themselves.

And to extend that, there’s obviously a way for electrical information processing to give rise to consciousness. And no one knows how that could be possible.

Meaning something like a true, alien AI would probably conclude that we are not conscious and instead are just very intelligent meat computers.

So, while there’s no reason to believe that current AI models could result in consciousness, no one can prove the opposite either.

I think the argument currently boils down to, “we understand how AI models work, but we don’t understand how our minds work. Therefore, ???, and so no consciousness for AI”

He’s successful in spite of himself. He makes terrible decisions constantly.

The people who claim “real estate value!” have just latched onto the simplest reason they can which aligns with their worldview.

The reasons I suspect companies are forcing return to office are more:

• shareholders don’t like unused assets, so they tell the ceo to “use it or lose it”
• the people who make the decision have the type of extroverted personality where they actually do work better in the office and they can’t fathom people being different
• the people who make the decision prefer to have the office full because it makes them feel more powerful. They can see the people they lord over.

It would help all of their competitors. A non zero number of people would move from windows to each of the others.

Whether or not the number moving away from windows and on to each of the others is significant or not is a different matter.

The biggest thing helping Linux right now is Valve’s work improving the gaming experience, IMO.

Or classic torrents combined with a VPN.

Tesla under pays compared to other car companies.

Duck duck go has kept getting better and google has kept getting worse.

I find the results are pretty even now and often lean in DDG’s favour (but not always, obviously).

Because of this, I’ve set my default everywhere to DDG and give Google a whirl sometimes if that doesn’t work out for a specific search.

Nah. The managers prefer in-office and companies are addicted to “corporate culture” which they can’t control if you’re working from home.

It has nothing to do with firing people (unless you want the most competent people to quit) nor does it have anything to do with real estate (no company will try to help fix a collective action problem voluntarily unless the attempt gives good PR or profits)

I agree. I think people are just missing the point. It’s really far from being able to replace a worker.

It’s current capabilities at best can help that worker be slightly faster at certain things. It’s akin to a type of search engine.

It can generate simple stuff accurately quite often. You just have to keep in mind that it could be dead wrong and you have to test/verify what it says.

Sonetimes I feel like a few lines of code should be doable in one line using a specific technique, so I ask it to do that and see what it does. I don’t just take what it says and use it, I see how it tried to solve it and then check it. For example by looking up if the method it used exists and reading the doc for that method.

Exact same as what I would do if I saw someone on stack overflow or reddit recommending something.

I like it for certain techy things. I just used it to create a linux one-liner command for counting the unique occurances of a regex pattern. I often forget specific flags for Linux commands like how uniq can perform counting.

And something like that is easy to test each piece of what it said and go from there.

As long as you treat it like a peer who prefaced the statement with “I might be wrong / if I recall correctly” it ends up being a pretty good aid.

I just don’t understand how people find accounts they like to follow.

Millennials, according to Wikipedia,

The generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996

After that is Gen Z and Gen Alpha starts somewhere around 2010.

So 1997 would be an older Gen Z

Distinction without a difference in this case.

It’s not commercial real estate. There’s no reason for a CEO to care about real estate. This is just the reason given by people who believe all companies only ever do things for the money. So they’ve made up a reason they think fits.

Why would a company care about the real estate market when it can make more money having its staff work from home? Have you ever seen a company care about something that doesn’t benefit them in the short term?

People keep bringing up real estate because everyone thinks the rich are evil and this move must be money related somehow.

Now, I too think they’re pretty rotten for the most part.

But returning to office is not about real estate.

Companies are ruthless and if they can increase profits at all, they will do pretty much anything to do so. Firing long-time workers, destroying the planet, etc. So if they had to destroy the real estate market to make more money, they would.

My point here is that if it was just about money, everyone would remain WFH. They could downsize the office, or even lease out the space to the companies that are returning to the office.

So then why are they doing it? It’s their preference. They prefer having their underlings in the building and enjoy seeing everyone from their corner office. They like feeling powerful which is harder to do when everyone who works for them is at home.

They might also have the kind of personality where they get more work done with others around, and they can’t imagine it being different for other people. Many high-up executives only got that far because they have very extroverted personalities.

Not everything a rich person does is strictly about money. Otherwise they wouldn’t buy mansions, supercars, private planes, etc. Apple wouldn’t have built the billion dollar donut office. They do these things because they’re powerful and want others to know.

Candles were once a significant cost. But lightbulbs are incredibly cheap.

Food used to take a whole day to acquire.

We have things that even royalty didn’t have before, like air conditioning, out-of-season food, international travel, etc.

Capitalism sucks for sure. But it has given society a few benefits, and sometimes things do get significantly cheaper long term (but I’m generally skeptical about which items will go that way)

Picking and choosing which one to fix “first” is a problem, IMO.

We are capable of tackling every area simultaneously. Let’s get more EVs out there, let’s try hydrogen-powered airplanes, more nuclear, and sails on ships.

Let’s do everything we can.

It just comes down to whether or not the fuel saved is worth more than the sail maintenance. Hopefully it is.