The city watch novels are by far my favourite. Jingo is especially amazing as a lighthearted deconstruction of xenophobia and how it functions, as well as another big theme of modern politics I can’t talk about because it’s a huge spoiler.

It’s a special experience. Others have gone over the broad strokes, so I’ll instead describe my two favourite characters in the entirety of fiction.

Sam Vimes is a pragmatic, down to earth everyman. In a world full of crime, racism, magic, and political shenanigans, he tries (and mostly succeeds) to be true to his beliefs and convictions. Convictions like female dwarves deserve to identify as female if they want to, no matter how much dwarven society despises any dwarf not sticking to male identities. That anyone and everyone deserves to be hired and promoted on merit, no matter the stigma around ghouls, zombies and werewolves. He cares about his people and his city, and really tries. He may not fully understand your culture or religion, but he will defend your right to it to the death.

Rincewind is the opposite of the hero archetype. He’s the coward with a thousand backs. A failed wizard, because the immensely powerful spell living in his head scares off all the other spells, all he wants is to live a nice, calm, peaceful life. Against his will, he’s dragged from adventure to adventure and runs away from every exciting and mystical thing in the world. He’s seen everything, done everything, and never wanted to step out of the Unseen University.

But seriously, are there really women who talk about men in those terms?

Yes. Personally, I see it as the mirror image of the “tradwife” thing where toxic men see their partner as a subservient maid. Seeing men as primarily an income source comes from a similar place imho.

I’d prefer local storage over cloud storage for quick silly things like that.

Absolutely. Fdroid is awesome.

I hate the fact that there’s no simple, free, ad-free note-taking app either inbuilt or on the app store. Just something simple and local to take a quick shopping list or a name or something like that. Fdroid has me covered for that.

Ublock origin isn’t the only ad blocker out there. If you like Ublock origin, use Ublock origin lite. It’s fully V3 compliant.

They pushed a driver update. That update is broken and causes the bootup sequence to fail.

So basically the Lemmy version of Subreddit Simulator, but allowing users as well?

Yes, absolutely. That is a concern that I too share, fellow meat being. We should be vigilant against superior, more capable, and really friendly artificial intelligences.

Even the question of “who” is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the “who” doing the thinking in the first place :))

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

That’s a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That’s what they are.

I’m happy with the Oxford definition: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”.

LLMs don’t have knowledge as they don’t actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

If asked to answer 10*5, they can’t reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren’t in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.

Honest question: isn’t OSx considered the OS of choice for video and music editing?

Linux from Scratch and Gentoo are also pathways to abilities some would call… unnatural

Ah, I misunderstood then, sorry. But still, even with all the investment in the world, LLM is a bubble waiting to burst. I have a hunch we will see truly world-altering technology in the next ~20 years (the kind that’d put huge swathes of people out of work, as you describe), but this ain’t it.

There’s an upper ceiling on capability though, and we’re pretty close to it with LLMs. True artificial intelligence would change the world drastically, but LLMs aren’t the path to it.

So on the gaming front, pretty much any mainstream Linux distro would work for that. Proton is pretty damn stable and great on any distro that supports Steam. If you like Bazzite though, you do you.

For pen testing, must-have skills are nmap, bash, sqlmap, wireshark and the burp suite. If you know how to use all those, you’ve got basic coverage of most common attack vectors (password cracking is also covered by bash, there’s 101 different password cracking algorithms in various CLI spps).

I’m a lazy ass who doesn’t care much about customization, hopefully someone else can help you with that :))

A quick Google shows that someone got sharex working on Linux: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/issues/6531

Might take some effort and learning bash and WINE + winetricks to get that running, but hey, you’re gonna need to do that anyways for the pentest stuff :)

If you want something useful, maybe some more info on what you use your computer for? Advice for a glorified web terminal would be “Click the Firefox icon”. Advice for learning bash would be a massive rabbithole.

App suggestions are also very dependent on what you use your computer for.