Syncthing

The canonical answer is that Jon is reacting to Garfield and Odie’s actions, not their thoughts: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/222029

Jim: I wanted to ride that real fine line between wanting to understand what the cat says, I think people honestly feel that cats think in English, that cats understand everything as they do but obviously they don’t talk so I wanted to ride that line between here’s what your cat is really thinking to give pet owners insight into what their pets are really thinking without giving it away, to have him really talk and Jon understand him, would have made it more of a fantasy. I always wanted to create a strip that could have cats, if they had opposable thumbs, would drink coffee if they could. Apparently Heathcliff, a cat in a comic strip panel, would fly planes and drive cars and be on a desert island and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to create a very real world and then go out to the fantasy from there. And, you’ll notice that when Jon understands what Garfield is saying, it’s something Garfield does with an action, not a word that communicates it.

Found someone that removed the thought bubbles from a few comics as an example:

https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/76445444351/i-know-garfield-minus-garfield-was-the-one-that

On the other hand, there’s strips like this one that seem to have Jon hearing Garfield’s thoughts, though that can be chalked up to Jon making up dialogue for his pets to amuse himself:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Garfield,_January_1992_comic_strips?file=1992-01-21.gif

Here’s another one:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Garfield,_May_1986_comic_strips?file=1986-05-20.gif

The trick is to define “think”. Nobody has a good definition that isn’t circular, because we don’t really know enough about how the brain works to come up with an objective, testable definition. It all loops around endlessly, “think” to maybe “conceive” or “ponder” or “know” or “aware” or “conscious” or “sentient”, so on and so on. I think LLMs think in the same way that planes and bees both “fly”, even if it’s very different mechanisms 🤷

I agree that the models aren’t geniuses, and we should critically evaluate them, especially whenever OpenAI or other such companies make claims, and all that. I just don’t really care for arguing about “is it truly thinking”, but maybe that’s just the engineer side of me:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1879

FYI I posted all of the Jon strips in !garfield@lemmy.world a while back, starting with this one:

https://discuss.online/post/21851092

Fun fact, those are in the public domain due to lack of copyright notice when they were published

You just made me look back at it again and realize that the coloring is wrong in the bottom left panel. That’s clearly a hedge, not a path. It should be green in front of him, not gray.

Yep, this is today’s comic

not that a human couldn’t solve it, but that they didn’t bother

I’d agree, but with the caveat that that’s still impressive and useful. There’s kind of an LLM of the gaps thing going on, where LLMs obviously can’t produce novel mathematical results, right up until they can. There’s limitations and caveats, and one shouldn’t trust most anything tech ceos say, but the models continue to progress in capabilities. This is the stuff of science fiction a few years ago.

One day a real AGI is going to be created.

IMO this is real AGI. It’s just not ASI. It’s a general intelligence because it’s capable of handling a huge variety of tasks fairly well without needing to be trained specifically for each one. It’s clearly not as smart as humans, and thus isn’t an ASI. The specific terms I’m not really attached to, moreso the point is that we need more specific ways of talking about intelligence.

It’s a joke about lines, somehow, but also don’t quite get it. He’s forced to be part of a happy conga line instead of a normal waiting line. It might’ve been a topical political joke at the time?

More direct link to page:

https://www.exocomics.com/500/

I use beets: https://beets.io/

The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.

He stopped for a while, but started occasionally drawing new ones every so often around 2020 or so. He’s got a Patreon that he releases them early to, and also draws stuff that he doesn’t release to the site. I repost old ones once per day, excepting that I’ll post new ones instead whenever he releases them.

They actually posted something like that a while back:

https://www.patreon.com/oglaf/posts/idea-orphanage-126198592

Here’s where I posted it to Lemmy:

https://discuss.online/post/16788508

Took me a bit to notice that lol

Thanks! Link for the lazy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster

Was he just waiting for someone to start crossing, so that he could block them? He wasn’t there when Moomin started crossing.

The joke is that the pop-up guide to sex had a pop-up penis come out and poke them in the eye.

I can’t really square “wildly overstated” with the progress made so far with these models. Is there a specific claim you’re thinking of that can be evaluated? Otherwise it feels like nutpicking, where you pick some audacious claim that nobody/barely anyone agrees with, and then go hard against that, ignoring the more reasonable positions.

Just looking at this article, how much do you think is worth investing in “AI” (however you want to define it) that can find novel mathematical results? Isn’t that good for humanity and something we should be spending a solid amount of resources on?

Personally, I don’t find much use in talking purely about the damages or harms of AI. It’s often used to just dismiss it entirely, without trying to consider at all if those can be solved or mitigated. In other words, saying “AI is bad because X” isn’t worth discussion. “How do we solve X caused by AI” is much more interesting.

EDIT: Funnily enough, I just got an email from the EFF that captures my position pretty well:

The important thing about a technology isn’t just what it does: it’s who it does it for and who it does it to. Cory Doctorow and EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer are tackling what needs to happen now to ensure AI actually works for everyone, not just those in power.

Join us on Wednesday, August 12 at 10:00 am Pacific for the latest installment of our EFFecting Change Livestream Series: Who the Machine Serves. AI can help or harm people, and EFF was created to make sure it helps. We are at a critical juncture to ensure that AI is developed and used in ways that respect fundamental rights and works for those who build it, use it, and are affected by it. Find out more and bring your questions for this livestream with live Q&A.

EFFecting Change Livestream Series: Who the Machine Serves
Wednesday, August 12
10:00 am - 11:00 am Pacific - Check Local Time
Livestream followed by Q&A

I don’t think that’s a fair take. The website Bloom built is useful background for why this is big news, and how we got here. But this isn’t just about Bloom:

And, on May 20, OpenAI shared a solution (opens a new tab) to the unit distance problem, along with a blog post (opens a new tab) explaining the work and a companion paper (opens a new tab) that featured nine world-class mathematicians commenting on the correctness of the proof and the importance of what had been done (as well as presenting a streamlined human version of the result). Mathematicians had generally believed that Erdős’ conjecture — about how many evenly spaced points can be placed on a plane — was correct. To general surprise, OpenAI’s internal model found a counterexample. To do so, it had found a sophisticated way to use tools from an area of math called algebraic number theory. As Jacob Tsimerman (opens a new tab) of the University of Toronto wrote in the companion article, “This is a really impressive piece of work. … It is definitely an intimidating construction.”

That’s an impressive, important result.

At this point, I don’t really understand the point of reductive arguments like “it’s just a next-token predictor” in regards to LLMs. Even claims of “it’s not useful” (not even limited to “not useful to me”, just flat out “not useful”). There’s always the response of comparing any argument to humans, e.g. “humans can generate bullshit too”, but even aside from that, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. AI is doing interesting things.

There’s downsides like power usage and centralized control by capitalists, but IMO those are problems to solve, not reasons to pretend AI is just hype.

Which title is that?