Sounds like something is off somewhere indeed, because on mobile safari it is running very smoothly for me. Cannot tell the exact FPS, except that it is at least 60 or more.
Just like with absolutely any other tool, their value is in what it enables humans using them to accomplish.
E.g., a hammer doesn't do anything, and neither does a lawnmower. It would be silly to argue (just because these tools are static objects doing nothing in the absence of direct human involvement) that those tools don't have a very clear value.
Seems equally silly to me to suggest that hammers and lawnmowers don't do anything, but I mean here we are.
When people use other people like tools, i.e. use them to enable themselves to accomplish something, do those people cease to do things as well? Or is that not a terminology you recognize as sensible maybe?
I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
To me, it's precision in language. "Doing" involves an action. You could in that sense compare the computer part of a robot to the mind of an animal. The mind may be involved in planning or the main source and possibly in control of the action, but it doesn't do. Your example robotic lawnmower is not merely a computer. It may contain one. The computer inside it does not mow the lawn.
To put my comment in context again: I replied to a comment that said "By that logic, nothing computers do is scary." as a response to "Why would it be scary? Claude is just parroting other human knowledge. It has no goal or agency.". I was following the train of "logic" of this chain of comments.
As long as this hypothetical Claude doesn't have control over objects, it cannot do anything. It completely depends on how its output is processed and received. An LLM spits out words, a computer ultimately spits out bits; what makes them "scary" is not what they produce, but fully depends how that product is translated into action by its environment. It cannot be determined in isolation by only looking at the computer/LLM ("mind") part.
The mind part does not do. A computer may be attributed to have "agency", but the "objects" around it can have agency too. A computer cannot force anything on its own; a toddler (or a president) may have agency, but they require cooperation by their environment to exercise that agency. If you break a leg, you can want to move it all you want, it won't do.
It's not merely a "linguistic semantics thing". Think Nuremberg trials. Who is responsible, in a network of 'autonomous agents'?
> Seems equally silly to me to suggest that hammers and lawnmowers don't do anything, but I mean here we are.
To be clear, I am not the person you were originally replying to. I personally don't care much for the terminology semantics of whether we should say "hammers do things" (with the opponents claiming it to be incorrect, since hammers cannot do anything on their own). I am more than happy to use whichever of the two terms the majority agrees upon to be the most sensible, as long as everyone agrees on the actual meaning of it.
> I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
To me, it isn't human-exclusive. I just thought that in the context of this specific comment thread, the user you originally replied to used it as a human-exclusive term, so I tried explaining in my reply how they (most likely) used it. For me, I just use whichever term that I feel makes the most sense to use in the context, and then clarify the exact details (in case I suspect the audience to have a number of people who might use the term differently).
> How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
I would use it the exact way you phrased it, "this API consumes that kind of data", because I don't think anyone in the audience would be confused or unclear about what that actually means (depends on the context ofc). Imo it wouldn't be wrong to say "this API receives that kind of data as input" either, but it feels too verbose and awkward to actually use.
I'm not sure how to respond then, because having a preferred position on this is kind of essential to continue. It's the contended point. Can an LLM do things? I think they can, they think they cannot. They think computers cannot do anything in general outright.
To me, what's essential for any "doing" to happen is an entity, a causative relationship, and an occurrence. So a lawnmower can absolutely mow the lawn, but also the wind can shape a canyon.
In a reference frame where a lawnmower cannot mow independently because humans designed it or operate it, humans cannot do anything independently either. Which is something I absolutely do agree with by the way, but then either everything is one big entity, or this is not a salient approach to segmenting entities. Which is then something I also agree with.
And so I consider the lawnmower its own entity, the person operating or designing it their own entity, and just evaluate the process accordingly. The person operating the lawnmower has a lot of control on where the lawnmower goes and whether it is on, the lawnmower has a lot of control over the shape of the grass, and the designer of the lawnmower has a lot of control over what shapes can the lawnmower hope to create.
Clearly they then have more logic applied, where they segment humans (or tools) in this a more special way. I wanted to probe into that further, because the only such labeling I can think of is spiritualistic and anthropocentric. I don't find such a model reasonable or interesting, but maybe they have some other rationale that I might. Especially so, because to me claiming that a given entity "does things" is not assigning it a soul, a free will, or some other spiritualistic quality, since I don't even recognize those as existing (and thus take great issue with the unspoken assumption that I do, or that people like me do).
The next best thing I can maybe think of is to consider the size of the given entity's internal state, and its entropy with relation to the occurred causative action and its environment. This is because that's quite literally how one entity would be independent of another, while being very selective about a given action. But then LLMs, just like humans, got plenty of this, much unlike a hammer or a lawnmower. So that doesn't really fit their segmentation either. LLMs have a lot less of it, but still hopelessly more than any virtual or physical tool ever conceived prior. The closest anything comes (very non-coincidentally) are vector and graph databases, but then those only respond to very specific, grammar-abiding queries, not arbitrary series of symbols.
Agreed, just like hammers get the nails hammered into a woodboard. They do what the human operator manually guides them to do by their nature.
I am not disagreeing with you in the slightest, I feel like this is just a linguistic semantics thing. And I, personally, don't care how people use those words, as long as we are on the same page about the actual meaning of what was said. And, in this case, I feel like we are fully on the same page.
I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
The fact that SA recently (past ~15 years) passed quite a few reforms that significantly lax old theocracy rules (e.g., women are now legally allowed to drive, they are no longer obligated to wear hijab outside, no male chaperone requirements, western-tier public music festivals and concerts can now be hosted, etc.) only solidified that opinion.
> I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
That assumes that Saudis did use to do FGM.. and that's not true either.
I recently was at the Vegas airport, and what struck me was the parking lot.
It was the same parking lot I saw many years ago. But this time, instead of feeling sorry for the owners of the cars that were obviously getting cooked up, that whole are was shaded in bajillion solar panels.
It seemed like such an obvious win-win for everyone, I expect it to catch on fairly quickly.
Even if it was just 0 albedo no generation, irradiation on whatever's parked beneath would be cut in half plus rest of (re-)radiation converted into far-ir. This is not unuseful. Just don't mandate this kind of thing in places where parking lots have to be cleaned up with bulldozers in winter.
If there are solar panels over the parking lot, then the parking lot doesn't have to be plowed. You can design the panels at appropriate slopes to direct the snow off the lot.
You're not looking at the albedo of the solar panels in isolation though, you're comparing it to asphalt and cars. Typical solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05.
Epic Games does way more than just purely making games.
They also have their own Steam competitor (Epic Games Store) and, more importantly, they develop and support Unreal Engine used by tons of other game dev companies.
If you want an apples to apples comparison (i.e., other big live-service game companies) in terms of the employee count, you got:
Mihoyo (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail) - ~5,000-6,000
What about Valve itself? They have ~350 employees. They make Steam, SteamOS, Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, the Source engine, and run four actively successful live service games: CS2, Dota2, TF2, Deadlock.
Last I've heard Valve makes use of a lot of contractors however. So the number of people working on their projects is a bit higher than their employee count suggests. Anyone's guess how many though.
I know they're sponsoring a bunch of ARM and Linux projects as well.
The small size of Valve is simultaneously mind boggling but also not, given its very intentional independence. I would have to imagine that they must contract out or have partners at least for their hardware relationships if not for their massively multiplayer online games. At just 350 people that's enough annual revenue to make everyone there a millionaire several times over. Simultaneously plausible but mind boggling.
They contract out all the time, they've admitted to it in lots of interviews. So I think through the amount of contracting they're able to keep their core hires down.
Yeah but Valve is not publicly traded, so that comparison is of course totally unfair! /s
Having skilled and happy employees that aren't constantly changing and do not spend all of their time on ways to fuck over customers and chase trends is simply impossible. Releasing a piece of hardware and leaving it open for customers to do with what they want? Linux? Not hiring people the second line goes up and then immediately firing them when line stagnates? Preposterous.
The game store doesn't need a lot of employees. A few years ago it was reported that Valve only needed about 70 employees to run Steam while it generated billions of dollars in Steam fees (30% per game). It's basically free money for Valve. I bet the situation is similar for the AppStore and Google Play.
Though Unreal Engine does indeed need quite a few developers. Additionally, using UE is much cheaper (5% on games exceeding 1 milion USD gross revenue) than using Steam (30% on every game). So they not only need more developers than Valve, they also earn less money.
Steam doesn’t really attempt to gatekeep submitted content the same way that Apple or Google do so I would expect those companies to have much larger teams supporting, in mostly non-development roles. Steam support has also historically been kind of a joke (not sure if it’s improved in the last 5 years) though I don’t know if Google/Apple provide a better experience
I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them).
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
> I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos).
I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website.
The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho).
I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it.
To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).
Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.
I don't have much meaningful info to contribute to this, but it is interesting to observe how the rollout of the red light cams happens in different places, and how it eventually turns out.
IIRC there was a point in time roughly around ~2017 when it happened in Redmond WA (i.e., in the town that the Microsoft HQ is in). I might be off by a year or two, but it doesn't really change the overall point.
TLDR: in under 2 years, that whole red light cam initiative got canceled and reverted, because the local stats showed that it just made things more dangerous on the roads (by significantly increasing the rate of rear-ending accidents at traffic lights).
I generally agree with your position overall, but the person in the OP was 36 years old. I don't think that his parents can be blamed for not doing their job here.
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