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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • This applies to pretty much all “Linux good, Win/MacOS bad” memes. I just assume that people either aren’t really serious about them and it’s just tongue in cheek, or they don’t have any contact with regular people.

    I used to work as a(n assistant to the) sysadmin and the things I got called over never stopped to amaze. For instance, there was a case when software was updated on the work machines and I got called because some lady couldn’t use Adobe Acrobat. “It is asking me something, I don’t know what”. I come over and it’s just a TOS Accept/Decline window.

    Some people do not understand computers to an extent that they can lock up in a state of confusion when a button has been moved 100px in any direction from its usual position.


  • Farid@startrek.websitetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldWindows VS Linux (part 2)
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    28 days ago

    Don’t use apostrophes wherever you see an “s” at the end of a word. If you’re unsure about whether or not to use an apostrophe, just don’t. Because statistically, there are far fewer cases where you need 'em than there are cases where you don’t. Plus if you missed the apostrophe where it should be, people will just assume you didn’t bother to type it or it was a typo. Whereas if you do type it where it shouldn’t be, it’s a clear case of “this person doesn’t know how apostrophes work”.


  • If you’re talking about an app that exist solely as Electron, then you might be right. But the primary benefit of Electron is that you can distribute your already existing webapp as a downloadable app, which reduces the amount of maintenance significantly.
    Also, when it comes to UI diversity and customization, nothing beats HTML+CSS.

    And as you mentioned, there’s a looot of webdevs. Electron empowers those people to easily create applications. Which they did, they created many useful apps. An application that isn’t perfect resource usage-wise is often much better than no application at all.

    Think of Minecraft. Java is arguably the worst language to use for a chunk-based 3D game. But it’s still better than no Minecraft at all.







  • I’m not redefining anything, I’m just pointing out that intelligence is not as narrow as most people assume, it’s a broad term that encompasses various gradations. It doesn’t need to be complex or human-like to qualify as intelligence.

    A single if statement arguably isn’t intelligence, sure, but how many if statements is? Because at some point you can write a complex enough sequence of if statements that will exhibit intelligence. As I was saying in my other comments, where do we draw this line in the sand? If we use the definition from the link, which is:

    The highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths.

    Then 99% of animal species would not qualify as intelligent.

    You may rightfully argue that term AI is too broad and that we could narrow it down to mean specifically “human-like” AI, but the truth is, that at this point, in computer science AI already refers to a wide range of systems, from basic decision-making algorithms to complex models like GPTs or neural networks.

    My whole point is less about redefining intelligence and more about recognizing its spectrum, both in nature and in machines. But I don’t expect for everybody to agree, even the expert in the fields don’t.



  • I would put it differently. Sometimes words have two meanings, for example a layman’s understanding of it and a specialist’s understanding of the same word, which might mean something adjacent, but still different. For instance, the word “theory” in everyday language often means a guess or speculation, while in science, a “theory” is a well-substantiated explanation based on evidence.

    Similarly, when a cognitive scientist talks about “intelligence”, they might be referring to something quite different from what a layperson understands by the term.


  • In a way, yes, if you frame it right. To simplify, you’re basically asking “is a calculator intelligent?”, right? While it’s an inanimate object, you could say that, in a way, it acquires knowledge from the buttons user presses and it applies knowledge to provide an output.

    “But that’s not making decisions, it’s just circuits!”, you might say. To which I might reply “Who’s to say that you’re making decisions? For all we know, human brains might also just be very complicated circuits with no agency at all, just like the calculator!”.

    IIRC, in his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil even assigns certain amount of intelligence to inanimate objects, such as rocks. A very low amount of course, and it might be a stretch, but still.

    So yeah, it’s really hard to draw a line for intelligence, which is why there’s no firm definition and no consensus.


  • Of course there are various versions of NPCs, some stand and do nothing, others are more complex, they often “adapt” to certain conditions. For example, if an NPC is following the player it might “decide” to switch to running if the distance to the player reaches a certain threshold, decide how to navigate around other dynamic/moving NPCs, etc. In this example, the NPC “acquires” knowledge by polling the distance to the player and applies that “knowledge” by using its internal model to make a decision to walk or run.

    The term “acquiring knowledge” is pretty much as subjective as “intelligence”. In the case of an ant, for example, it can’t really learn anything, at best it has a tiny short-term memory in which it keeps certain most recent decisions, but it surely gets things done, like building colonies.

    For both cases, it’s just a line in the sand.