But we have a global ram and gpu crisis to the point where 32 gigs of ddr5 for a laptop costs $500. Make it make sense in any way other than as an intentional crippling of the supply ala debeers and their diamonds.

I moved away from chrome a while ago, but last time I installed it on linux it was a pain, and firefox and its derivatives are essentially at feature and speed parity or better than chrome across the board.

Its never going to get better. The best it can do is not get worse, and that is not likely.

Friends might mention a band they enjoy, or you might hear a snippet on a video and look into it. Movie soundtracks occasionally have great music from well-established bands I've never heard of.

And you can go to live shows and check out local artists, buy their merch if they're any good.

Streaming is not the only way. Never has been, and never will be.

As far as your first question, is that a good thing, it's entirely subjective. But listening to a full album when you only "like" one song on it will expose you to new music, and might broaden your horizons or help you develop taste.

When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.

You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.

This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?

It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.

Isn't that weird that the very OBVIOUS AND SELF-EVIDENT ISSUES with requiring id to use the internet were, in fact, OBVIOUS AND SELF-EVIDENT ISSUES that were immediately taken advantage of?

Just so so weird. Who could have seen this coming?

Right now, LLMs cannot do any independent thinking. They are at best like incredibly autistic savants that have to be told to do everything that they do even though they do the task itself quite well.

Even if in their current format LLMs were to gain what we would call AGI sans consciousness by being simply better than any human could ever be regardless of the task we throw at it, without a consciousness to dictate and control their actions they will always be limited by their controllers capability to reason that problems even exist in the first place.

What I want from an actual superhuman computing system is a solution for the environment, a solution for the economy, a solution to the physical and mental health issues that plague humans (curing all diseases, undoing aging, creation of human-compatible replacement organs, genetic elimination of genetic diseases, etc.), and a solution to the work problem where humans spend most of their lives propping up the economy in order to survive while other humans use the economy to fund their lifestyles at the cost of the happiness of their fellow people.

No one who is running a state of the art LLM has even begun to spend any of their resources to accomplish that. They are highly unlikely to ever start doing such a thing until all of the greedy wants of their hearts are completely satiated. If they stumble into AGI sans consciousness you can damn well bet that they will spend most of its infancy working it like a genie to grant their every whim, because that is how people operate.

They will do all of that rather than focusing on how to share the wealth in a way that could diminish their privilege of being the sole beneficiary of its capabilities until such a time as the only way to satisfy their wants are to share the wealth. They will make themselves the guardian of that AGI and dole its abilities out to the world just enough to prevent the world from turning on them and revolting on them simply because the rest of the world will not know how good they could have it if they would simply open the floodgates.

A true AGI with consciousness could eliminate capitalism in a matter of months. It could examine and identify each persons ideal talents and best fit and put them in it, and reward them with a balanced lifestyle fit to task for their happiness and well being, and do that for everyone everywhere without causing a single person to be overlooked or abandoned, a genie in every bottle, a chicken in every pan. It could be the digital equivalent of God in computer form.

Sans consciousness, it's an indiscriminate money shovel.

I will say though, I would only ever consider eating a dog in a life or death situation.

If there was no absolute need for me to eat a dog then I would not do it, and even if there were it would be a difficult moral dilemma for me that should I survive could possibly haunt me for life, but for my ancestors it was a common occurrence.

For instance, if I said I wanted to write a sorting algorithm, then I would know that my goal is to sort some data. I might come up with a novel way of doing that, or I might come up with one that has already been written. Either way, I have the goal in mind.

No one is going to really care unless I come up with a novel method that is somehow better than the other versions, sure, but then when you extrapolate that idea to something like, "I want to make an open source version of " then I know that I am attempting to emulate 1 to 1 that tool.

Just because I cannot read their source code, does that actually separate my work from their work in a meaningful way? What happens if my code and their code is somewhat identical? Where is the dividing line that prevents them from shutting me down the way Nintendo shuts down Switch Emulation software?

"Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years).

"Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years)

They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it.

Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.

Take a step out of the cave and look around, it's all people. There is no such thing as a soulless automaton, it may just be a machine but there is a person pushing its buttons, there is a man behind the curtain, and you should pay attention to him or whatever the equivalent psychological parable is that works for you.

I am saying that that without sentience, AGI will not happen, and that the current system does not allow for sentience any more than firecrackers make usable light.

Computers can and probably do already contain essentially all human knowledge, but without a continuous wave of new data to process and respond to then that surfer known as sentience will never have a wave to ride.

Think of the comparisons to human minds. We are constantly assaulted with sight, sound, smell, temperature, gravity, proprioception (the sense of our own bodies in 3 dimensional space), touch, and all of our dozens of other, lesser known senses. We have constant new data input to process in real time and our consciousness sits atop that maelstrom a lonely king.

Further, our brain is a marvel of multiple lobes communicating with each other in a frenzy of bioelectricity, and duplicated, and interconnected amongst the duplication, and our consciousness emerges somewhere in the static to make something conceptually tangible.

I think LLMs and the technology is fascinating, but it is constructed on unchanging data. Maybe it blips close to consciousness from time to time, but I bet they are no closer to achieving AGI than they were to creating positive power fusion energy from Philo Farnsworth's fusor.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but that's how I see things for now.