I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.

Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.

Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...

I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.

Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?

I wouldn't bother with less than 32GB of VRAM. With 16GB you can already run something usable, but 32GB gives you much more power. 9B and 14B are only interesting if you want to tune models yourself. The sweet spot now seem to be around 27B-35B.

https://pine64.org/2026/03/24/march_2026_fosdem/#where-is-th...

In the long run - without PinePhone - people will lose more and more control over hardware and drivers.

The news here is that AI has too much trust in the internet. The first time I allowed tool-calling, it started googling up some nonsense instead of thinking... But I think at least it's possible for the AI to evaluate the quality of the source - you just have to ask for an analysis, and you'll get a reasonable evaluation. With humans, something like that just doesn't work - they'll get aggressive or might even start throwing bananas...

100 dpi with subpixel rendering already maxes out angular resolution (horizontal). It doesn't max out everything (retinal), so you still see some artifacts, but practically this is not that relevant. The price in energy/bandwidth rises quadratic for very little gain.

To get the equivalent of 4K at 100 ppi - with 200 ppi you have to put the burden of 8K onto the GPU... For now this is absolutely not good - High ppi is ok for small monitors and handheld devices, but for a decent desk with several good monitors GPUs just aren't ready yet.