Seems legit to me. The oldest news item is from 2021. The domain name is new, but there seems to have been some rebranding lately. The product used to be called Pocket RentalOS and even that seems to be fairly recent rebranding [2]

[1] https://pocketos.ai/ [2] https://pocketos.ai/news/pocket-rebrands-its-luxury-rental-m...

This had the result that a single farmer was not able to cumulate any kind of a buffer of surplus against a lean year. As a countermeasure the subsistence farmers developed a culture of mutual help and solidarity, where it simply was not socially acceptable not to help the neighbor, who had lost their crops. As long as at least some of the members of the community had a decent yield, the whole community survived.

Reading this was very eye opening to me and it at least sounded plausible. ACOUP is often mentioned here, deservedly. This was one of the best gems I have found.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

I haven't studied neuroscience so I don't know how you define consciousness. I have read Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness..." which in my untrained opinion makes a compelling case that consciousness is a hard term to define.

I'm not sure if ChatGPT also cumulates its previous answers in the context. It might do that as well. In that case the prompts would be q, qaq and qaqaq where 'q' is your question and 'a' the earlier reaction from the LLM.

The illusion of sentience comes from this. The new answers reflected what you said because the prompt was different and included the previous discussion.

This is a feature of the user interface, not the language model. The only reason why the language model would respond differently to the same input is the artificial randomness mixed with the input. Without it it would be totally deterministic and not appear sentient at all. It would still be as knowledgeable as before. Like a parrot trained to be very good at combining key words to key responses.

In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a simple formula. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play the game of go very effectively or even infinitely effectively.

A lot of what happens in the world can be modeled in a similar vein by a very simple mathematical model like the game of life. But there is also a lot that cannot. I do believe that eventually also human understanding is just a model of the world that we feed input from perceptions and gain output as opinions, but it is way more complex than the current large language-trained models.

For a very simple example, a LLM would answer a prompt the same way every time unless it wasn't fed some randomness. Can you imagine any sentient being that would respond the same way every time if you asked the same question three times in a row?

I cannot. I would imagine any sentient object would give a different answer every time. The first time it would give you an honest answer based on what it knows about the topic. The second time it would be a little embarrassed that you repeat the question, as if you hadn't heard the first answer. The third time it would be pissed off and think you are a troll.

A LLM does none of this. It doesn't remember you or your previous questions. It just keeps hallucinating.

University education does not need to be expensive. On the contrary, it can be free.

What's more alarming is that it seems those 32 years old files at ftp.funet.fi are mostly unreadable by now. Back then I thought PostScript would last but alas! that is not the case. Ghostcript can show just about the cover page and that's all.

Libreoffice does a little bit better with the DOC-file but it's still not quite right.

So if there is anything to learn it's about persistent document formats. I wish I had known about LaTeX back then.

Cannot help feeling good of seeing it's still there. https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/

Only curiosity value is left probably, but back then it felt like magic to be able to publish something like this on my own. Half a dozen people even asked for the diskette, which I sent to them.

So to me it sounds like this: you hired me to make a wall of bricks around your garden. I did it and presented you a bill: bricks 100$, mortar 20$, work 300$. Then you say I cannot charge for work as that's intangible and I have to restructure the bill by allocating the cost of work to the tangible objects. So instead of charging for work I split the cost of it by two and charge a bricklaying fee of 150$ divided by the number of bricks for each brick and another 150$ for mixing the mortar. Because I'm pissed off by your awkward and unpractical accounting requirements and not going to start figuring out more complex ways of dividing the cost between the materials, when everybody knows that it's the bricklaying that counts and not the bricks or mortar.

And that's how you get very expensive mortar or 600$ hammers.

Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture.

Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.

It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.

I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy.

Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.

Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.

Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.