Farid

Which is why I said “technically”.

Technically, MacOS doesn’t cost money to use and has no ads.

Pff, millions? How about 3 billions!

Technically, it’s not about the display technology, but instead about the signal/tuner. More specifically if it’s analog or digital. Some modern TVs still have analog or hybrid tuners for backwards compatibility and regions that still use analog, so they can display static. For instance, in Ukraine we finished the switch to digital TV only a couple of years ago. If your TV had no digital tuner (as was the case for many) you had to buy a DAC box. Retirees/pensioners got them for free, sponsored by the government.

I’ll have you know, that I have it on good authority (from the ever rational and totally not an echo chamber Hexbear) that the invasion is actually very successful and Russia is winning. By a lot!

PipeWire is a server and user space API to deal with multimedia pipelines. This includes:

• Making available sources of video (such as from a capture devices or application provided streams) and multiplexing this with clients.
• Accessing sources of video for consumption.
• Generating graphs for audio and video processing.

Nodes in the graph can be implemented as separate processes, communicating with sockets and exchanging multimedia content using fd passing.

Am I the only one who doesn’t see a less buff John Cena in that photo?

Or worse… expelled.

– No, don’t call my mother, she’ll be so mad! She told me that if I die I shouldn’t come back home for dinner…

Appreciate the Cutting Crew reference. But I can and I will.

According to my brain, every time I have to interact with a stranger.

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.

Opponent players in games have been labeled AI for decades, so yeah, software engineers have been producing AI for a while. If a computer can play a game of chess against you, it has intelligence, a very narrowly scoped intelligence, which is artificial, but intelligence nonetheless.

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.

To say it’s not intelligence is incorrect. It’s still (an inferior kind of) intelligence, humans just put certain expectations into the word. An ant has intelligence. An NPC in a game has intelligence. They are just very basic kinds of intelligence, very simple decision making patterns.

I selected all and it’s still not enough of a reason!

Bow to Alec! Let Alec consume you!

Radical approach, because I might miss the post with interesting comments, and people often provide alternative links or straight up embed summaries.

How dare you ignore Alec’s video? 😤