There’s a whole history of people, both inside and outside the field, shifting the definition of AI to exclude any problem that had been the focus of AI research as soon as it’s solved.

Bertram Raphael said “AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer.”

Pamela McCorduck wrote “it’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, but that’s not thinking” (Page 204 in Machines Who Think).

In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter named “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet” Tesler’s Theorem (crediting Larry Tesler).

https://praxtime.com/2016/06/09/agi-means-talking-computers/ reiterates the “AI is anything we don’t yet understand” point, but also touches on one reason why LLMs are still considered AI - because in fiction, talking computers were AI.

The author also quotes Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence:

Now we can see the entire picture. Nature first created animals such as reptiles with sophisticated senses and sophisticated but relatively rigid behaviors. It then discovered that by adding a memory system and feeding the sensory stream into it, the animal could remember past experiences. When the animal found itself in the same or a similar situation, the memory would be recalled, leading to a prediction of what was likely to happen next. Thus, intelligence and understanding started as a memory system that fed predictions into the sensory stream. These predictions are the essence of understanding. To know something means that you can make predictions about it. …

The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive memory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear, and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

If Searle’s Chinese Room contained a similar memory system that could make predictions about what Chinese characters would appear next and what would happen next in the story, we could say with confidence that the room understood Chinese and understood the story. We can now see where Alan Turing went wrong. Prediction, not behavior, is the proof of intelligence.

Another reason why LLMs are still considered AI, in my opinion, is that we still don’t understand how they work - and by that, I of course mean that LLMs have emergent capabilities that we don’t understand, not that we don’t understand how the technology itself works.

We are. Why do you think we stopped?

Thank you! That gives me a starting point that should be easy to look up!

From the blog post referenced:

We do not provide evidence that:

AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

Seems the article should be titled “16 AI coders think they’re 20% faster — but they’re actually 19% slower” - though I guess making us think it was intended to be a statistically relevant finding was the point.

That all said, this was genuinely interesting and is in-line with my understanding of the human psychology that’s at play. It would be nice to see this at a wider scale, broken down across different methodologies / toolsets and models.

Why is 255 off limits? What is 127.0.0.0 used for?

To clarify, I meant that specific address - if the range starts at 127.0.0.1 for local, then surely 127.0.0.0 does something (or is reserved to sometimes do something, even if it never actually does in practice), too.

Advanced setup would include a reverse proxy to forward the requests from the applications port to the internet

I use Traefik as my reverse proxy, but I have everything on subdomains for simplicity’s sake (no path mapping except when necessary, which it generally isn’t). I know 127.0.0.53 has special meaning when it comes to how the machine directs particular requests, but I never thought to look into whether Traefik or any other reverse proxy supported routing rules based on the IP address. But unless there’s some way to specify that IP and the IP of the machine, it would be limited to same device communications. Makes me wonder if that’s used for any container system (vs the use of the 10, 172.16-31, and 192.168 blocks that I’ve seen used by Docker).

Well this is another advanced setup but if you wanted to segregate two application on different subnets you can. I’m not sure if there is a security benefit by adding the extra hop

Is there an extra hop when you’re still on the same machine? Like an extra resolution step?

I still don’t understand why .255 specifically is prohibited. 8 bits can go up to 255, so it seems weird to prohibit one specific value. I’ve seen router subnet configurations that explicitly cap the top of the range at .254, though - I feel like I’ve also seen some that capped at .255 but I don’t have that hardware available to check. So my assumption is that it’s implementation specific, but I can’t think of an implementation that would need to reserve all the .255 values. If it was just the last one, that would make sense - e.g., as a convention for where the DHCP server lives on each network.

Why is 255 off limits? What is 127.0.0.0 used for?

PSTN is wiretapped.

It’s a good thing that the website itself supports sending and receiving alerts, then.

Current generation iPad Pros and Airs have the same processing power as Apple Silicon Macs. That’s more than enough for Blender. Even the base iPad and the iPad Mini likely have enough processing power - though I don’t think the base iPad has enough RAM.

Does mirroring a screen (or adding a screen) from a computer or connecting to a computer via remote desktop count?

if everyone thought like you no one would create digital media

This is obviously incorrect.

When did Democrats have a supermajority in both the House and the Senate?

I thought Hue bulbs used Zigbee?

The up arrow moves through the letters, e.g., A->B->C. The down arrow moves to the next character in the sequence, e.g., C->CA->CAA. If you click past the correct letter, you’ll have to click all the way through again. And if you submit the wrong letter, you have to start all over (after it takes twenty seconds attempting to connect with the wrong password and then alerts you that it didn’t work, of course).

Depends on your e-reader! If you have a Kindle, Kobo, or Nook, yes, that’s true. However:

Boox has e-readers that run Android and you can install Hoopla. The Palma 2 is phone sized which is great. The Page, Leaf2, and Go 7 are all in the 7” form factor, plus they have 6” versions. And they have tablet sizes, too. They have both traditional black&white and color e-ink displays.

I have the Boox Air 3C and the original Palma and both are great. I’ll likely get a Boox as my next standard sized e-reader, too (whenever I replace my Kindle Oasis). Though unless the technology drastically improves before then, it’ll be one with a black and white screen. (The color is nice in the tablet sizes, though, especially for comics from Hoopla.)

Some other options that I’m less familiar with include:

• Bigme has Android 7” color e-readers, as well as tablets and e-ink smartphones.
• Meebook has e-readers that run Android (and Android e-ink tablets)
• The MuSnap Aura C is a 10” Android e-ink tablet
• XPPen has an 11” Android e-ink tablet

Okay, and? What nontechnical user cares enough to use it specifically when they could use Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Polaris Office, MobiOffice, WPS Office, Collabora, etc., instead?

But do nontechnical users care about the “missing” features? A lot of nontechnical users prefer simpler apps.

There is a version of Blender that was made for Android. It’s quite old, though. But if you’re competent enough with Blender that you’ve memorized all its keyboard shortcuts and workflows, you’re likely technical enough to get it working via Termux. But if not, Nomad Sculpt (on both iOS and Android), SpaceDraw (Android only), and several other apps can serve the same purposes.

Not sure why you listed video editing software and two different specific video editors, but Android and iOS both have Lumafusion. I’m sure there are other decent editors but I haven’t used them because Lumafusion is great. iPads do have DaVinci Resolve, though, for what that’s worth. If you care about using a FOSS video editor then you should care enough to install it via Termux. But let’s be real, most nontechnical users are probably happy using CapCut.

DJ software - Cross DJ is free. There are other alternatives. And there are web based DJ software apps like YouDJ.

It’s incredibly compatible. Capitalists want laborers to work hard. It encourages laborers to work hard so they can one day be capitalists themselves.

It also encourages them to vote for politicians who don’t serve them, but politicians, because someday they’ll benefit from their pro-business policies.

The American Dream is capitalist propaganda, not anticapitalist.

OnlyOffice is available on Android already.

“any linux app” - I don’t think any nontechnical users want GParted on their Android phones, and it wouldn’t work anyway.

Android has its own games, same as iOS. Nontechnical users are way more likely to want Windows games than Linux games anyway.

Wine used to be developed natively for Android but they stopped a few years back. You can still download it at winehq though. I think Box64 with wine is a decent option?

Overall the thing I’m confused about is why you think Google or any major Android phone manufacturer have a motivation to make native Linux apps more accessible. Google certainly doesn’t want to make it easier for you to use the better versions of their competitors’ apps. Google is moving further away from Linux, not closer. Providing a usable, good enough desktop experience that’s still Android underneath makes far more sense for them.

Fortunately, like I said earlier, there are workarounds to get access to those Linux apps.

The thing that is more likely to change is for the creators of Android apps to build apps that function better when used in a phone-as-desktop format. And even if they don’t, there are enough competent web apps out there that just being able to use your browser full screen on a monitor solves 90% of people’s actual use cases - and probably over 95% when you include the other apps that have decent desktop experiences that can be run alongside them.

The Steam Deck approach is much closer to what you seem to want. The Steam Deck is an actually competent Linux machine that has a Valve-supported compatibility layer in Proton for running non-Linux games. It plugs into a USB-C hub connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard just fine, can install any Linux app, etc… It’s completely usable handheld as well. But it isn’t a phone, and even though it’s quite portable, it’s not “stick into your pocket” portable.

I don’t expect a major manufacturer to make a Linux phone any time soon, and I don’t think the Linux phones that are out already have - or will have in the next 5 years - a smooth enough experience to convince any nontechnical user to switch.

There are mobile versions for all of those?