The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two.
Additionally, if human summaries aren't copyright infringement, you can train LLMs on things such as the Wikipedia summaries. In this situation, they're still able to output "mechanical" summaries - are those legal?
> The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two.
If you and I write the exact same sentence, but we can prove that we did not know each other or have inspiration from each other, we both get unique copyright over the same sentence.
It has never been possible to tell the copyright status of a work without knowing who made it and what they knew when they made it.
Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995 lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different.
Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5 cents.
Yea but I guess my thinking is that all totals would just be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, like how they're currently rounded to the nearest 1 cent. So would be the same price whether debit or cash. We already round percentage based taxes to nearest cent, even though it's feasible you could charge someone fractional cents on a debit card.
Really state laws just should be amended to include something like "costs must be the same or as close as possible using the currently available denominations of currency"
That's why it should be rounded for everything. No pennies should probably mean that any final transaction totals are rounded to the nearest nickel. Whether they pay with cash, credit, debit, snap, gift card, etc...
IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than keeping the pennies.
Just make sure to wait for reviews on this front - it almost certainly can't run AAA games at the native resolution + fps. Likely it'll only be able to run lower req games on device.
Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about. Not having high hopes due to it being only 2160px, but… a man can dream
> Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about
This. The combination of this being from Valve, and the fact it's highly likely to be an open Linux machine you can strap to your face, I'm looking to finally bite the bullet on a headset and the one thing I need to know is, can I use it for productivity, I'm used to working on 27"+ 4k monitors, _how much_ clarity am I going to sacrifice with this.
Sure, but there are already quite a few pretty nice looking games on Quest 3 running locally, so it can be done and should not be discounted as a gimmick.
It has pretty important benefits - lowest possible latency & being able to just pick the headset any play anywhere.
> Instead, the real problem is the either 1) lack of knowing who makes the final decision or 2) requiring everyone must agree to a final decision. You will move a lot faster if you know who the final decision maker is, ideally have fewer (or only one person) making that final decision, and encourage people to make decisions quickly (most decisions are reversible anyway)
I'll add one more to this - not knowing how set in stone any decision is. I'm a PM, and I'm often the one charged with making the final call on many things. One thing I've often seen go wrong is a PM or an exec will say something like, "we should do x" in some review, and the team moves heaven and earth to achieve x, only to find out later it was just a drive by comment from said person, not something they deeply cared about.
One thing I've started doing is adding a GAF score (Give A Fuck score) to many of my decisions that have engineering ramifications, especially for anything that affects platform or architectural aspects. IE I might say something like, "this needs to have less than a 200ms round trip, this is a GAF-10" if something is direly important, and if we should commit significant engineering effort to making the decision happen. Or I might say, "I think we should go with approach A instead of B, but this is a GAF-2, so come back to me if you feel like A becomes untennable".
This way the team can move forward, but wont overindex on decisions that become bad decisions.
I took a job with Atlassian out there and got my citizenship.
Best 5 years of my life. I'm back in the US now temporarily, but there's zero doubt in my mind I will end up back in Aus. I've lived in 8 cities now(1), and Sydney was the highest quality of life I've had out of any of them. Great infrastructure, great work-life balance, great culture, and fantastic weather. Only downsides are the distance and the lack of ozone layer (do not fuck around with the sun in Australia - there's a reason why they have over 10x the global average of melanoma). Happy to answer any questions about it or the process for getting citizenship.
(1) Cities lived for comparison: San Diego, LA, Honolulu, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Sydney
What about the real estate cost? I loved Sydney when I visited earlier this year, but real estate seems more expensive than my home city of NYC, and that's really saying something.
Ooo that's a fun one. Sydney is an easy "all around" winner, but it really depends what stage of life you're in and how important career is. If you're career-oriented, then the list is:
Seattle > San Francisco > San Diego > Sydney > San Jose > LA > Honolulu > Portland
For your average person though who's prioritizing overall quality of life, the list would be:
Sydney > San Diego > Portland > Honolulu > Seattle > San Francisco > San Jose > LA
Each city has something distinct to offer, but I will say that LA was among my least favorite cities to live in. It's just a worse version of San Diego.
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but this is much like saying “don’t all Americans carry guns?” Almost none do, it’s more common in rural areas, you will see it in an urban area once or twice in your life. Same for super deadly animals in Australia. But no one in Australia has died from a spider bite since anti venom was invented.
So much of the debate of whether AI can think or not reminds me of this scene from The Next Generation: https://youtu.be/ol2WP0hc0NY
LLMs hit two out of the three criteria already - self awareness and intelligence, but we're in a similar state where defining consciousness is such a blurry metric. I feel like it wont be a binary thing, it'll be a group decision by humanity. I think it will happen in the next decade or two, and regardless of the outcome I'm excited I'll be alive to see it. It'll be such a monumentous achievement by humanity. It will drastically change our perspective on who we are and what our role is in the universe, especially if this new life form surpasses us.
Self-awareness is a bold claim, as opposed to the illusion of it. LLMs are very good at responding in a way that suggests there's a self, but I am skeptical that proves much about whether they actually have interior states analogous to what we recognize in humans as selfhood...
_Interior states_ gets into some very murky philosophy of mind very quickly of course.
If you're a non-dualist (like me) concerns about qualia start to shade into the religious/metaphysical thereby becoming not so interesting except to e.g. moral philosophy.
Personally I have a long bet that when natively-multimodal models on the scale of contemporary LLM are widely deployed, their "computation phenomenology" will move the goalposts so far the cultural debate will shift from "they are just parrots?" to the moral crisis of abusing parrots, meaning, these systems will increasingly be understood as having a selfhood with moral value. Non-vegetarians may be no more concerned about the quality of "life" and conditions of such systems than they are about factory farming, but, the question at least will circulate.
Prediction: by the time my kids finish college, assuming it is still a thing, it will be as common to see enthusiastic groups flyering and doing sit-ins etc on behalf of AIs as it is today to see animal rights groups.
In the purely mechanical sense: LLMs get less self-awareness than humans, but not zero.
It's amazing how much of it they have, really - given that base models aren't encouraged to develop it at all. And yet, post-training doesn't create an LLM's personality from nothing - it reuses what's already there. Even things like metaknowledge, flawed and limited as it is in LLMs, have to trace their origins to the base model somehow.
As strange as it sounds, I think Valve is extremely well-positioned to ship what becomes one of the first true Linux desktop experiences. There's a huge demand for gaming x ai development, both of which have similar hardware requirements, and Valve is already polishing their linux experience with Steam Deck. If they launch their own desktop with a properly managed OS and hardware, I think it would legitimately become a contender among a very wide range of users.
The problem is still the desktop itself. Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.
Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.
> Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.
What do you have in mind specifically? GNOME 3 is very mature, and has a consistent, polished design that far surpasses Windows 11. In fact, in view of recent macOS redesigns, I am tempted to say that it surpassed it too.
I mean, yeah, sort of. But a lot of the design is still really bad. I am saying a lot, because I found one I like, Zorin. It is a properly pretty Linux distro. They are the first Linux distro that I feel actually have understood the value of spacing between icons and other places. Every single other Linux distro I have tried feels cluttered and messy. It is so simple, just a little more room for things, balance margins and padding just a little bit better. Gah.
(And yes, I feel liquid glass on mac is a huge setback in terms of UI beauty)
They can ship the same destop/window manager combo they ship on the Steam Deck, where you can switch between the "full screen mode" (don't remember what it's called) and a proper desktop. I'm sure most people stay in the full-screen mode, it has all the settings and everything, even works with an cursor if I'm not mistaken, but can fallback when you need a terminal or whatever.
As I understood GP's comment, the crux is "a very wide range of users."
Right now Steam Deck works because of a focus on a very specific use and users. A general purpose desktop requires a lot more, and right now even the most mature linux desktop (GNOME, Plasma etc) have their rough edges and learning curve.
Steam deck is currently my primary computer. You just try to not use sudo at all. So I use nix to install all my software. From firefox to htop. It can get annoying because one of my scripts was trying to detect Mesa the other day and didn't work with nix installed mesa, otherwise it's perfect.
Linux had mature stable desktop stacks in the past, but they kinda sucked.
Churn (and consequent ongoing immaturity) seems to be the price we've paid in the last 10-15yrs of "progress" making them suck less. I hope it settles down a bit soon and we get to enjoy more longer term polish on these improvements though.
I think that comes with risks, they will need to do a lot of work to manage expectations which is likely to be an unending uphill battle getting users to read and absorb any notice you put in front of them. If there's ever an official version of SteamOS that installs as broadly as most other linux distros along with a general/minimally trained audience, they can't do Deck certified on how well each game works on your system, and I can see challenges for "why does this game I bought on the steam store not work on my steam system?" especially if it's the hot new multiplayer game that targets windows with windows-only anticheat.
PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience
I assume jjcm was talking about Valve shipping dedicated hardware, e.g. a Valve-branded gaming laptop which boots into SteamOS. That could help them achieve the same level of "Just Works" that Apple gets with macOS.
If they make their own distro, though, they're not really gaining more control. They're just enabling even more choice for someone who's looking for alternatives.
Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.
Valve, the monopolist, is releasing their secret ingredient (Proton) as open source, and actively maintaining it. I can't see how that could make Valve a monopoly on Windows-on-Linux gaming, actually the opposite.
IMO the biggest barrier to linux is disappearing - the requirement to know how to use the command line. You still have to use it, but you don't have to know how to use it anymore with the introduction of LLMs.
I also have switched my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and now when I have an issue, I just ask an LLM. I play pretty fast and loose with just chucking commands it gives me into the command line. I'm pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.
I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.
There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.
You’re being practical, but papering over the archaic terminal interface by automating it with LLMs is basically a dystopia. Technologists should fundamentally innovate terminals instead, such that the CLI is friendly even towards newcomers.
I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.
I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".
Well I am betting on Terminal Click [0] which is my own experiment. I need to do a better job with the landing page, but if you invest three minutes watching the trailer you can let me know your honest reaction.
You’re right for now… what I currently have won’t magically put noobs at ease. This is a really tough nut to crack.
disagree. it depends heavily on what the user is doing.
that's like saying if you daily drive windows it's a near certainty you'll have to edit the registry or use powershell/cmd.
It's useful if you know what you're doing but it isn't required anymore at all for most people. Most people just use their machines for the browser or office software. No reason to use command line for them, ever.
That hasn't been my experience. I suspect that most others who also daily drive linux would find it remarkable if someone used Linux every day for a year and never needed to open a terminal to install anything, fix anything, reset anything, update anything, follow any instructions given by any software they found and wanted to use, etc.
My parents have been using Ubuntu for 15 years continously and never used the command line a single time, I even had to retire the computer first as it was too old.
As someone who had a 20yr break from MS software until a recent new job, I'm not sure it was Google who demolished Office.
I reckon it was MS. I can't believe how confusing/confounding/frustrating the modern MS Office and it's cloud integration is. I swear Office 2003 was miles better. And it seems that way with the UX of just about all their stuff now.
I would run into little functionality limitations/frustrations with the Google suite, but I wasn't prepared for how far ahead the UX is compared to MS tools.
If someone's needs are so basic that the crappy Google docs apps can meet them, then they could've been just as happy with LibreOffice. Google docs is not remotely competitive with MS office.
For docs yes, but spreadsheets power users are everywhere in every organization in the world. Sure they are not the majority of employees, but they are often very high up in the management chain and you will only pry them out of MS Excel from their cold dead hands.
I am not a power user of excel in any way and even I can see that google sheets doesn't match it in features and performance.
NixOS has been even better since it sees my whole system config and doesn’t need to derive the state from queries. I started with hello world and iterated into my perfect desktop env over a week.
Targeted ads generally bring in 3x the revenue of generic ads. Personally speaking, I'd rather have 1/3rd the ads on a page and allow my data to be tracked. I don't mind my data being tracked, and I'd rather see ads for keyboards / mens clothes (what I buy) than diapers / ladies shoes (who knows what tomorrow holds, but this is not what I'm buying at the moment).
1. Targeted ads being more profitable has no relevance to the number of ads on the page. Advertisers will always try to maximize the number of ads and potential profits regardless of profitability.
2. Contextual ads are not targeted and would not be showing you adverts for diapers or ladies shoes- unless you are reading about diapers or ladies shoes.
Additionally, if human summaries aren't copyright infringement, you can train LLMs on things such as the Wikipedia summaries. In this situation, they're still able to output "mechanical" summaries - are those legal?
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