I used to work at Epic as a software developer. The experience with MyChart isn’t particularly surprising. I generally think that Epic is pretty genuinely well-intentioned, as companies go, but they’re not particularly incentivized to put more than the bare minimum of effort in this process, since the number of patients who want to opt out is very low, and it’s in Epic’s interest for patients to be signed up (not, I think, for nefarious reasons like selling data; Care Everywhere data is covered by HIPAA and misuse would be a serious legal liability for Epic. But having more patients lets them tout their exchange numbers, etc).

Some of this can also probably be said about the hospital itself. They probably slapped together a process needed to meet legal requirements, but don’t put much effort into it beyond that. It wouldn’t surprise me if they simply didn’t have the resources to spare for it.

Sounds good! And the emergency is that there are too many data centers on the grid.

If one of these bumped into me I feel like I’d want to tip it over in response.

Another option is to disable the warning locally […] But this is compiler-specific and noisy. It also does not explain the real issue to anyone reading the code.

I don’t understand this logic. Surely disabling the warning is directly explaining the actual issue, that the code emits a false positive warning for specific compilers and conditions? That the false_but_compiler_does_not_know_it_ thing is apparently the better way to convey what’s going on seems kind of ridiculous.

They’re really playing up the ominous tone.

“We know this because your IP address — xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx — was the first thing your device sent us. We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice. We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.”

Uh, yeah. That’s how IP addresses work.

Most of the time the front doesn’t fall off at all! Unless a wave hits it.

One of the options under the connect/share button is “Start content server”. Then you can access that page in a browser on the ebook.

Calibre just provides a little management on top. I use it for doing things like cleaning up metadata (making sure all books in a series have the same series name, for example), and transferring books over wifi (calibre can spin up a mini web server that I can access on the kobo).

I could get by without it, but it’s nice sometimes.

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise

Ok, the wikipedia page for bisphenol does mention skin absorption.

Is this a “don’t lick the headphones” thing, or can these chemicals be absorbed through the skin?

No option for “a little AI, maybe, where it makes sense, but don’t go crazy with it” option, I see.

Does navidrome support Chromecast? I’ve had a hard time finding a self hosted music solution that will actual cast. I do have a public facing domain name with certs that, as far as I can tell, is working correctly.

If I ran the zoo, then any AI that trained on intellectual property as if it were public domain would automatically become public domain itself.

I installed linux on my PC a couple months ago. The other day I wanted to log back into my windows partition for the first time in a while in order to clean up some of the files on that partition (even though the drive is mounted in linux, the windows “fast boot” option apparently leaves it in a state that linux considers read-only). Windows apparently wouldn’t let me log in without a microsoft account, instead of just using my regular windows username.

So yeah, that partition’s gone now. No going back!

Cherry-picking a couple of points I want to respond to together

It is somewhat like a memory buffer but, there is no analysis being linguistics. Short-term memory in biological systems that we know have multi-sensory processing and analysis that occurs inline with “storing”. The chat session is more like RAM than short-term memory that we see in biological systems.

It is also purely linguistic analysis without other inputs out understanding of abstract meaning. In vacuum, it’s a dead-end towards an AGI.

I have trouble with this line of reasoning for a couple of reasons. First, it feels overly simplistic to me to write what LLMs do off as purely linguistic analysis. Language is the input and the output, by all means, but the same could be said in a case where you were communicating with a person over email, and I don’t think you’d say that that person wasn’t sentient. And the way that LLMs embed tokens into multidimensional space is, I think, very much analogous to how a person interprets the ideas behind words that they read.

As a component of a system, it becomes much more promising.

It sounds to me like you’re more strict about what you’d consider to be “the LLM” than I am; I tend to think of the whole system as the LLM. I feel like drawing lines around a specific part of the system is sort of like asking whether a particular piece of someone’s brain is sentient.

Conversely, if the afflicted individual has already developed sufficiently to have abstract and synthetic thought, the inability to store long-term memory would not dampen their sentience.

I’m not sure how to make a philosophical distinction between an amnesiac person with a sufficiently developed psyche, and an LLM with a sufficiently trained model. For now, at least, it just seems that the LLMs are not sufficiently complex to pass scrutiny compared to a person.

LLMs, fundamentally, are incapable of sentience as we know it based on studies of neurobiology

Do you have an example I could check out? I’m curious how a study would show a process to be “fundamentally incapable” in this way.

LLMs do not synthesize. They do not have persistent context.

That seems like a really rigid way of putting it. LLMs do synthesize during their initial training. And they do have persistent context if you consider the way that “conversations” with an LLM are really just including all previous parts of the conversation in a new prompt. Isn’t this analagous to short term memory? Now suppose you were to take all of an LLM’s conversations throughout the day, and then retrain it overnight using those conversations as additional training data? There’s no technical reason that this can’t be done, although in practice it’s computationally expensive. Would you consider that LLM system to have persistent context?

On the flip side, would you consider a person with anterograde amnesia, who is unable to form new memories, to lack sentience?

lol, yeah, I guess the Socratic method is pretty widely frowned upon. My bad. =D

I don’t think it’s just a question of whether AGI can exist. I think AGI is possible, but I don’t think current LLMs can be considered sentient. But I’m also not sure how I’d draw a line between something that is sentient and something that isn’t (or something that “writes” rather than “generates”). That’s kinda why I asked in the first place. I think it’s too easy to say “this program is not sentient because we know that everything it does is just math; weights and values passing through layered matrices; it’s not real thought”. I haven’t heard any good answers to why numbers passing through matrices isn’t thought, but electrical charges passing through neurons is.

Sure, I’m not entitled to anything. And I appreciate your original reply. I’m just saying that your subsequent comments have been useless and condescending. If you didn’t have time to discuss further then… you could have just not replied.