• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 16 days ago
cake
Cake day: July 27th, 2025

help-circle
  • I think current LLMs are already intelligent. I’d also say cats, mice, fish, birds are intelligent - to varying degrees of course.

    I’d like to see examples of LLMs paired with sensorimotor systems, if you know of any

    If you’re referring to my comment about hobbyist projects, I was just thinking of the sorts of things you’ll find on a search of sites like YouTube, perhaps this one is a good example (but I haven’t watched it as I’m avoiding YouTube). I don’t know if anyone has tried to incorporate a “learning to walk” type of stage into LLM training, but my point is that it would be perfectly possible, if there were reason to think it would give the LLM an edge.

    The matter of how intelligent humans are is another question, and relevant because AFAIK when people talk about AGI now, they’re talking about an AI that can do better on average than a typical human at any arbitrary task. It’s not a particularly high bar, we’re not talking about super-intelligence I don’t think.


  • thanks for this very yummy response. I’m having to read up about the technicalities you’re touching on so bear with me!

    According to wiki, the neocortex is only present in mammals but as I’m sure you’re aware mammals are not the only creatures to exhibit intelligence. Are you arguing that only mammals are capable of “general intelligence”? I can get on board with what you’re saying as *one way* to develop AGI - work out how brains do it and then copy that - but I don’t think it’s a given that that is the *only* way to AGI, even if we were to agree that only animals with a neocortex can have “general intelligence”. Hence the fact that a given class of machine architecture does not replicate a neocortex would not in my mind make that architecture incapable of ever achieving AGI.

    As for your point about the importance of sensorimotor integration, I don’t see that being problematic for any kind of modern computer software - we can easily hook up any number of sensors to a computer, and likewise we can hook the computer up to electric motors, servos and so on. We could easily “install” an LLM inside a robot and allow it to control the robot’s movement based on the sensor data. Hobbyists have done this already, many times, and it would not be hard to add a sensorimotor stage to an LLM’s training.

    I do like what you’re saying and find it interesting and thought-provoking. It’s just that what you’ve said hasn’t convinced me that LLMs are incapable of ever achieving AGI for those reasons. I’m not of the view that LLMs *are* capable of AGI though, it’s more like something that I don’t personally feel well enough informed upon to have a firm view. It does seem unlikely to me that we’ve currently reached the limits of what LLMs are capable of, but who knows.




  • You can choose any font you have locally available by setting the “reader.font_type” to the font name in about:config

    You can also set “reader.content_width” to values beyond the 9 allowed by the UI to have the text take up even more of your screen width. Setting it to 12 is just about perfect for me.

    These values will be lost if you update the font style or the width via the Reader “Text and Layout” menu though. For fonts, you might be able to avoid that by putting fonts you want to be able to select from in the “reader.font_type.values” list but I haven’t tried that.


  • Firefox reader mode is great. I started using it just to avoid having to tell sites to piss off with their cookies, and to dodge some paywalls, but now I use it on a lot of sites even when there aren’t any dialogs to dodge.

    I actually prefer having articles take up my screen width rather than be all squashed into a skinny little column in the centre. It’s also nice when trying to read someone’s blog with questionable text colour.


  • That’s good, thanks for that info. It does say it’s a “good will” gesture from the various train companies, but it seems to be a firm offer - would be good to have it enshrined in law nevertheless.

    From what I read, you need to get a Delay/Cancellation Confirmation somehow. You then would need to book a seat on one of the following trains - on some routes, most trains are full by the time of travel, and in the event of a delay like this, you’re probably not the only one needing to reschedule. You may well need to get a hotel overnight and travel the next day. All possible, but potentially stressful.

    I will still avoid getting long distance trains with connections - but saying that, none of the several international train journeys I’ve made so far have been delayed more than 15 minutes.

    Missing a connecting flight is no less stressful - and I also always avoid those as much as possible, although because long-distance flights are shorter, the knock-on effects of missing a connection tend to be less (more likely to be able to find a seat on a replacement flight on the same day for instance).







  • Archive link - https://archive.ph/6rgTS

    Definitely good news to hear. Over the last couple of years, I’ve made several long journeys by train that normally would have been by plane.

    One rule of thumb I’ve been using is to only get direct trains. I find travel a bit stressful in any case and I don’t want to be worrying about any delay with the first train causing me to miss the second. If the two trains are the same operator, you would at least be able to reschedule onto a later train - as long as there is one with free space which isn’t guaranteed at zero notice. If the trains are run by different operators then it’s presumably down to whatever agreements exist between them. So I skip all that uncertainty by only doing it when there’s a single direct train available. Hopefully the EU will come up with a good solution for this as well.