mr. h

Stymyx said:

[...] forcing people to wear one when they don't want to, that never works.  If they want to live dangerously, fine, let them.  If they don't, they're only endangering themselves.

If they are in a rear passenger seat, it is not true that they are only endangering themselves. In a high-energy crash, a person sitting in a rear passenger seat without a belt on, can crush a person sitting in a seat in front of them.

humbug1873 said:

So essentially features I don't care about the least but at least I can still use my 27'' iMac which Apple failed to replace with a silicon based model ... and no I don't care for a cluttered desktop with an additional box (MacBook, Mini, Studio) sitting on my desk.

You can get mount kits to attach a Mac mini to the back of a monitor.

john-useless said:

does anyone think there is enough of a market for Apple to sell a newly-designed 11- or 12-inch MacBook Air for $899?

[...]

Or, potential market demand aside, perhaps Apple wants to satisfy demand for smaller screens only by offering the various iPad models.

Yes to the second point; I'm sure Apple considers that size and price point to be covered by the iPad.

foregoneconclusion said:

hmlongco said:

foregoneconclusion said:

I don't need access to a gigantic database of previously written text in order to type or write. AI programs do. Turn off the database access and they're useless. 

As pointed out, they've been "trained" on a large corpus of information.

As have you, since birth.

Baloney. The "training" IS the database, i.e., exact duplicates of millions of written documents or millions of pixel base images. That's what the "AI" constantly accesses. The idea that computers are going to retain knowledge without exact copies of the material being stored somewhere is ludicrous.

No. That is wrong. That is not how generative AI works. It's how a lot of people think it works, leading to the kinds of fallacious claims that you are making. Generative AI works in a much, much closer way to how your brain works than you either understand or are willing to admit.

An LLM's training and learning really is similar (not identical) to how you learnt your native language as a baby. No-one could "explain" to you what language is - you were just exposed to a lot of it, and your brain had to form new neural pathways to try to figure it out. Your brain detected that it was hearing the same "kinds" of sounds repeatedly, and that re-inforced certain pathways in your brain. That forms the basic scaffold that enabled your brain to then recognise whole words, and from there, start to figure out how to use those words yourself.

foregoneconclusion said:

mr. h said:

Highly advanced cut-and-paste.

Is a gross over-simplification of what these tools do. In fact, it may not even be an oversimplification, but rather just flat-out wrong. When you are typing, are you performing "highly advanced cut-and-paste"?

I don't need access to a gigantic database of previously written text in order to type or write. AI programs do. Turn off the database access and they're useless. 

No, that is not what an LLM is. The model was trained on a large database, but it does not access that database when generating responses.