The aggregate effect of the chemical gradients in the antheap controls the ants. It's similar in these giant companies where the combination of all the incentives makes for a gradient towards certain outcomes. I can see little intentionality or individual agency in what the likes of Google have produced in the last two decades.

Language is intersubjective (its meaning is in the minds of the participants). Referring to the history or composition of a word is interesting but entirely insufficient to justify its use.

> intersubjective

I often quote what we do in the server-client relation: interpret loosely but express correctly.

It is not just a way of communication: language is one of the factors behind thought: hence, its care must be cared for and promoted.

Sure, also the context and the communication need have a weight. But without compromising into conformism (as in, "doing it wrong because people do").

> its meaning is in the minds of the participants

Awareness has its benefits (the greatest understatement I have ever written); licence has its costs.

> entirely insufficient to justify its use

Why. The competent will always use tools differently than the layman and the amateur. Again the server client (and always the need of good thought in the background): you will express as best as you can and try to be clear (communicatively efficient) within that framework.

Not definitively. LLMs are stochastic with respect to input, temperature and the exact prompt. It's possible that the model was already capable of it but never received the exact right conditions to produce this output.

Every model is able to solve each problem, given the right prompt. (Worst case, the prompt contains the solution.)

Interesting... Exhaustive brute force prompting might expose previously unknown capabilities in existing models. Seems like a whole can of worms.

Exhaustive brute force prompting is completely unfeasible. The number of potential prompts is impossibly large.

It "exhaustive brute forcing" approach does not need an LLM in the loop. Just brute force the possible outputs instead. They will contain all the most beautiful novels you can imagine!

That's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.

This is how it works in the US. Federal/State/County/City.

State governments are very much not under "management" of the federal government.

We're trying to have a discussion about facts, not opinions.

Ecological footprints are more about the distribution of resource burdens between first and third world countries. Predictions about resource exhaustion have proved mostly false.

That's the definition of a tree though. Everything has a parent, no cycles allowed.

That sounds like people making an informed decision about their body to me. Doctors don't need to be inserted into every risky decision.

If you think that sounds like an informed decision then you might be proving their point.

You can't trust what a model says about itself. It has no ability to introspect.

A lot of enterprise orgs are completely helpless without Microsofts' identity solutions. That's what makes it easy to just adopt more and more Microsoft products.