Because it has no mind, no cognition, and nothing to "feel" with. Don't mistake programmatic mimicry for intention. That's just your own linguistic-forward primate cognition being fooled by the linguistic signals the training set and prompt are making the AI emit.
I could describe the electrical and chemical signals within your neurons and synapses as proof that you are merely a series of electrochemical reactions, and can only mimic genuine thought.
You could do that if you wanted to ignore reality and be reductive to score points in an argument by purposefully conflating mimicry with intention, yes.
And that is dogma. It's unthinking circular reasoning.
It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.
Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable, because any apparent evidence of animal cognition could be refuted as simply not being cognition, by definition.
Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math. There really isn't a middle ground. If you want to believe that wetware is fundamentally irreducible to math, then you believe it's magic. If that's want you want to believe, then fine. But it's dogma, and maintaining that dogma will require increasingly willful acts of blindness.
You are using word "math" in a magical way. Current LLM programs are reducible to math and human cognition is reducible to math (which is a reasonable hypothesis). What you are implying is that just because word math is used in both sentences it actually means the same thing. And that is a magical thinking. Just because human cognition is reducible to math (let's assume that for sake of discussion) doesn't mean it's the same math as in the LLM programs, or even close enough. Or maybe it is, but we don't have any proof yet.
I agree with this. I'm not arguing that LLMs are conscious. We don't understand the math behind how our brains work; we don't know how close or far LLMs are to that; and we don't know how many different pathways to consciousness there are within math.
All I'm saying is that the argument that "It's not consciousness, it's just <insert any tangentially mathematical claim here>", is dogma. Given everything that we don't know, agnosticism is the appropriate response.
> It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.
It's cool that you can decide to take half-remembered incorrect anecdotes about what "scientists" are certain of at some indeterminate time in the past, sans citation, and use that to underpin your argument about a totally different thing.
> Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable...
...like your post's anecdata.
> Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math.
Yes, when you decide to draw a convoluted imaginary bounding box around the argument, anything can be whatever you want it to be.
LLMs have no mind and no intention. They are programmed to mimic human language. Read some Grice and learn exactly how dependent humans are on the cooperative principle, and exactly how vulnerable we are to seeing intent where none exists in LLM communication that mimics the outputs our inputs expect to receive.
Your cries of "dogma dogma dogma" are unpersuasive and lack grounding in practical reality.
> A selector is not not a variable or a function. CSS has functions (e.g translate) and it has variables, which are both distinct concepts in the language from selectors.
Congratulations, you have attacked the analogy rather than the argument.
So in your head, the analogy is not a big part of the argument? I'd accept your congrats, but I really have not earned it.
The whole idea of comparing CSS to general purpose, Turing complete programming languages is surprisingly stupid. CSS has a very specific, narrow goal: styling HTML elements.
> So in your head, the analogy is not a big part of the argument?
The analogy is decoupled from the thing it analogizes, and refuting the analogy refutes the thing itself about as much as burning a picture of the thing burns the thing itself.
> The whole idea of comparing CSS to general purpose, Turing complete programming languages is surprisingly stupid. CSS has a very specific, narrow goal: styling HTML elements.
Right, so, you still don't like the analogy but again don't address the argument.
A blatant self-link from the guy behind the Chronicles of George, a tech support humor site of some old renown (read: it's ancient as balls) consisting of some of the worst help desk tickets ever, at https://chroniclesofgeorge.com/
The blog post gives a bit of site history, and a bit about who George was.
Hey, how awesome you live in an area where you have a choice of ISPs and can dismiss one that doesn't meet your spec, rather than having to simply shut up and eat what you're served!
> If you are struggling with IPv6 I recommend reading up on where it is at today and figuring out how whatever makes your network special can be done using IPv6 with no fuss.
> ...
> Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers.
Yep, that's where I am. Frontier FTTH, IPv4 only. Because....I have no idea why. Because Frontier sucks, basically? They have at least started their rollout:
I eventually added proper css, bolted on https, and updated the html to something a little more modern and standards-compliant, but the site is still hand-coded, and looks pretty much the same as it has for a quarter-century.
Great story and very nostalgic. I remember pre-ordering an N64 with my brother and getting it on launch day with Mario 64. We were blown anyway. Then Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, FFVII, Panzer Dragoon Saga and so on. Great time for a video game nerd to be growing up. What are some of your favorite games on more modern consoles?
Thanks for this… great trip down memory lane. I also worked at Babbages during the 1993 academic year. I probably spent my whole paycheck there! I definitely considered myself lucky, I didn’t find a wife but it sure beat McDonald’s!
> Have you had to go back and fix any of your vibe coded projects yet?
Not yet, but you're absolutely right. Once a tool like this stops being front of mind, it'll fall right out of my head. It's a bit like driving somewhere versus being driven—I'm a lot more likely to remember how to get to a place if I have to actively navigate to it. If I'm in the passenger seat, all bets are off!
Looking at the comparison image between CSS grid lanes and CSS grid 1, the grid lanes example looks....horrifying. It looks like pinterest cancer. It makes the page look like a ragged assortment of random shit. Scannability is grossly impaired. How are you supposed to approach this content? What objective does this mess of a presentation accomplish? What kind of information lends itself to this kind of "masonry-style waterfall layout"?
There is a use case for grid lane and pinterest is a good example: random images where a user isn't looking for a particular image but is just browsing. That's also why the example looks bad, is because it prominently includes text, which isn't part of the use case. Scannability is terrible, this layout has a very limited use case. It really is only for browsing random images, not even searching for a specific image and definitely not concerned with text.
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