Hmm. Are you sure that your stack wouldn't accept these discovery packets until after you've successfully authenticated (which is what those chains are for) ?
Take eduroam, which is presumably the world's largest federated WiFi network. A random 20 year old studying Geology at Uni in Sydney, Australia will have eduroam configured on their devices, because duh, that's how WiFi works. But, that also works in Cambridge, England, or Paris, France or New York, USA or basically anywhere their peers would be because common
sense - why not have a single network?
But this means their device actively tries to connect to anything named "eduroam". Yes it is expecting to eventually connect to Sydney to authenticate, but meanwhile how sure are you that it ignores everything it gets from the network even these low-level discovery packets?
I may be missing something, but it is almost a guarantee that you would not receive a RA in this scenario? eduroam is using WPA2/WPA3 enterprise, so my understanding is that until you authenticate to the network you do not have L2 network access.
Additionally, eduroam uses certificate auth baked into the provisioning profile to ensure you are authenticating using your organizations IdP. (There are some interesting caveats to this statement that they discuss in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7593#section-7.1.1 and the mitigation is the usage of Private CAs for cert signing).
People keep reinventing LaTeX, but poorly. Most of the issues described have already been solved by it at least 20 years ago, especially the semantics part. The tooling is mature, well understood and supported on all operating systems.
As far as custom shortforms for fully tagged angle-bracket markup is concerned, people are reinventing SGML which can handle markdown and other custom syntaxes since 1986.
Markdown inline syntax is straightforward to capture using SGML SHORTREF. What's more difficult (impossible) are things such as reference links where a markdown processor is supposed to pull text (the title of a link) from wherever it's defined before or after its usage.
Haven't heard about archforms in a while ;) but it's not a technique for custom syntax, and since markdown is specified as a Wiki syntax with canonical mapping to HTML, there's no need for the kind of simplistic element and token renaming possible with archforms.
For example added an <nbsp> attribute to turn all spaces into non-breaking spaces, and used archforms to remove the attribute afterwards.
But yeah, maybe for Makrdown you don't need archforms. On the other hand, perhaps there is some super clever way to use archforms to get your reference links working.
This kind of cynicism is wild to me. Of course most AI products (and products in general) are for end users. Especially for a company like Google--they need to do everything they can to win the AI wars, and that means winning adoption for their AI models.
This is different. AI is an existential threat to Google. I've almost stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT came out. Why search for a list of webpages which might have the answer to your question and then manually read them one at a time when I can instead just ask an AI to tell me the answer?
If Google doesn't adapt, they could easily be dead in a decade.
That's funny. I stopped using ChatGPT completely and use Gemini to search, because it actually integrates with Google nicely as opposed to ChatGPT which for some reason messes up sometimes (likely due to being blocked by websites while no one dares block Google's crawler lest they be wiped off the face of the internet), and for coding, it's Claude (and maybe now Gemini for that as well). I see no need to use any other LLMs these days. Sometimes I test out the open source ones like DeepSeek or Kimi but those are just as a curiosity.
If web-pages don't contain the answer, the AI likely won't either. But the AI will confidently tell me "the answer" anyway. I've had atrocious issues with wrong or straight up invented information that I must search up every single claim it makes on a website.
My primary workflow is asking AI questions vaguely to see if it successfully explains information I already know or starts to guess. My average context length of a chat is around 3 messages, since I create new chats with a rephrased version of the question to avoid the context poison. Asking three separate instances the same question in slightly different way regularly gives me 2 different answers.
This is still faster than my old approach of finding a dry ground source like a standards document, book, reference, or datasheet, and chewing through it for everything. Now I can sift through 50 secondary sources for the same information much faster because the AI gives me hunches and keywords to google. But I will not take a single claim for an AI seriously without a link to something that says the same thing.
Given how embracing AI is an imperative in tech companies, "a link to something" is likely to be a product of LLM-assisted writing itself. Entire concept of checking through the internet becomes more and more recursive with every passing moment.
And self sustained nuclear fusion is 20 years away, perpetually. On which evidence can he affirm a timeline for AGI when we can barely define intelligence?
Another way to put it is that it writes, sounds and paints as the Internet's most average user.
If you train it on a bunch of paintings whose quality ranges from a toddler's painting to Picasso's, it's not going to make one that's better than Picasso's, it's going to output something more comparable to the most average painting it was trained on. If you then adjust your training data to only include world's best paintings ever since we began to paint, the outcome is going to improve, but it'll just be another better-than-human-average painting. If you then leave it running 24/7, it'll churn out a bunch of better-than-human-average paintings, but there's still an easily-identifiable ceiling it won't go above.
An oracle that always returns the most average answer certainly has its use cases, but it's fundamentally opposed to the idea of superintelligence.
> Another way to put it is that it writes, sounds and paints as the Internet's most average user.
Yes, I agree, it's not high quality stuff it produces exactly, unless the person using it already is an expert and could produce high quality stuff without it too.
But there is no denying it that those things were regarded as "far-near future maybe" for a long time, until some people put the right pieces together.
This is the key insight I believe. It is inherently unpredictable. There are species that pass the mirror test with a far fewer equivalent number of parameters than large models are using already. Carmack has said something to the effect that about 10ksloc would glue the right existing achictectures together in the right way to make agi, but that it might take decades to stumble on that way, or someone might find it this afternoon.
Well, he heads a company devoted to creating AGI, so admitting success in research is inherently unpredictable is surprisingly honest. As to whether his estimate that we have the pieces and just need to assemble them correctly is itself correct, I can only say it is as likely to be correct as any other researcher in the field. Which is to say its random.
Is this true? I think it’s equally easy to claim that these phenomena are attributable to aesthetic adaptability in humans, rather than the ability of a machine to act like a human. The machine still doesn’t possess intentionality.
This isn’t a bad thing, and I think LLMs are very impressive. But I do think we’d hesitate to call their behavior human-like if we weren’t predisposed to anthropomorphism.
Humans have since adapted to identify content differences and assign lower economic value to content created by programs, i.e. the humans being "impersonated" and "fooled" are themselves evolving in response to imitation.
> I'd argue we've had more progress towards fusion than AGI.
way more pogress toward fusion than AGI. Uncontrolled runaway fusion reactions were perfected in the 50s (iirc) with the thermonuclear bombs. Controllable fusion reactions have been common for many years. A controllable, self-sustaining, and profitable fusion reaction is all that is left. The goalposts that mark when AGI has been reached haven't even been defined yet.
Yet at the same time "towards" does not equate to "nearing". Relative terms for relative statements. Until there's a light at the end of the tunnel, we don't know how far we've got.
I don't think he should stop, because I think he's right. We lack a definition of intelligence that doesn't do a lot of hand waving.
You linked to a paper with 18 collective definitions, 35 psychologist definitions, and 18 ai researcher definitions of intelligence. And the conclusion of the paper was that they came up with their own definition of intelligence. That is not a definition in my book.
> second a definition is obviously not a prerequisite as evidenced by natural selection
right, we just need a universe, several billions of years and sprinkle some evolution and we'll also get intelligence, maybe.
Imagine such a amazing productivity tool, so amazing that you have to force your users into using it. As a person that was just born yesterday, I'm quite sure that the other technologies that are constantly compared to LLMs, like the internet and smartphones certainly must have endured the same adoption barriers, right?
It is common misconception, but evolution does not happen at the individual level, but on populations, so a single individual not reproducing is irrelevant, as long as the local population carrying the same genes do successfully reproduce.
It is supremely annoying when i ask in a group if someone has experience with a tool or system and some idiot copies my question into some LLM and paste the answer. I can use the LLM just like anyone, if i'm asking for EXPERIENCE it is because I want the opinion of a human who actually had to deal with stuff like corner cases.
Nah, that’s different. Lmgtfy has nothing to do with experience, other than experience in googling. Lmgtfy applies to stuff that can expediently be googled.
In my experience, usually what people had done was take your question on a forum, go to lmgtfy, paste the exact words in and then link back to it. As if to say "See how easy that was? Why are you asking us when you could have just done that?"
Yes is true there could have been a skill issue. But it could also be true that the person just wanted input from people rather than Google. So that's why I drew the connection.
I largely agree with your description, and I think that’s different from the above case of explicitly asking for experience and then someone posing the question to an LLM. Also, when googling, you typically (used to) get information written down by people, from a much larger pool and better curated via page ranking, than whoever you are asking. So it’s not like you were getting better quality by not googling, typically.
It’s not clear to me in what way it is a version of that, other than the response being different from what the asker wanted. The point of lmgtfy is to show that the asker could have legitimately and reasonably easily have found the answer by himself. You can argue that it is sometimes done on cases where googling actually wouldn’t provide the desired information, but that is far from the common case. This present version is substantially different from that. It is invariably true that an LLM response won’t give you the awareness and judgement of someone with experience in a certain topic.
Okay I see the confusion. We are coming from different perspectives.
There are three main reasons I can think of for asking the Internet a question in 2010:
1. You don't know how to ask Google / you are too lazy.
2. You don't trust Google.
3. You already tried Google and it doesn't have the answer or it's wrong.
Maybe there are more I can't think of. But let's say you have one of those three reasons, so you post a question to an Internet forum in the year 2010. Someone replies back with lmgtfy. There are three typical responses depending on which of the those reasons you had f or posting:
1. "Thanks"
2. "Thanks, but I don't trust those sources, so I reiterate my question."
3. "Thanks, but I tried that and the answer is wrong, so I reiterate my question."
Now it's the year 2025 and you post a question to an Internet forum because you either don't know how to ask ChatGPT, don't trust ChatGPT, or already tried it and it's giving nonsense. Someone replies back with an answer from ChatGPT. There are three typical responses depending on your reason for posting to the forum.
1. "Thanks"
2. "Thanks, but I don't trust those sources, so I reiterate my question."
3. "Thanks, but I tried that and the answer is wrong, so I reiterate my question."
So the reason I drew the parallel was because of the similarity of experiences between 2010 and now for someone who doesn't trust this new technology.
In my experience what happened was the top hit for the question was a topical forum, with a lmgtfy link as a response to the exact question I'm googling.
Both statements can be true at the same time, even though they seem to point in different directions. Here's how:
1. *"If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading"* is a normative or idealistic statement — it sets a standard or value judgment about the quality of writing and reading. It suggests that only writing with value, purpose, or quality should be produced or consumed.
2. *"There is a lot of handwritten crap"* is a descriptive statement — it observes the reality that much of what is written (specifically by hand, in this case) is low in quality, poorly thought-out, or not meaningful.
So, putting them together:
* The first expresses *how things ought to be*.
* The second expresses *how things actually are*.
In other words, the existence of a lot of poor-quality handwritten material does not invalidate the ideal that writing should be worth doing if it's to be read. It just highlights a gap between ideal and reality — a common tension in creative or intellectual work.
Would you like to explore how this tension plays out in publishing or education?
