You go on to say that (and I’m paraphrasing) “sentience is in the eye of the beholder”, which is also wrong.

So you are misinterpreting my statement, calling it “paraphrasing”, to create a strawman argument that I never said.

There’s also the implication that you do think computers are sentient

Again, misinterpretation to flesh out the strawman.

I know you said you didn’t want assumptions, but this is a fair inference.

Fair, if by fair you mean pure lies.

Someone who wasn’t emotionally invested I the idea of chatbot sentience wouldn’t push back so hard with basically 0 facts to back them up.

Because someone who doesn’t 100% agree with you must obviously have the exactly opposite opinion of you. False dicotomy, to again push the strawman.

Your final assertion is that the Wikipedia article doesn’t immediately contradict you, which again, it does in the first sentence. You can see my previous comment for that information tho, I’m not retyping it.

Yeah, of course, if you think that what I am saying is something entirely different than what I’m saying, than of course it means whatever the hell you hallucinate.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you are ChatGPT by the amount of shitty “inference” and hallucination you produce.

Here’s my position: The question whether an AI is sentient or not is beside the point. Sentience means nothing, because it means whatever anyone wants it to mean right now.

AIs are computer programs, nothing more than that. Whether they are sentient, sapient, intelligent, feeling or not doesn’t matter in the slightest, because the definition of any of these terms can change depending on who’s asking.

The bigger question behind these terms is: Does an AI deserve the protection of basic human rights? That’s the actual question that these terms are a proxy for. I say no. Certainly AI doesn’t deserve the protection of basic human rights.

Let’s get back to the Wikipedia article.

I claimed that sentience isn’t well-defined. The first line in the Wikipedia article is:

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.

What are feelings and sensations then?

Following the definition of “feeling”:

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is “a self-contained phenomenal experience”; feelings are “subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them”.

A feeling is an experience. What’s an experience?

Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes.

An experience is knowledge and familiarity gained by perceptions. What is a perception?

Perception (from Latin perceptio ‘gathering, receiving’) is the identification, interpretation and organization of sensory information, in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.

So a perception depends on sensory information. What’s that?

A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli.

Ok, here we have the arbitrary requirement of “biological”, otherwise anything you get from a stimulus. So what’s that?

In physiology, a stimulus[1] is a change in an organism’s internal or external environment.

So a vision tool would suffice. LLMs with vision capability exist.

The sensations from the original definition are also covered here.

So in the end it comes down to what are your definitions, and depending on that it literally means nothing. By the definitions above, a script that logs the readings off a temperature sensor could be defined as “sentient”. And if you route it through an organic sensor even the “biological” part is covered.

The term is a nothing burger that means literally anything and nothing at the same time.

This is where my investment in this topic comes from. All these terms (sentience, sapience, intelligence, …) are defined in the vaguest ways possible. They mean nothing. And still people get worked up like crazy over them, making crazy assumptions about whether animals or AI are deserving of rights, personhood and all that stuff.

AI won’t really do that, because it’s a very different workload.

Mining Bitcoin needs very little memory but extremely complex maths calculations. It has a built-in difficulty mechanism that makes the math more difficult if mining goes too fast.

ASICs are unbeatable when it comes to super-fast pure calculation.

AI work is mostly memory-bound. You need huge amounts of RAM (24GB for a somewhat decent model, a few TB for frontier models) and then you perform pretty simple vector math on that huge amount of data in memory. So the main limiting factors are RAM size and bandwidth. The computation power of a GPU doesn’t matter that much. Also GPUs contain ASICs for vector math already.

Standalone ASICs have no advantage over GPUs for this workload. The only thing you could do with a specialty chip is remove some unnecessary parts of a GPU to save a bit of cost and energy, thus turning a GPU that can be repurposed or resold if the AI bubble pops into a single-purpose device that has to be discarded if the bubble pops.

The main problem is that now people without software engineering background now have the ability to do some very complex things without having to have any knowledge about what they are doing and what risks they are taking.

Imagine just handing out forklifts or excavators to anyone who wants to drive one. No license needed just off you pop.

You’ll see a massive spike in dangerous accidents.

Yes, people are using AI irresponsively, but they often do so because they were handed an incredibly powerful tool with zero oversight or education in this matter.

And the thing is, AI can act pretty autonomously nowadays. It’s not rare that if you tell an AI that it should do one thing it stumbles into a chain of three other tools and ends up doing something else entirely. Again, something that can be counteracted with skill and knowledge, but we are talking about people with neither.

For now.

Nvidia has two massive problems.

• They know that AI is a bubble. If the big AI companies go belly up, Nvidia loses all their revenue.
• The big AI companies are working on DIYing their own AI chips. If they manage to, Nvidia loses all their revenue.

That’s why they have been at work with local AI for a while. They publish their own open-weights models (Nemotron) and they build comparatively cheap local AI hardware (DGX Spark, RTX Spark).

That way, when the whole AI bubble pops, they still have quite a bit of a foot in the door with customers.

And their local AI push (Nemotron, DGI Spark, RTX Spark, Huggingface, …) is all done to diversify before the crash.

Local AI is constantly getting better, both on server-grade hardware and on hardware regular users can actually own.

In fact, for Nvidia it’s better to have a solid standing with consumer-grade local AI. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI manage to DIY their own AI chips, then Nvidia will lose a large portion of their revenue within a day.

I can run models on my 3yo midrange smartphone. Gemma-4-E2B totally runs on there. Bonsai-8B too. But neither is really good for most tasks.

Heck, “a basic model” even runs locally on the 8MB RAM of an ESP32-S3, but it’s utterly worthless at anything.

If you get a bit more into self-hosting AI it quickly becomes obvious that for any actually useful real world tasks you need at least 24GB you can dedicate to the LLM alone, and if this is fully GPU vRAM, the performance is way, way higher than on CPU, even with an NPU.

If you continue down to the section on “digital sentience” you will find other sentences that directly contradict your assertions,

So, then, what are my assertions?

Please read my comments so far carefully. Do not hallucinate. Do not make assumptions that aren’t in my text. Do not make mistakes.

Then find those supposed assertions of mine that Wikipedia seems to contradict.

I’m always astonished when there’s a discussion about a topic so deep that it’s been hotly debated by philosophers for centuries and someone drops in the dictionary definition thinking they solved the whole discourse with a one-liner from the dictionary.

Congrats, you managed to find the dictionary, but didn’t even make it to the encyclopedia, let alone the acutal literature.

And now, with just the barest of definition and no deeper knowledge on anything you think you are an expert.

Here, please read at least the wikipedia entry to get a very basic understanding about what the adults in the room are talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

Sentience is roughly defined as “Line in the sand between humans and things we are allowed to eat”.

It’s a concept created to justify treating animals differently than humans in a world where the old justification (“You can eat animals because God said so”) isn’t applicable anymore.

Since the concept is defined backwards to justify preexisting actions, it doesn’t have any actually solid definition, and whether something’s sentient or not depends pretty much entirely on the opinion of the person deciding it.

I mean, it kinda is.

Lemmy is setup in a way that it totally crumbles at around 100-200k active users. The “every instance replicates almost everything while being legally liable if it doesn’t correctly moderate everything” means that it’s close to impossible to run a Lemmy instance if there’s too many people on the platform.

Reddit has more than one billion accounts and hundreds of millions of active users.

Lemmy physically cannot sustain anything near those numbers. Thus it’s kinda hard-coded to prevent it from getting serious astroturfing, for better and for worse.

For comparison: Both the LTT forum and the crackberry forum have more total and more active users than all of Lemmy combined.

Yeah, go tell that to your company’s IT department.

That’s what WSL is used for: keeping developers somewhat sane in a company that’s Windows-only.

Amazing quote!

Probably the closest way to pronounce the name as an American would be “Virt”, with “i” pronounced as in “will”.

Kazaa, LimeWire and similar products were proprietary for-profit software that made money with copyright infringement. LimeWire was opensourced later on.

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

Ironically, on Github

Only partially helpful. For me, when I open up issues archive.org often only has the first post in the thread. Often the stuff is months outdated.

Don’t get me wrong, the Wayback Machine is an incredibly amazing piece of tech and I use it all the time. But it’s a less-than-satisfactory replacement for a working Github.

I’m pretty sure it’s exactly that. Electric engines during takeoff and landing would also decrease noise pollution near humans.

Because it’s new tech, and any time there’s new tech it takes the judicial system around 20 years to figure out that old laws still apply even in the context of new tech.

Remember how long it took for copyright to become somewhat relevant on the internet?

Or how long it took for murder threats to become illegal on the internet?

When I was growing up it was totally 100% to be expected that once you step online, especially in games, someone will graphicly threaten to murder and rape you and your entire family in an arbitrary order.

Stuff like that would have gotten you in legal trouble instantly if you said that in real life, but online it was totally fine for a very long time.

Heat is the worst form of energy. It’s super hard to extract energy at all from it. Basically, you can’t extract energy from heat itself, you can only extract it through the process of heating something up. So you always need a cold component that gets heated up and a hot component that does the heating.

Without a cold component, you can’t extract energy from heat.

Don’t they have cameras to find out who did it?.. Oh, I guess they don’t now.