don’t do kubuntu, it is a terrible place to start for beginners. I don’t think we should be recommending ubuntu at all, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

theres also the fact that ubuntu ships very out of date software… among other things regarding privacy concerns, snaps being terrible, just don’t.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

Vesktop

Vesktop

No, you still can, it’ll just be much easier to recover from.

This is a nonsense talking point, what exactly can’t you do with root access on bazzite that you can do on a non-immutable?

the answer: nothing

I have, I simply disagree with your conclusions.

No, the machine will and so would a conscious one. you misunderstand. This isn’t an area where a conscious machine wins.

Tell me, if consciousness prevents this, why did humans do it?

These have been listed repeatedly: love, think, understand, contemplate, discover, aspire, lead, philosophize, etc.

these are not tasks except maybe philosophize and discover, which even current models can do… heck google is using old shitty ones to do it…

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/

I said a task, not a feeling, a task is a manipulation of the world to achieve a goal, not something vague and undefinable like love.

We want a machine that can tell us what to do, instead.

theres no such thing, there’s no objective right answer to this in the first place, it’s not like a conscious being we know of can do this, why would a conscious machine be able to? This is just you asking the impossible, consciousness would not help even the tiniest bit with this problem. you have to say “what to do to achieve x” for it to have meaning, which these machines could do without solving the hard problem of consciousness at all.

yet again you fail to name one valuable aspect of solving consciousness. You keep saying we need the hard problem of consciousness solved for agi but can’t name even one way in which it provides a functional improvement to anything.

Why do you expect an unthinking, non-deliberative zombie process to know what you mean by “empower humanity”? There are facts about what is GOOD and what is BAD that can only be grasped through subjective experience.

these cannot be grasped by subjective experience, and I would say nothing can possibly achieve this, not any human at all, the best we can do is poll humanity and go by approximates, which I believe is best handled by something automatic. humans can’t answer these questions in the first place, why should I trust something without subjective experience to do it any worse?

When you tell it to reduce harm, how do you know it won’t undertake a course of eugenics?

because this is unpopular, there are many things online saying not to… do you think humans are immune to this? When has consciousness ever prevented such an outcome?

How do you know it won’t see fit that people like you, by virtue of your stupidity, are culled or sterilized?

we don’t, but we also don’t with conscious beings, so there’s still no stated advantage to consciousness.

You don’t understand the claims you’re making if you can’t explain them. Try again this time actually explaining yourself rather than just going “some guy said I’m right”, you keep doing that without engaging with the discussion, and you keep assuming the guy verified your claim when they actually verified an irrelevant one.

That’s just because there are no consistent set of axioms for human intuition. Obviously the best you can do is approximate, and I see no reason you can’t approximate this, feel free to give me proof to the contrary but all you’ve done so far is appeal to authority and not explain your arguments.

Yeah am I missing something here??

Wayland is so goddamn close, this is the only app I’m waiting for before I can get rid of xwayland besides steam/proton

Jobs are not arbitrary, they’re tasks humans want another human to accomplish, an agi could accomplish all of those that a human can.

For instance, people frequently discuss AGI replacing governments. That would require the capacity for leadership. It would require independence of thought and creative deliberation. We simply cannot list (let alone program) all human goals and values. It is logically impossible to axiomatize our value systems. The values would need to be intuited. This is a very famous result in mathematics called Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem

Why do you assume we have to? Even a shitty current ai can do a decent job at this if you fact check it, better than a lot of modern politicians. Feed it the entire internet and let it figure out what humans value, why would we manually do this?

In other words, if we want to build a machine that shares our value system, we will need to do so in such a way that it can figure out our values for itself. How? Well, presumably by being conscious. I would be happy if we could do so without its being conscious, but that’s my point: nobody knows how. Nobody even knows where to begin to guess how. That’s why AGI is so problematic.

humans are conscious and have gotten no closer to doing this, ever, I see no reason to believe consciousness will help at all with this matter.

A job is a task one human wants another to accomplish, it is not arbitrary at all.

philosophy, politics, science are among the most important non-family-oriented “jobs” we humans do. They require consciousness.

i don’t see why they do, a philosophical zombie could do it, why not an unconscious AI? alphaevolve is already making new science, I see no reason an unconscious being with the abilty to manipulate the world and verify couldn’t do these things.

Plus, if a machine does what it’s told, then someone would be telling it what to do. That’s a job that a machine cannot do. But most of our jobs are already about telling machines what to do. If an AGI is not self-directed, it can’t tell other machines what to do, unless it is itself told what to do. But then someone is telling it what to do, which is “a job.”

yes but you can give it large, vague goals like “empower humanity, do what we say and minimize harm.” And it will still do them. So what does it matter?

The existence of black holes has a functional purpose in physics, the existence of consciousness only has one to our subjective experience, and not one to our capabilities.

if I’m wrong list a task that a conscious being can do that an unconscious one is unable to accomplish.

Is water wet?

You’ve arbitrarily defined an agi by its consciousness instead of its capabilities.

Most people can’t identify a correct mathematical equation from an incorrect one

this is irrelevant, we’re talking about something where nobody can tell the difference, not where it’s difficult.

What is “economically important labor”? Arguably the most economically important labor is giving birth, raising your children, and supporting your family. So would an AGI be some sort of inorganic uterus as well as a parent and a lover? Lol.

it means a job. That’s obviously not a job and obviously not what is meant, an interesting strategy from one who just used “what most people mean when they say”

That’s a pretty tall order, if AGI also has to do philosophy, politics, and science. All fields that require the capacity for rational deliberation and independent thought, btw.

it just has to be at least as good as a human at manipulating the world to achieve its goals, I don’t know of any other definition of agi that factors in actually meaningful tasks

an agi should be able to do almost any task a human can do at a computer. It doesn’t have to be conscious and I have no idea why or where consciousness factors into the equation.

Being able to decide its own goals is a completely unimportant aspect of the problem.

why do you care?