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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Your first two paragraphs seem to rail against a philosophical conclusion made by the authors by virtue of carrying out the Turing test. Something like “this is evidence of machine consciousness” for example. I don’t really get the impression that any such claim was made, or that more education in epistemology would have changed anything.

    In a world where GPT4 exists, the question of whether one person can be fooled by one chatbot in one conversation is long since uninteresting. The question of whether specific models can achieve statistically significant success is maybe a bit more compelling, not because it’s some kind of breakthrough but because it makes a generalized claim.

    Re: your edit, Turing explicitly puts forth the imitation game scenario as a practicable proxy for the question of machine intelligence, “can machines think?”. He directly argues that this scenario is indeed a reasonable proxy for that question. His argument, as he admits, is not a strongly held conviction or rigorous argument, but “recitations tending to produce belief,” insofar as they are hard to rebut, or their rebuttals tend to be flawed. The whole paper was to poke at the apparent differences between (a futuristic) machine intelligence and human intelligence. In this way, the Turing test is indeed a measure of intelligence. It’s not to say that a machine passing the test is somehow in possession of a human-like mind or has reached a significant milestone of intelligence.

    https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238


  • I don’t think the methodology is the issue with this one. 500 people can absolutely be a legitimate sample size. Under basic assumptions about the sample being representative and the effect size being sufficiently large you do not need more than a couple hundred participants to make statistically significant observations. 54% being close to 50% doesn’t mean the result is inconclusive. With an ideal sample it means people couldn’t reliably differentiate the human from the bot, which is presumably what the researchers believed is of interest.




  • It’s a lot better with some notable exceptions. First, .NET Core is multiplatform by design, so it is by default quite portable. The .NET Core CLI is extremely powerful and means a CLI workflow is totally feasible (and also simplifies CI pipelines). The new “multiplatform” application framework, MAUI, runs on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, but not Linux/GTK/QT etc. You can maybe attribute this to the design philosophy of abstracting native controls, of which “Linux” itself has none, but either way it’s useless on Linux. Third party frameworks like Avalonia do work very well on Linux.


  • Despite .NET being relatively friendly with Open Source, Java will probably remain the first choice for FOSS devs for a while, if only due to history and traction. You could write a C# Lemmy alternative, but it wouldn’t necessarily be faster or simpler or better in any particular way than a Java version. I’d certainly rather contribute in Java than start from scratch in C#.


  • C# isn’t really the go-to for high scale distributed systems. But it’s extremely easy for a small team of developers to set up a really solid service really quickly. I don’t have experience with Go so I can’t really compare, but I find ASP.NET Core very pleasant to work with, and I also appreciate the suitability of C# and .NET libraries for both backend and frontend work.


  • Nullable reference types are (a completely mandatory) bandaid fix in my opinion as a .net dev. You will encounter lots of edge cases where the compiler is unable to determine the nullability of an object, e.g. when using dependency injection to populate a field, or when using other unusual control flows like MediatR. You can suppress the warnings manually at the slight risk of lying to the analyzer. Objects supplied by external library code may or may not be annotated, and they may or may not be annotated correctly. The lack of compile-time null checking is occasionally an issue. But that said, NRT makes nullability a significantly smaller issue in C# than it used to be