[ExI] More mailing lists of this calibre?

[efc at swisscows.email]

>
> PB scale storage systems are not boring.  Or rather they wouldn't be, if the
> masses were to be more excited by it.  I have heard of silicon being used
> for storage, but never lead.  Lead would have its advantages, against
> radioactive particles and such.  Perhaps I misunderstand what you meant by
> PB storage.
>
> Oh wait, petabyte.  Retract all.
>

Haha, sorry, I got caught in my own associations. Yes petabyta and not 
lead.

As far as the underlying storage goes, it doesn't get more exciting for me 
(or didn't, rather) than finding the right combination of spinning disk, 
solid state disk, tape, cache layer etc. So my job was more in selecting 
and applying technology than inventing.

Before I moved on to my own business, the most interesting development I 
was following was going from dedicated storage systems to software defined 
storage systems being built on commodity servers instead of specialized 
hardware. But I'll leave that for now, unless someone is interested of 
course.

> What has been happening here in the past few weeks is as philosophical as it
> gets.  Debating whether ChatGPT is conscious feels like an echo of what the
> chess players were doing in the 1990s: asking if the software really
> understood chess or was it just calculating mindlessly.  What we eventually
> decided was that these were exactly the same thing.  It was quite the ego
> buster.
>
> Daniel as a newcomer, with little or no influence from what has been posted
> in the past here, do you have a favorite take on the hot topic of the month?
> I presume you have played with ChatGPT.
>

Not ChatGPT, but alpaca.cpp on my local laptop. And is it conscious or 
not? I'm sorry that I have to be "that guy" but that would depend on the 
definition of consciousness. ;)

But based on my own playing around and very much amateur opinion, I have 
not detected any traces of an independent "will" or goals, but only 
reactions to inputs.So based on a badly defined and very "day to day" definition of 
consciousness I'd say no.

But, give me a definition, and I'll give you an answer. ;)

I have read some threads here as well, and what I'd like to see thrown 
into the ChatGPT mix is memory or state, "will" or goals, an ability to 
react to outside stimulus, and generation of new knowledge and not just 
follow logical deductions. Right now, I see ChatGPT as a component or 
some kind of "center of the brain" that could perhaps be glued together 
with other systems and perhaps the system of systems would in a few years 
time get closer to something I would view as consciousness.

Best regards,
Daniel