The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?
I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.
Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.
Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
I'm running a server in the 5K-league. And the results are very good. I get about 150 Tokens/s from Qwen3 for coding. And about 50 Tokens/s from the newer non-MoE Qwens.
I wouldn't bother with less than 32GB of VRAM. With 16GB you can already run something usable, but 32GB gives you much more power. 9B and 14B are only interesting if you want to tune models yourself. The sweet spot now seem to be around 27B-35B.
Real Linux on phones is a thing. They're usable, but most hardware is getting old. E.g. PinePhone still works fine, but they recently announced that it's unlikely that we see a new version. They mention that it's hard to be competitive with hardware when people can install PostmarketOS and SailfishOS on cheap old Android Devices for a similar experience.
Good point. Also, most humans seem to have no problems believing even stories that are self-contradictory. Philosophers from all periods have often stated that the situation with human mind and reasoning is almost hopeless.
The news here is that AI has too much trust in the internet. The first time I allowed tool-calling, it started googling up some nonsense instead of thinking... But I think at least it's possible for the AI to evaluate the quality of the source - you just have to ask for an analysis, and you'll get a reasonable evaluation. With humans, something like that just doesn't work - they'll get aggressive or might even start throwing bananas...
I think using violet as a name for the entire color-range around (~128, 0, 255) is also common. So in a sense purple is an element of the violet color-range. But as points they are distinct. I think purple is more specific - as a color-range it'd cover less area.
And don't forget open source games. Before going for the indies, I'd suggest downloading and winning all the available major open source roguelikes. And after that, start creating mods/patches for those. Once you're done with that - and not too old of age - maybe think about spending some money on games again.
I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.
Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.
Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...
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