Delk

I also can't figure out where those numbers come from.

I'm guessing a part of the confusion could be that there was also a rerelease called SimCity Classic. The Classic release also came as a Windows 3.x version which (unsurprisingly) had higher system requirements. The specified minimum for that was a 286, though, not a 386.

I have no idea how well a 286 would have coped, though; it's rare to see "real" games (bigger ones, not Solitaire) for Windows 3.x that didn't require a 386.

> Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe

My company's policy is that retired laptops are destroyed. (I suppose properly wiping them or removing storage devices should be enough but for some reason it's not considered sufficient.)

There are indeed lots of second-hand former company laptops being sold, and some companies even specialize in refurbishing and selling them. I don't know what percentage ends up being recycled but it's definitely not 100 %. I'd assume the more security-oriented the organization gets, the more likely it might be to avoid recycling devices intact.

With that said, I haven't seen two-year-old high-end devices getting retired. But if there are only a few of them, and a large fleet is being renewed, I suppose it can make sense from a fleet management point of view to renew the few perfectly current ones as well.

> In the last decade, keeping my OS on a different volume from my data in `/home` has saved my work at least 5-10 times.

Mine is of course just another anecdote, but despite seeing some crashes or hangs over the years, I can't remember the last time I've even had to manually fsck my ext4 filesystems, and I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen any unrecoverable corruption on ext4 or ext3. (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, as it certainly can, but I wouldn't think it's that common unless you're operating on a fairly large scale. And before journaling filesystems, crashes were of course a whole different deal.)

I used to keep /home separate on my personal devices (and maybe some other partitions as well because it was "a good practice"), but for more than a decade now my personal devices have had everything on a single large root fs, save for /boot and swap.

I've stuck with rather conservative fs choices and haven't used btrfs much, so I don't know if the story is different there.

What you gain with a single large root partition is of course that you don't need to know in advance how much software you'll want to install under /usr or how much space you'll need for /home or /var.

Multiple partitions can certainly be a good idea from a system management point of view, for cases where people either want to actively manage the system, or when their needs are demanding enough that it's warranted. If I were deploying a server for any kind of real use, yeah, the database or the server logs would certainly not be on the root volume.

But in case of desktops or laptops, most people, even engineers, don't really want to be meticulously managing their personal computers. Nor are most people's personal computing needs that demanding. The convenience of not running out of space on a single partition because you guessed the your future needs wrong wins over.

> Swap on a different physical drive is faster.

> Spread the load across multiple media for performance. That is how server OSes do it, because it is faster.

Of course it is, but in contrast, laptops don't really tend to have separate physical drives on which to put swap. I doubt most people would care enough about swap performance to install a separate high-performance drive for it even in desktops.

With that said, I also do keep a swap partition even on personal computers, and hibernation can be useful. (I think there are some issues with hibernation and encrypted swap in Linux, though, so I haven't bothered with it in a while).

I think the first release of Windows 95 did include TCP/IP networking support. I remember using it. But I think it wasn't installed by default, so you had to go and install it separately via the control panel.

I remember at least Civilization II, Descent II, Settlers II, Outcast, and I think some rallying game I had as using Redbook audio. The industrial soundtrack of Descent II was actually pretty good.

The interwebs also mention G-Police, which I remember playing, but I have no recollection about the soundtrack.

The sandboxed application would be something you explicitly chose to run. When the browser is the platform, every web page you visit has access to the general-purpose runtime. (Of course permission checks e.g. for microphones exist.)

It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD.

I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well.

I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.

That has been the trend for decades in lots of other developed countries as well. It doesn't have to be in any way because of increased means of surveillance.

> There is no objective evidence of qualia.

You can argue there's no objective evidence for qualia in others than oneself, but I'm sure you know you have subjective experience just as I know I do.

> All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics.

I don't claim that ANNs or other computational models are fundamentally different from brains in computational capacity (although AFAIK biological neurons are a lot more complex than those in ANNs, so drawing a parallel just because both are "neural networks" would be erroneous as well.) I'm claiming that language alone cannot represent qualia, so an ANN trained on the level of language alone cannot have subjective experience.

> This assumes a lot.

Perhaps, but so does the idea that "intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories", including the rather elusive concept of intelligence itself. And that today's AI models could possess intelligence in whatever form that sentence requires.

If forming natural categories alone were enough for sentience, clustering algorithms could be sentient.

It has traditionally been assumed that only humans are sentient. Present understanding leans more and more towards many animals having some kind of sentience as well. Some of them are probably even self-aware. Language in animals is a lot more controversial, though.

Nobody knows how (or even why) sentience emerges. But since it seems to exist in other animals as well, including those that probably don't have language or abstract concepts, it would seem to be a product of something else than language. It might even be some kind of a spectrum, with different animals having different levels of sentience and, ultimately, even awareness.

Sure, but those internal states could then exist for just about any program, or at the very least for any ANN. Nobody in their right minds would have suggested that those might have been aware before the rise of generative models.

When people get the idea that a LLM (or some other generative model) might be aware, surely that impression is because of human-like output. I don't think there's any objective basis for that thinking.

I just don't think linguistic (or other symbolic) representations alone can contain the information, in any sense of the word, of what e.g. human subjective experiences actually are like. The concepts we express with language get their meaning from our physical reality, even if quite indirectly in case of some abstract concepts.

Hunger as a concept doesn't mean anything without the physical need. Politeness or bluntness, even in writing, don't mean anything without social dynamics. And we have social dynamics (and neural structures that directly process social cues and associated feelings) because we've evolved into social animals for whose survival that was important.

I see no reason to believe that a model trained only with symbolic representations, with no connection to the physical world phenomena that those symbols represent, could contain the subjective experience itself.

Neural network models may be able to derive novel (or at least novel-looking) output rather than just an obvious rehash of their input, but I don't think any set of bytes can fundamentally contain information that was never entered into it. (Even if e.g. a model produces previously unknown mathematical results, those results can in principle be derived from the information that they were trained with.)

I'm not saying that artificial neural networks couldn't, in principle, be aware. ANNs and biological neural nets may be equivalent in the sense that any information and processing structures represented by a biological one could in principle be represented by an artificial one. If that's the case, and awareness is purely a product of our neural systems as materialism would imply, it should be possible for an ANN to be aware, too.

But when the model has been trained with only language, and IMO the subjective experience can't be derived from the symbolic representation alone, I can't see how the model could include the actual subjective human experience.

An AI model could of course have an awareness and subjective experiences that are totally different than our human experience. But then the fact that it happens to produce output resembling what humans find meaningful shouldn't be considered indicative of such awareness.

This is of course more of a philosophical argument than a technical one, and I'm happy to hear counterarguments, but not on the level of off-hand dismissal.

I wasn't trying to give a model. The point was that I don't think it's necessary to give one.

You didn't address any of what I wrote, let alone provide any counterarguments. Which part of what I wrote do you think was wrong?

I honestly don't think a language model is enough for self-awareness, regardless of the exact model of awareness.

A language model (or an image model or whatever) cannot even be sentient, and I think sentience is a prerequisite for awareness.

Even if we express a lot of our subjective experience with words, the language is just a symbolic representation of those experiences. The qualia themselves, even those that are quite abstract, are rooted in our physical presence and evolution.

You can't have an understanding of what hunger or physical pain feel like if you have no need for food or a sensory capacity for feeling pain. You can't understand what loneliness or pride at an achievement mean if you don't have a neural network wired to value social connection or status. We value connection because we're social animals that have needed each other for survival.

Even the more abstract of our subjective experiences are in some way rooted in our physical evolution.

I see no reason to believe that a neural network built entirely based on the symbolic level of language could have the features needed for the subjective experience itself.

AI awareness might actually be more believable if that awareness manifested itself in an entirely different way than in humans. But if we assume awareness because outputs resemble what we consider meaningful as humans, yet the neural network has had no inputs or evolution that could form the actual basis of human-like experience, I think we're seeing something that isn't actually there.