rollin

You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There's no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.

this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.

The other approach is not to try to block out all non-approved internet sources, and instead teach your child about the dangers out there, and how to handle them.

If a young child becomes addicted to online porn for instance, it's an indication of deeper issues and it seems to be missing the point to put the blame on network operators for not blocking children effectively enough. I don't think a healthy well developed child would become addicted to porn in the first place.

That's the real challenge for parents: they don't need to be a part-time network über-wizard but rather a stable trustworthy figure for their children to rely on who can guide them through the often difficult journey of growing up.

they're mammals though, sharing a common ancestor with pigs (who are also renown for their intelligence)

I stopped paying for YouTube when they started cracking down on free users, and stopped using them pretty much entirely. It was hard though - even though I have Netflix, I always found it easier to find interesting and informative things to watch on YouTube than Netflix. I'd watch YouTube several times a day, whereas with Netflix I usually spend about 10 or 15 minutes scrolling through their god-awful UI before closing it and finding something else to do.

Just had a look - $6 a month, based in NYC. Definitely better than giving YouTube money, for now at least. They say they have a 50/50 profit sharing model with creators - profit presumably is after salaries (including bonuses?) have been paid, so it's not clear exactly how much of your subscription does in fact go to the video creators. Still, a better option than YouTube, if only to support competition.

Community service is a classic punishment which I think makes good sense for nonviolent crime.

It should be a good option, but it's more difficult to run effectively than it might appear. The ideal would be for it not to be purely punitive, but to offer in itself some level of rehabilitation. For instance, a bike thief might be sentenced to helping out in a community bike workshop, or someone who committed low-level fraud might be required to help poor people manage their finances.

At the moment the reality is quite different I think, and people end up being sentenced to pointless busywork. I know someone who was given a community sentence for fighting and he described it as a bit of a joke. Every Saturday, they were supposed to clean up litter from grass verges, but the main issue was no one wanted to be there, not least the supervisor. So they'd generally just mess around for a bit and go home early.

If it was in Europe, people being made redundant are typically given several months pay, but it's America so he probably just got a t-shirt and a cardboard box.

A good tip is to search the Amazon reviews before you get a laptop for "Linux". Even if you don't buy it there, you'll often find one or two Linux users saying how well everything worked, or didn't.

Intelligence and consciousness are not related in the way you seem to think.

We've always known that you can have consciousness without a high level of intelligence (think of children, people with certain types of brain damage), and now for the first time, LLMs show us that you can have intelligence without consciousness.

It's naive to think that as we continue to develop intelligent machines, suddenly one of them will become conscious once it reaches a particular level of intelligence. Did you suddenly become conscious once you hit the age of 14 or whatever and had finally developed a deep enough understanding of trigonometry or a solid enough grasp of the works of Mark Twain? No of course not, you became conscious at a very early age, when even a basic computer program could outsmart you, and you developed intelligence quite independently.

I'm going to repeat myself as your last paragraph seems to indicate you missed it: I'm *not* of the view that LLMs are capable of AGI, and I think it's clear to every objective observer with an interest that no LLM has yet reached AGI. All I said is that like cats and rabbits and lizards and birds, LLMs do exhibit some degree of intelligence.

I have been enjoying talking with you,, as it's actually quite refreshing to discuss this with someone who doesn't confuse consciousness and intelligence, as they are clearly not related. One of the things that LLMs do give us, for the first time, is a system which has intelligence - it has some kind of model of the universe, however primitive, to which it can apply logical rules, yet clearly it has zero consciousness.

You are making some big assumptions though - in particular, when you said an AGI would "have a subjective sense of self" as soon as it can "move, learn, predict, and update". That's a huge leap, and it feels a bit to me like you are close to making that schoolboy error of mixing up intelligence and consciousness.