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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • PipeWire is a server and user space API to deal with multimedia pipelines. This includes:

    • Making available sources of video (such as from a capture devices or application provided streams) and multiplexing this with clients.
    • Accessing sources of video for consumption.
    • Generating graphs for audio and video processing.

    Nodes in the graph can be implemented as separate processes, communicating with sockets and exchanging multimedia content using fd passing.








  • I’m not redefining anything, I’m just pointing out that intelligence is not as narrow as most people assume, it’s a broad term that encompasses various gradations. It doesn’t need to be complex or human-like to qualify as intelligence.

    A single if statement arguably isn’t intelligence, sure, but how many if statements is? Because at some point you can write a complex enough sequence of if statements that will exhibit intelligence. As I was saying in my other comments, where do we draw this line in the sand? If we use the definition from the link, which is:

    The highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths.

    Then 99% of animal species would not qualify as intelligent.

    You may rightfully argue that term AI is too broad and that we could narrow it down to mean specifically “human-like” AI, but the truth is, that at this point, in computer science AI already refers to a wide range of systems, from basic decision-making algorithms to complex models like GPTs or neural networks.

    My whole point is less about redefining intelligence and more about recognizing its spectrum, both in nature and in machines. But I don’t expect for everybody to agree, even the expert in the fields don’t.



  • I would put it differently. Sometimes words have two meanings, for example a layman’s understanding of it and a specialist’s understanding of the same word, which might mean something adjacent, but still different. For instance, the word “theory” in everyday language often means a guess or speculation, while in science, a “theory” is a well-substantiated explanation based on evidence.

    Similarly, when a cognitive scientist talks about “intelligence”, they might be referring to something quite different from what a layperson understands by the term.


  • In a way, yes, if you frame it right. To simplify, you’re basically asking “is a calculator intelligent?”, right? While it’s an inanimate object, you could say that, in a way, it acquires knowledge from the buttons user presses and it applies knowledge to provide an output.

    “But that’s not making decisions, it’s just circuits!”, you might say. To which I might reply “Who’s to say that you’re making decisions? For all we know, human brains might also just be very complicated circuits with no agency at all, just like the calculator!”.

    IIRC, in his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil even assigns certain amount of intelligence to inanimate objects, such as rocks. A very low amount of course, and it might be a stretch, but still.

    So yeah, it’s really hard to draw a line for intelligence, which is why there’s no firm definition and no consensus.


  • Of course there are various versions of NPCs, some stand and do nothing, others are more complex, they often “adapt” to certain conditions. For example, if an NPC is following the player it might “decide” to switch to running if the distance to the player reaches a certain threshold, decide how to navigate around other dynamic/moving NPCs, etc. In this example, the NPC “acquires” knowledge by polling the distance to the player and applies that “knowledge” by using its internal model to make a decision to walk or run.

    The term “acquiring knowledge” is pretty much as subjective as “intelligence”. In the case of an ant, for example, it can’t really learn anything, at best it has a tiny short-term memory in which it keeps certain most recent decisions, but it surely gets things done, like building colonies.

    For both cases, it’s just a line in the sand.