I taught myself to touch-type when I was a schoolkid using something similar to Mavis Beacon. All the while, I had a voice in my head saying, "This is pointless, everyone will be talking to their computers like in Star Trek in a couple of years". Well, that was the 90s and it turned out to be one of the most useful skills I taught myself - but surely the age of the keyboard must soon be coming to an end now??

Eh, that’s pretty metal.

It's definitely pretty, and as thermite is a mixture of metal powder and metal oxide, your statement is entirely correct.

Imagine life in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. All electronic devices have been rendered useless due to the EMPs from all the nuclear blasts. You, with your unfathomable ability to tell the time from an old wind-up clock, are viewed as a literal god among men (and women)

ah they were making a nice and lame pun (anova brand == another brand)

They are remarkably useful. Of course there are dangers relating to how they are used, but sticking your head in the sand and pretending they are useless accomplishes nothing.

It models only use of language

This phrase, so casually deployed, is doing some seriously heavy lifting. Lanuage is by no means a trivial thing for a computer to meaningfully interpret, and the fact that LLMs do it so well is way more impressive than a casual observer might think.

If you look at earlier procedural attempts to interpret language programmatically, you will see that time and again, the developers get stopped in their tracks because in order to understand a sentence, you need to understand the universe - or at the least a particular corner of it. For example, given the sentence "The stolen painting was found by a tree", you need to know what a tree is in order to interpret this correctly.

You can't really use language *unless* you have a model of the universe.

Heroic works really well. I've just installed it myself recently, motivated mostly by a desire to finally play the free games I got off Epic. I've only installed two EGS games so far - Civ 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy - but they're working perfectly, running via proton.

The experience is so good I was actually inspired to buy my first game outside of steam in years, namely Wartales which I just bought yesterday on GOG. Installation is a breeze, it runs under proton, and as far as I can tell it is running perfectly.

I sort of prefer Heroic to Steam in fact, because it starts almost immediately - no waiting around for 30 seconds while it tries to connect to the Steam network etc

That’s 1 in every 50 desktops. Anecdotally I can think of only 3 people, including myself

Can you name 147 people using Windows? If you can, then that's 1 in every 50. Of course, people you know are probably the technical sort that are more likely to pay attention to their OS, but still you'd need to be able to individually name 147 Windows users just to match the 1 in 50 stat. Point I'm trying to make is that one in 50 really is not very many!

they, in fact, will have some understanding

These models have spontaneously acquired a concept of things like perspective, scale and lighting, which you can argue is already an understanding of 3D space.

What they do not have (and IMO won't ever have) is consciousness. The fact we have created machines that have understanding of the universe without consciousness is very interesting to me. It's very illuminating on the subject of what consciousness is, by providing a new example of what it is not.

They absolutely do contain a model of the universe which their answers must conform to. When an LLM hallucinates, it is creating a new answer which fits its internal model.

I don't have Subnautica but it is on my wishlist because you can play in VR, which is what I mostly play these days. PCVR is not as reliable on Linux as standard games, but nevertheless more than 50% of titles do work flawlessly now. Subnautica is definitely one of them - you should check for other people who've got your problem on ProtonDB. If you actually care, look into it more, you should be able to get all of those games running.

Hmmm? You can run Subnautica on Linux through Steam, as you can run most games written for Windows.