Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lr4444lr 1180 days ago
Yes, insofar as we know exactly how the adder and shift registers are implemented we can safely say a calculator "understands" the math its limited button set can be asked to perform. We could certainly replace those circuits with a GPT-like set of internals that would be unreliable as Stallman means, perhaps more reliable than text generation, but fundamentally just as untrustable.