AvAn12

Carpet has been made for millennia. Scotchguard is new and toxic. So just make the carpets without the stain protection junk.

Frankly the carpet factories will do more business as people will want to replace their carpets more frequently.

Both try to maximize engagement. Both (soon to be) ad supported. Both driven by algorithms that show the user what they want to see.

Like dot matrix printer fonts

I’m not sure anyone needs to break anything. I’m not sure this is a commercially viable business once all of the VC and foreign funding scaffolding goes away.

If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.

In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.

Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?

You can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site.

There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.

Isn’t this sort of like saying you know how to use a web browser?

Good point regarding “ survivorship bias and groupthink” here.

Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free?

And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality?

It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?

Trump is the only one convicted of felonies and found liable for civil wrongdoing.

No other president violated laws (and please don’t start with Monica Lewinsky or that time Obama wore a tan suit…)

Sloppy.

Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.

The shilling for AI continues. How much $$$ do the big tech companies pay Columbia? Oh yeah, and what exactly did Columbia agree to do to get the trmp admin to leave them alone? All speculation of course, but the circumstantial picture stinks.

A wise move.

And if we all buy umbrellas, then it will start to rain??

You make a good argument that nobody needs to follow any laws any more. By your argument, it’s all about brute force. Ice has it now, but anyone can later. Is that the world you want? Or, would you prefer a society of laws after all?

Manga Carta - king governs by the consent of the governed. King != tyrant or dictator.

It is neither dead nor burned.

The only reason we have come this far is because we have a system of laws that rests on constitutional order. And policy, cultural, and commercial norms of respecting and preserving that order. We did not get here blindly - though we can lose it if people blindly forget that we are part of a bigger society.

Why only democrats? Why should American citizens who identify with the Republican Party tolerate destruction of constitutional order? If the constitution goes, it won’t matter what party you prefer - everyone is at risk.

Generalizations about generations are pretty silly. Every generation, baby boom, X, Z, millennial, etc. has a pretty heterogeneous mix of mindless, selfish dicks, geniuses, morons, artists, business people, wizards, creeps, and normies.

Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.

Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.

like Elon declaring FSD?

with extra stoopid

aren't programming languages like SQL designed to strike a quasi-optimal balance between precision and economy? that is to say, if I want to use plain English to specify some kind of data operations, the prompt will necessarily be more verbose and/or less specific than SQL statements. So why not just learn SQL properly? And then learn the domain-specific considerations of the source data as well as the domain-specific business requirements? Or am I missing something essential?

Very much agreed

+1 for the Lead Hypothesis. Apart from negative health effects, lead exposure leads to more impulsive behavior and reduced inhibition - which kind of covers nearly everything here.

Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s

Similar to YAML? Also do consider ancient formats like fixed width - in which case you don’t even need delimiter characters. Are LLMs clever enough to parse these if given a code book or old-school INPUT statement? Cheers

No belligerence intended! Yes, processes are faulty today even with maker-checker and other QA procedures. To me it seems the main value of LLMs in a spreadsheet-heavy process is acceleration - which is great! What is harder is quality assurance - like the example someone gave regarding deciding when and how to include or exclude certain tables, date ranges, calc, etc. Properly recording expert judgment and then consistently applying that judgement over time is key. I’m not sure that is the kind of thing LLMs are great at, even ignoring their stochastic nature. Let’s figure out how to get best use out of the new kit - and like everything else, focus on achieving continuously improving outcomes.

That’s the kind of thing that can get a company into a lot of trouble with its auditors and shareholders. Not that I am offering accounting advice of course. And yeah, one can not “blame” and ai system or try to ai-wash any dodgy practices.