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> Only nerds are going to find CVE-2014-0160 triggering, but if I say heartbleed everyone who was there remembers.

That has more to do with the severity of heartbleed than the fact that it had a name and a logo. I've since seen a lot of vulnerabilities try to market themselves with websites, cute names, and stupid logos but I still don't remember them because they still just weren't big enough to actually be memorable.

Healthcare workers for the elderly don't need giant stacks of cash, they just need fair wages they can live on. There is no shortage of extremely compassionate people who don't need to be bribed to care for others in need. They do need to be able to support themselves and thrive though. It makes zero difference if they are foreigners, or unrelated.

Traditionally, communities cared for each other, no matter if someone was their family member or not. The elderly, injured, sick, disabled, and orphaned have been cared for by those outside of their immediate families throughout all of human history. Our modern lives have made us unusually isolated, but it's still our nature to care for each other.

You can be stupid as fuck and still be insanely rich. It really helps if your daddy was rich and you have no morals tho.

> I for one wouldn’t mind living independently into my 80s rather than being a burden on my only kid.

You wouldn't be living independently if you were dependent on a robot. The burden shifts from your family only as long as you can pay for and maintain the robot yourself and if that's the case you could probably pay humans to care for you anyway.

> Nursing homes and Elder care facilities also have huge labor problems, and throwing just money at the problem isn’t really an option.

The solution probably involves paying workers a hell of a lot more and breaking up the largest companies.

> I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it.

It dominates news coverage even when we're not coming up on an election, and the high stakes involved makes it an even bigger topic, and one that weighs heavily on people's minds.

> People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.

The wealth of information available (and disinformation avilable) is partly to blame. It's easy to spend your time only on a small number of interests. Most people just let the algorithms of a small number of corporations feed them the vast majority of what they consume, so while technically there's a lot more information out there, they only see what those corporations choose to show them.

I have sometimes wondered what news we're missing out on when all the focus is on politics, but some of it is probably due to media consolidation. It's easier and cheaper to write and send out scripts on national issues to every station you own all over the country than invest time and money on reports that only matter to a single region/community.

Both things can be true. The world is getting worse and news is overeager to tell you about it while ignoring the good things that are happening. Knowing about the good things wouldn't stop the bad things from still being true, but at least the news wouldn't be entirely depressing.

While Russian bots and manipulation campaigns are real, sadly, I feel that there's enough legitimate issues that you'd still see many people upset even if the bots weren't there.

I wonder if AI didn't end up having an impact in other ways. Did they get more aggressive about captchas or bot detection around the time when LLMs came out annoying or keeping out legit users? I imagine they were saw a lot of bot traffic in the years before AI chatbots went public and that probably continues even now that it's a ghost town.

I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.

"or else" works too but that's still three extra characters

Some of those people in the early days were just letting their imagination run away with them, like that google engineer who thought a chatbot was self-aware, being enslaved, and was in need of rescue. Much of the time they weren't talking about "AI" as it exists, but what AI might maybe one day become. Other times it was purely marketing to make headlines and put the idea in people's (investors) heads that the chatbots were vastly more powerful than they are.

Even without AI it should be. Honestly the less AI has to do with giving people access to our laws and court records the better since the value of having that access would decline with hallucinated laws/interpretations/attribution. A post about how AI isn't even fit to write wikipedia articles just fell off the front page a few hours ago, and providing something like this to the public seems at least as important.

> when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated.

That seems like a great way to turn functional legislation into swiss cheese as one line at a time things are either kept or removed based on chance/circumstance and the whims of the current people in power.

Laws are collectively voted for as a complete package, and a law that worked and was passed as being acceptable can become useless, dangerous, and undesirable with a very small number of lines removed from them. I want lawmakers to spend their time focused on the entirety of a bill. Your idea would result in them fighting over who should or shouldn't be recorded as the official author of each and every line. We don't need nonsense like "Senator X will retire soon so Senator Y should author it!", or "I'll agree to author line 405 if you agree to author line 30!"

Your idea, like so many ideas where laws just fade away unless something happens to keep them, also sounds like a great way for you to lose longstanding freedoms and protections that should never be at risk of simply deprecating just because some one gets voted out or dies or retires.

The intent of a law should be clear from the text. It isn't always, but at least now it's possible. To have the intent of a law, or even worse the intent of specific lines within a law, subject to change at any time would make interrupting that law and establishing precedent a nightmare for the courts.

We really should have a system in place to help clear out old and unnecessary laws on the books, but this would be a terrible way to accomplish that.

> Policy makers would be much less likely to explore bold reforms or risky bipartisan compromises if their draft quality notes and correspondences were publicly tied to their political reputation.

Only if those bold reforms weren't in the interests of the people they serve. Risky bipartisan compromises should still be transparent along with what was gained in exchange for them. If the people feel that the compromise wasn't worth it they should be empowered to vote accordingly come election time. It's the job of representatives to assure the people who elected them that they are doing a good job and if they can't do that they deserve to lose their position. Refusing to support bold reforms that the people they represent want, or refusing to compromise when it would be beneficial to voters would become just as costly to their career.

> It takes significant work to produce successful legislation, and much of that work can be productively and safely done without direct public oversight.

Often most of that work is done entirely for them by corporations and lobbying groups and "law makers" just vote how they are paid to vote without even reading the bill put before them. Just because something can be done in secrecy doesn't make that the ideal way to do it. We've have extremely poor results with the system as it stands right now, so a change to introduce more transparency and accountability seems like a very good idea.

> This is the same reason an individual might value a private journal.

A public servant representing the people by making edits to laws and performing the duties they were elected to carry out is nothing at all like someone keeping a private journal. Their work is not their personal affairs, it is the public's affairs. How that work is being done matters to the public. Legislators would still remain free to go home at the end of the day and write in their private diary all they like.

> If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it.

When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind closed doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold them accountable for it, which is exactly why it takes place in secrecy. Increasing the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable by increasing transparency can only improve outcomes for voters, and it would certainty be inconvenient for elected officials who want to put their own interests above the interests of the people who elected them.

> If you were willing to live like 1950 you could have the male working 20 hours a week and the female never leaving the home. What people forget is in 1950 having a black and white TV was unusual (though not uncommon) and color TV was still several years away. Your phone was a shared party line. You had one car which wasn't reliable by modern standards.

Another way of looking at that is you could own a home and a modern car, and support your entire family and have the latest technology all on a single income.

TV wasn't worth having in 1950 for most people, if they even got reception at all, but by 1955 75% of homes had state of the art TVs. Phones improved over the decade as well, and pretty much everyone had at least one in their home (technically owned by AT&T). What people had seems primitive to us, but it was all new and constantly improving to the people at the time.

Today our experience causes us to expect that greed and enshittification will make everything both worse and more expensive, but back then people were excited about the future and about how technology would make their lives better while getting cheaper because that was their experience.

> I always thought left wing politics had little basis in reality from transitioning babies to deplatforming scientist for practising science.

That does sound like exactly the kinds of lies that a good model would want to avoid, but which conservatives would believe, along with "Climate change isn't real", "There is a war on Christmas", and "Trump won the 2020 presidential election"

Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He spoke passionately about the dangers of domestic spying programs and against the Patriot Act. Maybe he was lying the entire time just to be elected, but he was extremely convincing.

Personally, I suspect that once in office he was either shown something that scared him so much that it genuinely made him believe that violating the rights of every American citizen was necessary, or he was strong armed into supporting what they were doing and expanding their abuses. I imagine the NSA had no shortage of dirt on him and his family just as they must have on every politician, CEO, parent, and child in the country.

Part of the solution is to make bribery illegal so that people are less likely to be swayed by money. It'll be hard to get the people who have been stuffing their pockets with cash in exchange for selling out the American people to agree to limit their ability to do that now. Instead we're going in the opposite direction with the recent Supreme Court ruling making bribery legal as long as you call it a "tip" or "gift" after the public official gave you what you wanted.

Obama wasn't always pro-surveillance though. He campaigned on ending the NSAs domestic spying program. Only after he was elected did he suddenly praise the NSA publicly and greatly expand their spying powers.

Ideally an AI model's output would have a basis in reality which already means it will be considered "Left biased propaganda" by conservatives.

Since 2022 Google has killed off like 50 products and services, so it's pretty impressive that they've added employees at all.

Perfectly readable without JS enabled too!

I'm mostly ambivalent about it excepting those situations where it makes things confusing. For example, I really enjoyed A Psalm for the Wild-Built which featured a non-binary protagonist referred to using they/them pronouns, but there were some sentences which became ambiguous as a result. That's something the editor could have caught and had corrected though and I wouldn't have had anything to complain about.

> I genuinely don't understand the intensity with which you and others respond with.

I'll try to explain. I think it's a very strange request to make, especially to people you aren't close to like random co-workers. Imposing on others can put them in an uncomfortable position. It would be easier for them to say "No, if you choose to feel excluded by an explicitly and objectively inclusive phrase with full knowledge that it isn't being used with any intention to exclude you, that's 100% a 'you' problem. Please handle your shit and don't make your problem into everyone else's problem.", but most people probably won't want to be rude, so many will just agree. Depending on the power dynamic in play, some people may feel that they have little choice at all, or that the consequences of non-compliance could be career limiting.

For you the whole interaction is the request, followed by their response, followed by your judgement, but for the polite others it involves making an active effort to be conscious of every moment where you're within earshot, remembering the common and innocuous phrase that upsets you for some strange reason, and then actively changing the way they'd normally express themselves to others in order to accommodate you. In addition to having to constantly remember to self-censor, it also means risking feeling like shit if they happen to slip up, or worse, worrying about the impacts their mistake might have on their career or the work.

It's absolutely not the most demanding demand you could place on another person, but it isn't nothing either, and when the reasons for that demand don't make a lot of sense, having to actively make and continuously maintain that effort can feel like a larger imposition than it might otherwise, especially in a busy environment where there's work to be done and people's heads are already filled with other concerns.

A request like that could easily be seen as rude, self-centered, or off-putting in a professional environment even when the same request made to your friends and family would likely be better received. Being able to clearly explain why you have the issue you do in a relatable way might help avoid some of those negative feelings. If it isn't a deliberate choice on your part to twist other people's innocently spoken words by willfully ignoring the very definition of them and turning them into something that makes you feel bad inside, and you find that even if you try you can't help but feel that way about it, in all sincerity, I'd recommend finding and speaking with a therapist about it.

I'm all for reasonably accommodating reasonable preferences. A nickname preference for example is common and fairly easy to accommodate. The more bizarre and unreasonable your preferences are though the less likely people are going to be to accommodate them, especially if those people aren't very close to you. Even people who do go through the trouble to accommodate someone's strange or burdensome preference might think less of them a little bit.

"I interpret a commonly used word or phrase as meaning something other than what the dictionary says that it means, and differently from what pretty much everyone, for hundreds of years, has intended it to mean when they say it, and so every time I hear it used by anyone that makes me unhappy so please stop using that word or phrase around me" is a pretty strange request that some people might find a bit unreasonable. At least it might not be too hard for some to constantly remember to alter their vocabulary around specific people.

In terms of human negotiation, part of working in a professional environment, or any large group of mixed company, involves understanding that you may not have your every preference catered to and that for some preferences it can even be impolite to impose on the group by asking them to take your weird hang up into account. The strength/impact of the preference, the size of the group and how well you all know each other will have to factor into that though.

I suspect that "I'll just try to remember and understand that people who say 'you guys' use it to mean what the dictionary says that it means" is a more reasonable position than "Every one of the 200,000+ people who work for the same company that I work for should alter their vocabulary to accommodate my personal preference because I want to cling to a non-standard definition of that particular phrase and I'll judge anyone who refuses to comply"

Pedantry would be pointing out the extensive history of "you guys" as being non-gendered and that even dictionaries say that is what it means. Anyone misinterpreting a word or phrase by using their own made up non-standard definition of it is, at best, assuming the absolute worst about someone's intention without any cause. If people feel excluded by the phrase it's an entirely self-inflicted wound.

Why spend even one minute "solving" a non-problem? What would even qualify as a solution to a non-problem? Or maybe it's a problem, just not a real problem, although if a problem is imaginary, surely the solution can be too.

> I cringe with AI "colonialism".

It initially got an eye roll our of me, but it looks like the term that's been thrown around increasingly, and not entirely without cause. If the patterns, parallels, and impacts are close enough to make the comparison valid then it might be a more reasonable term than I expected. Colonialism doesn't necessarily require forced intervention or conquest. There are several definitions, but one would be the domination/exploitation of a people to serve a foreign power. By driving down wages, data harvesting through surveillance, and stealing natural resources tech companies are just as capable of exploiting and plundering as governments have been.

I think the people who choose to hurt others for profit are basically psychopathic. No conscience. Lack of empathy or compassion. Inflated Ego. They're no different than muggers and rapists who are also willing to hurt others to get what they want, they just happened to end up finding a way to hurt people that they can (so far) get away with.

People like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy who already have more money than they could ever need but still feel compelled to cause others to suffer in order for them to make even more money likely have some other kind of mental sickness. Either some form of pathological greed that causes them to never be satisfied with what they have and obsess over hoarding, or something that causes them to derive some sort of sick pleasure from causing suffering.

Unless/until they can treated our world would be better off if we locked these kinds of people up to keep the rest of us safe from them, but right now those with enough money can get away with just about anything which only further emboldens them. They can bribe law makers to prevent regulations that would stop them from releasing harmful products and services. They can hide behind corporate shields. Hopefully we find a way to hold them accountable for the harms they cause soon because they're never going to stop hurting us, or our children.