The issue is government is also how us non elites might be able to band together to fight back against the elites. There's no way for one non-elite to do anything against one elite - the elite can just buy them off or pay others to kill them or whatever they want. Government is how we make any progress in stopping them from just polluting ever more egregiously such that we non-elites can't even use water from our wells. Most regulations are because *not regulating* the thing caused problems big enough for either elites or enough other people to get up in arms about it.

For instance, get rid of the FCC and now cell phones, radio, TV, wifi etc all stop working because everyone is just trying to overpower each other.

Get rid of the FAA and now dumb people are crashing drones into airplanes from outside airport property. Or malicious people.

Get rid of police and the roads, towns, etc all become mad max.

The bill of rights aren't even in the constitution - why are those good and other later laws or amendments not? Even if the Federal government isn't involved, the states have no such limits, see the 10th amendment. But in today's interconnected world, trying to have 50 + different sets of laws for *everything* is kind of impossible. Well, actually just horribly inefficient.

I also think that we as a society want to minimize roving hordes of starving people with nothing left to lose - I don't want to need to have armed columns to go anywhere. And I think that "life" and "pursuit of happiness" are positive goals in our founding documents - doesn't matter how protected my bill of rights is if I die of starvation because 100 people own everything and I can't even get work because of ever more automation.

The wealthy almost make the government, both through campaign contributions, and through funding think tanks, and media campaigns, and more. You talk like the reason people are jailed for bullshit reasons isn't to make money both by increasing use of private jails to providing slave labor for those wealthy owners.

Also, much of the political class *is* the wealthy, they get there via people seeking favors - that's why they end up rich or richer.

However, I can see a direct link between owners not wanting to have to have employees they pay and AI potentially replacing our jobs. I do not see how government is causing that problem.

Part of it certainly has to be "what you grew up with" I think. I caught ebooks pretty early in 2000 and I was like 18. I've never found an issue with reading digitally, though I generally don't put as much mental effort into memorization at all with easy search.

After listening to Decoding the Gurus and Very Bad Wizards review various breathtaking studies "that should change the world" - I was basically assuming the study didn't show anything of the sort that was reported. As the GPP said - a brainwave pattern we think means paying attention. Whoopde fucking do. And what's worse IMHO is this is because it's cheaper or cooler to use "sciencey EEGs", but it seems like we could at least have used widely available reading comprehension tests to get closer to something useful.

But even then, I would want to know the actual P value, the N of participants, the control, and if it can be replicated.

I find AI *can* be a great search, say for a question like "how do I change the management VLAN on a juniper ex4300". I used to have (for Blade switches pre us using Juniper) 3 PDFs I'd need to cross reference when we got a new model, and write up lots of docs for our specific use case. I still need docs, but for one off things I can usually get the right answer from AI without spending 30 minutes searching for the correct manual and then searching the PDF for the syntax, or searching Juniper's site and figuring out which KB applies from 3 that *look* the same to me. I actually hunger for when we could realistically get a FLOSS AI tool to point at our internal KBs / docs that users could ask natural language questions to and have it give the answer or even better the link to the wiki. Right now many of our trouble tickets are sending back wiki links.

I also (along with plenty of others) find it useful for better tab complete for code - providing entire blocks of code you can then edit as needed. I think it saved me a few hours on the last script I needed to create. I did need to edit it, and I would always vet the code, but I can't argue with the time savings.

Finally, I wonder if you could use it better in reverse of your suggestion - you write the letter and have it proofread / polish your prose. I know a lot of people who basically pay their one friend good at basic writing to clean up their papers, slides, proposals etc...

"Are going to"? Where have you been? It's basically impossible to find decent reviews of any product, or this service vs that service for the last 3 years at least. Is Going.com a useful service? How does it compare to Mighty Travels Premium? Who knows?! I guess I'll need to pay for both and compare, or just keep using traditional flight searches and hope for the best.

Every product search is just endless "best product of 2023" lists that are junk. What's a good laser cutter? 12 best of 2024 is already out as a list, times like 50. It's worthless.

And if its not that, it's a youtube video answering what should be a 5 second answer. Though at least for kdenlive those videos seem to be ~30 seconds rather than minutes of wasted time.

I find Claude2 useful for looking up command syntax when I'm swapping between different switch OSs. It is like having a friend who's an expert in that CLI who you can just ask "How do I change the management port VLAN" or whatever on a given switch model.

I find GPT4 useful a bit with it's DALLE plugin for quick illustrations.

Hilariously I find them most useful for speeding up my DMing in D&D - here's an image of what stuff looks like for players off the cuff, or here's a leveled NPC off the cuff. Probably not the market enterprises are looking for, but there's lots of people playing roll20.net (I think) for gaming software, I could see them buying in.

Honestly, I think a lot of customer service chats would be improved - Amazon's "click from the 5 things we think it might be" "chat" system probably would be improved it if could take more options - assuming there was a way to feed that sort of stuff through an expert system for decision making. I wonder if they could just make a much wider system that classified via an llm down to the small number of choices available now? Or basically could be trained to "refund" vs "no refund" better.

Last time I looked, about a 9 months ago, a Subaru Solara was ~$51k and functionally similar to the Crosstrek which was *at the same dealer* for $32k for an up model version with extra trim levels. Making up $19k initial purchase price is a big hill and A LOT of GAS. Maybe we're getting screwed in the US, but I don't think we'd ever make up that difference over the life of a car. If we also need to purchase solar panels and charging infrastructure and controllers etc, that's at least thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars more to make up in "free energy".

It's precedent that Napster - a tool people used to violate copyright (while the software was never implied to be a person) was responsible for the copyright violations due to some ... well I'd call it interesting logic. So I don't think that's as slam dunk as you think it is.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure it is actually against US copyright law to draw snoopy. How do you think before computers people violated copyrights?

Although I might make the case that if you're selling on a library of pictures, the company as a whole ought to "know" what the pictures they are selling *are*. For all sorts of legal reasons including copyright, CSAM, and just basic quality control/fitness for purpose.

Just because you sold me a couple million bolts doesn't mean you can disclaim them being a specific grade of bolt suitable for a specific purpose. And companies are held liable for messing that up all the time.

For most political meetings, and certainly most corporate meetings, I don't see why it wouldn't be do a video call. The government surely could set this up? Heck, I video call rather than drive 22 miles now most days.

This is all good if you never want to go from the US to Europe, or really ever want to go from one side of the US to the other. I feel like adding days of driving to a trip isn't very appealing, and depending on how it's done, is adding more hotels along the way, adding more restaurants etc better?

This is how you end up with people not travelling / experiencing different cultures and other parts of the world - which can increase provincialism - which I'd argue hurts convincing people to care or believe in "subtle" global challenges like climate change.

If you never leave a "small" area in your life, you're less likely to viscerally understand how different parts of the world are from each other. I can't prove this, but I believe this can increase the psychology of "not happening here - not a problem for me" because - a Tsunami over there or Wildfire Smoke in Australia for instance ... don't feel like my problem the way local fires or floods are. I think it's human nature.

What we have seen studies on is how the best way to overcome what I'd call "non-malignant" othering is to actually meet and know people from the specific group. If you're just ignorant, you might well change your mind given actual experiance.