Clearly you have failed to wear your company mandated Shokkollar: Presented by HP(tm). This infraction will be reported and then you will be shocked. Shocked, we say.

The problem isn't cramming people into cities, it's cramming people into cities WITH TRAFFIC.
Also, to a lesser extent, with traffic AND NO TREES.

Plant more trees. Plant trees between major roadways and homes. Have fewer cars on the road and more trains.

1 train with 4 cars can move 1000 people. That takes about 15 buses, but over 600 cars (on average, based on typical occupancy; in the best case, you might be able to reduce that to 200-ish). And those cars will require an enormous amount of parking--asphalt that just sits there and heats up in the sun, doing nothing productive.

If you want to move a lot of people around, cars are the worst way to do it, but that's the way that currently dominates. Our cities can be cleaner and less bad for our health if we treat them as places where people live as opposed to places where people DRIVE. City planning for the health of your population actually requires attention to that detail, it's hard to just stumble into it by accident. Plant trees, establish parks, get rid of parking lots, increase public transit into the densest areas. It's all doable, if we want to.

So app syncing happens all the time, and it happens on the free tier (5GB), so what we're talking about is actual backups of data that aren't normally synced.

I cannot guarantee this, but I'm pretty sure that Apple only starts a backup when the device is connected to power, and after some amount of delay. So backups aren't really fully continuous. Some people never plug their phones into their computer, which is fair, but if you're plugging into your computer anyway, the backups are fast and non-intrusive. If you also have a remote backup system, like Backblaze, then any time your phone is backed up to your computer, you're getting a cloud backup of your local disk.

THAT SAID.

5GB is insanely stingy. It should be 5GB per device you own, minimum. Maybe 10GB.

But I don't really buy the lawsuit. There's plenty of ways to hook data sources up to your phone. I have Box doing some of my storage, iCloud doing some, and I could sync my photo library with some other service if I really wanted to.

This is mostly my experience as well.

Do you ever find that you have to speak that running dialogue out loud? I find that sometimes if I don't, it rattles around in my head a bit, and I can relieve that feeling by saying the words. It kinda feels like manifesting the dialogue into the world, like it isn't real until I say it or type it or something similar.

I don't have the same thing going with those language rules, though. I find spelling and grammar come fairly easily without any tricks, but I'm a terse, usually uninteresting writer. My technical writing is quite good, but my creative writing (when I was in school and forced to do it) is terrible.

Reading is fine, I just don't have a good sense of the spaces that the characters are moving through. I'd have to sit down with a pencil to map things out if I wanted to do that. But if a character is in a ship, moving down a corridor and turns left into a room, and that room has a chair and a bed and a screen on the wall with a video message waiting, etc. I can still follow the events fully abstractly. It also means that I do tend to like more character driven stories rather than ones that try to describe the setting more.

Basically, I still take a lot of joy in reading, but I suspect the books that we'd pick out would have different characteristics. (But given that we're both here, and both nerds, probably still a lot of overlap.)

It's a GREAT documentation summarizer.

And, honestly, we're having to rewrite our C++ programming tests. It can answer questions about copy elision and move semantics better than most humans, and the questions that are small programming tasks are trivially solved by it.

The questions aren't meant to be super difficult (though in the case of copy elision and move semantics, it's a little bit obscure and you have to go do some reading) but ChatGPT completely obviates them.

I know ChatGPT doesn't actually KNOW things, but in a written test, it can fake it well enough that we have no choice but to change our approach to testing and interviewing.

I don't really think it does any good to ignore what it's good at. It's a stochastic parrot, yes. It cannot reason, that's true. But it still generates text that can be really useful if you need it to. I've used it to tell me how to do something in FFMPEG so I don't have to read through the mountains of command line switches to find what I want, and I've used it to summarize elisp documentation because honestly, some of the docs in OSS projects are terrible, and GPT's interpretation of them turn out to be more readable than some lisp nerd's half-assed attempt at explaining how a function works. (I mean that in the kindest way possible, I am also a nerd that half-asses documentation sometimes.)

It's a catch-22. The public transit in your area sucks because it was defunded so people could drive their cars more, and so the only convenient way to get door-to-door on your schedule is by car. I understand completely, but the fact of the matter is good transit COULD do the thing you asked, if we would make a cultural shift to do it.

I had to rent a car recently to get to a medical appointment in a town about 60km away. There was no way for the transit in the area to get me to the appointment on time. If I'd lived in a few different European countries, that kind of distance wouldn't have been the slightest issue. That's a failure of our system, not an indication of the superiority of individual vehicles.

The truckers that were protesting were idiots, and I think you might have no idea what you're actually talking about.

Those unvaxxed truckers were complaining that the law wouldn't let them back into the country. Too bad that the USA's laws wouldn't have let them LEAVE THE COUNTRY in the first place. They were protesting for nothing. There was no freedom at stake. They held Ottawa hostage for however many weeks because they weren't willing to do what 90% of all the other truckers still driving were doing. It was a small fraction of idiots that wanted to protest because 'Trudeau bad' and nothing else.

I have no sympathy for those dipsticks. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They have every right to remain unvaxxed, but the government is allowed to set laws to protect the health of the country (there are laws that require that you have certain vaccinations if you're coming from overseas; similarly you need to get vaccinated for certain things before going to other parts of the world, none of this is new) AND employers are similarly allowed to set rules about what they find acceptable conduct. Not being vaxxed is a choice, and choices have consequences.

“Running a successful open source project is Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.”

And if you're lucky, you even get paid the same as the janitor.

My guess is that there isn't as much iOS-specific Objective-C and Swift code on GitHub. In the general case, Microsoft will be better, 100%. If you're writing an iOS app and need a suggestion, I would bet money that Apple's suggestions through Xcode will be better.

Sigh.

The problem is that the training data is bad and they're trying to correct for it, but they're doing a terrible job, because it's super difficult to correct for bad training data.

If you ask one of these things to generate you an image of an autistic person, it generates basically the same picture over and over again of a sad, white man. Occasionally it'll pop out one woman, or one person of colour, but those results are stupid and unrepresentative. Autistic people aren't inherently sad, they're not inherently white, or inherently male. The output fails to account for any sort of diversity at all, using white men as the default. It's kind of insulting no matter how you look at it, but garbage-in-garbage-out is just as true as it ever was.

Some of our history is whitewashed. I don't know what it would generate if I asked for a person living in Palestine in the 3rd century, say. Or London during the plague, or any number of places across Europe across history, but we know that those places were not homogeneous, but our art and our media tends to reduce those places to enclaves of JUST white people, or JUST dark-skinned people, in the case of the Middle East. In reality, history shows that a lot of those places were crossroads and quite diverse.

I agree with the starting point: we should not reinforce bad data that flattens our society to just white people in all contexts, all the time. We should not have to specify the race/gender of the person just to make sure we don't get a default white person. White people aren't even the majority of people on the planet right now, it's nonsense to make that assumption in any context where the race isn't inherent in description ("programmer", "plumber", "factory worker").

But you also can't just pretend that by randomizing the makeup of any group you're going to somehow find historical accuracy. It ISN'T true that the Nazi army was racially diverse; it's absurd to claim otherwise.

In the end, it's actually just more proof that "AI" doesn't actually KNOW anything.

I don't know exactly how you fix the problem, but certainly it's more complicated than just "make sure to roll the dice every time you create an image of someone to make sure nobody is left out". That's just MORE BAD DATA, and we have enough of that.

1. Inflation is still pretty bad and people are spending more money on housing, so they're not buying EVs. But I've seen a few trend charts that show that all vehicle sales are slowing. But it's not because EVs are bad (even if the infrastructure isn't ideal right now).

2. Hertz dumped their Teslas because not only were they not getting rented that often, they were also extremely expensive to maintain. That's because Elon is a grifter and Tesla's poor build quality extends beyond panel gaps to cars practically falling to pieces on the drive home, occasionally. This is not necessarily the case with other brands, though it turns out that replacing a damaged Ioniq 5 battery is potentially absurdly expensive.

3. There's no sense in buying an EV right now. Battery tech is still evolving and the landscape 5 years from now is likely to be different. Get a 3 year lease, let the dealer/manufacturer take care of it. The lithium in those batteries is going to get more valuable over time, so I feel like they're a bit more likely to recycle them.

4. Also: good. We don't need more cars, TBH. We need better designed cities and ways to get around them and between them that don't rely on more cars. My plan is to lease an EV when I absolutely can't get away without having a car, but I haven't owned a car for about 10 years now. I could probably go forever if the forest fire risk in my area weren't so high.

Apple's problem space is actually a bit more constrained, I think. They already have millions of lines of code to train against internally and if theyâ(TM)re trying to make the lives of iOS/macOS developers easier, their models will be very good at that specific thing. I suspect the suggestions for general purpose code will merely be average.

Certainly, this is absolutely true. But what I'm suggesting here is that at the very least, certain types of events--political speeches, rallies, riots, what have you--have three (or more) humans that agree that someone has said the things that they said. If you can deepfake a politician saying literally anything, we need some outside sources that are public and can vouch for something. It's probably even more important that they're all at odds with one another in some way.

This can really be an opportunity for traditional media if they seize it.

They can form coalitions across political divisions that guarantee that a video or speech or whatever actually happened as you see it.

So Fox, NPR and the NYT, say. They all send live reporters to the event, all of them have cameras and sound equipment, all of them are at the source and can confirm that the video is a true capture of the event, and if any manipulated versions come up, all three have source material to judge against. Nobody (reasonable) can accuse the coalition of bias, because they span the political spectrum. They can give it a catch-phrase and have a 'GUARANTEED' graphic across the screen, the suits will eat it up.

It might give people a reason to watch/read them again, and they don't even have to change their political spin.

I mean, I suppose this relies on people actually wanting a ground truth to base their views on, but I can't solve people enjoy being lied to.