Since you seem knowledgable, I honestly have to ask this boomer-sounding question: Why does anyone install the Tiktok, Facebook, or Reddit apps on their phone? People send me tiktok links and Google gives me tiktok links, and they work just fine. I get it if someone is a creator -- but for the majority of people they just browse. Isn't the browser sufficient? I don't even have an account -- what am I missing? Having visited the site plenty of times in a private window, I've never found any reason to engage any more than that. I honestly just don't get it.

An AC gave an interesting option I've never considered before. What if we allow the user to select from various open moderation algorithms? The user could turn it all off and thus see everything. They could choose to option to disable nazi bullshit, then maybe hate speech, then maybe various 3rd-party filters that tend to lean left, or right, or whatever. This sounds awesome to me -- I can tailor the filter based on my preferences, and I could even make my own. Maybe I want one based on keywords, but somebody else wants one based on AI, and somebody else has a trusted person who they use as a filter. Maybe people could even have the job of being a professionally moderator for hire.

One way to do this would be for the sites to expose everything and the client browser filters it. Another would be for to create APIs that allow remote moderation. Really with REST-based web applications this is entirely feasible.

Slashdot kinda works like this. Friends get +1, enemies -1. We can set Funny, Interesting, Informative, Flamebait etc. to get a -1, +0, or +1. We can give a bonus to long comments, and we can set a threshold. So by selectively friending people I see slightly different view from you. But we are relying mostly on community moderation.

Not really, it just kicks the problem out a level. There's a similar mechanism on Android. It's probably in the top 5 things new developers don't understand and need to be taught in detail. It's doable, if the devs writing the program understand and correctly use the system, but it's not free or anywhere near a solved problem.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

"Big" is relative. The local IHeart station wouldn't include their closure notice for "just" a few stores. A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? Yeah. Sixteen is just a local retailer.

You could also start with:
  - two molecules that (moderately) accurately copied each other (though getting them both at the same time makes the time scale to the big event much longer.)
  - A molecule that makes NEARLY always inacurate (but occasionally acurate and complete) copies of itself. (This also drastically pulls in the time to a two-molecule solution.)
  - A molecule that makes inaccurate copies but with string of typical errors that occasionally loops back to an accurate and complete (mod a few errors in unimportant places) copy of a previous version.

These could eventually mutate into a version that can perform a one-step copy-itself loop.

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I've always been partial to an RNA-only origin. RNA can do it all (self-copy, enzymes, energy transport batteries in at least two sizes with self-pluggin-in connectors: ATP/ADP and UTP/UDP, expression regulation, directed genetic code editing, etc.). It's also still doing a lot of that in current lifeforms, especially in key parts (such as many of the components of the DNA duplication, DNA repair, DNA-to-MRNA copy, gene expression regulation, MRNA exon-eliminating editing, and MRNA directed protein synthesis machinery)

I recently read where the majority of the microplastics that we're finding every, including inside our tissues, in placentas, and such is coming from. Tires. Perhaps the car really is killing us, and the US is more in love with cars than almost anywhere. I wonder what these stats are like in Germany, possibly the only place more car-happy than the US?

We are going to replace stupidity with automated stupidity. All these bad moderations will go into the training set. But then people will blame the AI instead of looking in the mirror and going "Hmm..... we trained the AI on ourselves.... and it is acting like an ass... what could this mean?"

It originally referred to the number of days between public disclosure or active exploitation in the wild, and the patch. If one defined it as defined the number of days between private discovery and the patch, then every vulnerability is a zero-day vulnerability and the term becomes useless.

As I've been searching lately, AI has been cutting in to my searches. When a search engine decides to throw AI at what I've asked for it, I search on a different search engine; I'm looking for matching WEB PAGES, not some computer's interpretation of what I've asked for.

I'm old-fashioned. I search for content, not computer guesses at content that might contain what I asked for. Today, I looked for information on a store chain having financial issues. Google decided I was looking for "closest to Chicago", for the Los Angeles-based chain. duckduckgo at least didn't prioritize Chicago store locations over the recently-reported corporate problems.

That sort of thing will cut my searches by at least 25% going forward, as they increase the bad data. I'm getting too old to deal with the [censored] "help".

In the old days it was something like two weeks per year of service, to a maximum of six months. The other aspect that affected where I worked was that the state required 90 days notice prior to layoffs of some size or greater. (Forget the threshold) So they'd lay people off immediately and they would be on the payroll but not working for 90 days. Then the severance kicked in.

I manged to survive the layoffs at IBM, then was sold to Global Foundries in 2015 with 5000 friends and a bunch of real estate.

In the old days when there was a decent severance package, volunteering for layoff was a good way to retire with a bonus. Other than a few specific times there wasn't a formal way to do so, but there was an informal path. Way back when I was on vacation over the layoff. When I came back someone I enjoyed talking with was gone. I found out he had been laid off and left with a smile on his face. (He was quite a bit older than me.)

I notice that most of the people saying AI is not useful comes from people who start by saying "I tried it one time for something trivial and gave up."

Interesting opinion article about Stochastic parrots