The only place where a gun would have a valid use for self defense is when people are screaming.
But maybe you just want to ban guns.
There's one killer app I'd absolutely love: Name tags. I want facial recognition and a person's name to pop up over their head like in an MMO. Give me that, and shut up and take my money. Even if it was privacy-limited to, say, only showing me names of people in my contact list it'd be worthwhile.
- A popular Washington state high school Spanish teacher was recently FIRED after reading a passage from "To Kill a Mockingbird" - responding to a dare by his students. In fact, that same book is now BANNED in multiple âoeprogressiveâ high schools.
- The latest edition of 1984? Prefaced with trigger warnings, and a new introduction apologizing that its characters arenâ(TM)t diverse enough.
I'm pretty much Lefty McLeftface myself, and I agree with you that these things are stupid. While I don't know the political leanings of the schoolboard in question, I'll note that banning books outright is not a typical leftist approach. Most of us would go with, "Yeah, this is a teaching moment," which is what it sounds like the teacher in question did. The book is about racism, it would be pretty dumb to try to eliminate the racist elements. I don't think most lefties would try to prevent teaching "To Kill A Mockingbird". I suspect that most of the objections come from right-wingers who feel oppressed by any suggestion that whites have historically oppressed minorities in the US.
Speaking of teaching moments, that's pretty much what your description of the new 1984 forward sounds like. I haven't read that edition myself so I can't really comment on it. Doesn't sound like it affects the text of the novel itself though, and it may even clarify it by giving context. Like I said, I don't know. Haven't read it.
As for LLMs' characterization of Heather Cox Richardson, I'd need you to show your work on either of those claims. I'd be interested to see the unfiltered chat logs of the prompts and responses. FWIW, I think LLMs in general have pretty much the same accuracy as a Magic 8-Ball. Blind faith in anything Grok or the others say is itself the height of stupidity.
As for HCR herself, I'd put her in the "left-leaning" category. Her letters tend to mix relatively neutral descriptions of the events of the day and her own mildly leftist interpretation of them. Definitely not neutral, but if you think she is FAR left you need to re-calibrate.
"Dear Slashdot, how important is it to learn how to efficiently use the tool that I'm going to need every day for my entire career?"
The answer should be obvious. Yeah, you can get by without it, but even if prompting AI becomes the "programming" of the future you still gotta type your prompts. If for no other reason than your officemates will throttle you after listening to you giving voice commands all day.
I admit it, I'm an old fart. Here's a nickel, kid, go get yourself a better computer. But I learned to touch type on manual typewriters in high school in the early 80s because I knew I wanted to be a programmer and I knew it would be useful. I have never regretted it even once.
TLDR version: The system is engineered to be too complex for humans, which is the mark of a very very badly designed system that is suboptimal, inefficient, expensive, and useless.
That's only true if you assume the purpose of the tax code is to spread the cost of operating government fairly across the citizenry. That's not the case, at least in the USA. Here, the tax code is designed to shift the tax burden away from the class which writes tax code (politicians and people wealthy enough to make those politicians sit up and beg for scraps) and towards the classes which don't (all the rest of us schmucks). With that in mind it's a very well designed system. The fact that it needs a computer and an advanced degree to understand aren't bugs, they're features.
In short, if you can afford to get enough of an education to actually understand the tax code, you're almost certainly in the class which benefits from the convoluted nature of it.
RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science
Well, if *that* doesn't sound like the opening location shot of a kaiju movie, I don't know what does!
Reminds me of the real mechanical turk (not the Amazon crap), which was a 16th century contraption supposedly using advanced mechanical intelligence to play chess.
It was really just a guy in a box.
I spent practically my whole career as a maintenance programmer. Bugs that escaped to the field came back to me to find and fix. Shifting the bulk of coding to AI scares the willies out of me. Not because it would make my job obsolete, but because it would double or triple my workload with some of the most esoteric, inscrutable, and just plain bad code ever seen by mortal man.
Look, we've all pulled up old code and said to ourselves, "How the hell did this ever work in the first place?" AI code will be worse. Oh, sure, you can ask the AI to explain it to you... LLMs are really good at that. Well, really good at coming up with an explanation, anyway. Not so good at the whole "correctness" thing. But the explanation will sound great!
Every day just reinforces that I picked exactly the right time to retire.
"The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan