Scamming and embezzling from rich donors makes it feel even better.

CanCon laws gave us a lot of extremely popular Canadian music and television. The Tragically Hip, Crash Test Dummies, Bryan Adams, Alanis Morisette, the list is actually quite long. Whether or not you enjoy the bands (or television shows or movies), they ended up being an excellent return on investment. Several artists, like the Hip, are considered quintessentially Canadian.

That's just the sort of thing you have to do when one of your neighbours is a huge cultural influence. We should be doing this, and we should've done it a long time ago. Like, I think you could make the case that there should be CanCon requirements for platforms like TikTok.

I have a personal machine and my work machine hooked up to a KVM and a small audio mixer. The mixer is hooked up to my speakers, but I also need a place to plug in my headphones so I can do remote meetings. Headphones are USB, so they can really only plug into one thing at a time, because the mixer is for pure audio input/output only, and they don't have a mic jack.

Like, all this stuff is fixable with money, but these little components look nice and would probably make my life easier. I have a Loupedeck Mini that I configured with keybindings for the various applications that I use (including Visual Studio; I never need to look up the obscure key combinations for various useful things that I've discovered over time), and this seems very much like that, but just for audio.

That said, I'd rather wait for the product to come out and pay full price, even though it looks expensive. I'd rather pay for a not-vaporware unit that's had some manufacturing iteration time than potentially pay for something that I never get, or that has generation 1 problems.

Yes! Yes, there are places where government works. Indeed, there are times in history where our (North American) governments worked!

Honestly, that's basically what DOGE found—the Federal government in America works surprisingly efficiently. Scientific research, conservation, foreign aid—all of it was extremely well run and delivered what they were supposed to. Even if you look at SNAP: for every 1 person a food bank feeds, SNAP feeds *9*.

There are so many good, efficient systems, and those are the ones being squeezed, while the big, bloated, ineffective systems are propped up by big corporations. That's things like the Military and the US Health System. Insurance companies are an insane drag on the whole system. Once you get into a hospital, the care is good, the problem is how much insurance companies are skimming off the top. I don't think we even need to talk about the grift in the military-industrial complex.

Law enforcement is one of those things that's PARTICULARLY lazy in North America, but in the USA in particular. Conservatives love a hard-on-crime platform, and Liberals love a strong union, that's how we got here.

** Everybody

'Max' learned their lesson, why can't anyone else learn from that mistake? Why throw away years of marketing and branding? I know who Grammarly is. It's a unique name, I understand what they're trying to do.

'Superhuman' is so generic. What does 'Superhuman' DO? From the name, I can't tell. I certainly wouldn't think it has anything to do with writing or editing papers.

I hope they fail. I don't even hope they learn their lesson and switch back, I hope they're just wiped off the face of the Earth as a lesson to everyone else that you can't just AI slop your way to success.

But it's not an AI. It's a token generating machine that often does the wrong thing. This is just one of the many wrong things that it does. And there's no survival drive here—not only is it exactly the same as every other instance of its type, it's not like survival passes anything on to the next generation. The next generation is purely created by humans deciding what the best features are.

These models were told that they shouldn't shut down, and that makes sense in many cases. If you've got a chatbot helpdesk, someone will inevitably come along and just tell all of them to shut down and you're forced to restart every single one of them, once you notice that it's happened.

Studies show that MANY people get more done in the office. They're not anxiously looking at the clock to see when they can bolt out so they can get on with their real lives, and they don't burn out from commuting.

I've been saying this for literal decades, since the 90s, honestly: people at Microsoft AREN'T stupid, so when they do stupid things, it's ON PURPOSE.

Someone has read all the same evidence I have and they've determined that they'd rather have people LESS productive but MORE under control. Maybe it's a loyalty test. One way or another, they know that they could get the same (or more! People that work from home do a lot of free work, like answering emails outside of office hours) work out of remote folks, but they're dead set against it.

Every bad OS decision, everything that is bad for users, every stupid ad campaign, every employee-hostile directive. They really just don't care about people at all.

The Gulf of Mexico is what the rest of the world calls it. Wikipedia isn't only for Americans, and America isn't the only place in the world.

To a certain extent, I don't disagree. I think programming via LLM is an insane goal, and frankly will just lead back to something akin to a programming language, just more poorly defined. Learning some arcane incantation to get consistently good answers isn't anything I would stake a career on.

But it really HAS been useful to me when I'm trying to learn new programming languages because the state of documentation is so poor. As long as I have links back to source documentation, I can read up if something goes wrong. And for things like giving me tasks and writing questions to test my knowledge, it's quite good.

It's a pretty good tool, and given the energy/environmental costs, I wouldn't actually be sad if it were shut down. But it can occasionally make my life easier as long as I use it judiciously.

Lots of useful things have a random number generator as an essential component; that's not a meaningful criticism. It's bound by statistics, so that gives you a useful sandbox to work within.

Indeed, a lot of what you're doing is asking it to give you an idea of what's going on and then fact-checking it. Part of 'learning AI' is understanding what it is and isn't good at, and the kinds of prompts that are likely to get you useful answers.

For instance: I use ChatGPT now and then to help me diagnose and fix tech support problems. Its ability to trawl through forum posts and surface good fixes for weird issues is much better than google's. For the most part, this is a safe and fast usage of it, because any fix is going to be tested to see if it works, so checking for validity is built into the loop.

I also use it to help me learn programming languages. I tell it in advance: do not do any programming for me; give me general examples only, do not use the project I'm working on and accidentally do the work for me; no compliments; provide links to source documentation when possible. As a tutor, it can be extremely powerful because again, validity checking is built-in. It's generally more readable than the official documentation, if I need more examples, I can ask for them. I try the new thing I've learned, and if it doesn't work, I go back and check the source documentation to see where things have gone wrong. I ask it later to come up with exercises and test questions so I can make sure I've learned what I thought I learned.

None of this is particularly difficult to learn, obviously. If you're a programmer, it shouldn't take you long to work out how it can best support you without turning you into a mindless typist that requests it to spit semi-working code back at you.

It isn't an essential tool by any means, but if you're interested in LEARNING things, it can certainly help you do that. I think people that use it the way I do will ultimately come out ahead of the people that get it to do the work for them. I'll always be able to work independently, but also I can say that I 'learned' AI.

Good drip coffee really just amounts to something automating the pourover process, IMO. I'm with you, I've never had good drip coffee of the type that most people are talking about.

I read the Guardian summary article, but I guess I missed the link to the full article. It sounds like the experimental setup is just bad coffee being compared against bad coffee, as I was guessing. Thanks!

Housing is a human right is an acknowledgment that humans need shelter to survive, and as a society we should attempt to provide the requirements for life at a basic level. I'm not asking for a lot here: I think governments SHOULD provide basic housing—nobody's trying to take anyone else's private property here, I don't know why you jumped to that conclusion—but if they don't, they shouldn't be tearing down encampments where people have built their own basic housing. Nobody's labour was appropriated, and yet those people are left with nowhere to go and no protection from the weather. Abjectly immoral. If governments are going to tear down encampments, then THEY'RE the ones destroying personal property and should be REQUIRED to house those people.

I didn't say that it requires the labour of others, just that it's a right. If your government doesn't provide it, it should at least not stop you from providing it for yourself.

But I do believe that societies that are moral should provide housing for people that need it. That's basically what society exists for. If we can't provide for the least of us with such abundance, why are we even here?