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Comment No (Score 2) 66

Something isn't over just because it has peaked. While I wish there was more, compared to when I was younger there are a lot more shows available.

What I do kinda dislike though is these mini-abbreviated seasons that have been adopted on new shows. I know its due to expense, but 10 episodes feels kinda short for a season when the shows I grew up with would have 20 to 26 episodes per season. And while I can deal with 10 - a lot of shows have been trying to get away with "seasons" of 6 episodes or less. 6 episodes of TV isn't a season - its a long movie chopped into pieces.

Comment Re:Ugh (Score 1) 146

I think most couples could/can retire comfortably on 1.2million, even today

Hell, my parents retired 3 years ago with 200k in savings. They still haven't touched it and are living solely off of their social security.

It all depends on what you want to do. Their house was paid off years ago, they cook all their meals at home, and rarely spend money on anything that isn't necessary. It just doesn't cost much to keep the lights on and food on the table.

Comment Re:It's one thing to think about this as a concept (Score 2) 87

I don't have an issue with using natural land for hunting or recreation. Hunting when bag limits are set and laws are guided by biologists isn't harmful to an area.

Humans are a part of nature. Our structures and creations are not. Us going out and walking in the forest or taking a limited amount of game (basically legally limiting humans to an amount of predation that is sustainable) isn't throwing the ecosystem out of whack.

Comment Re:Thought we already had that. (Score 3, Interesting) 87

Antarctica I'd say doesn't really count towards the percentage total. You'd need 30% per region, not 30% of all the land on the planet with a large percentage of that being just the land that isn't of human use.

Antarctica is damned near uninhabitable. Very little plant life and the animal life is relegated to coastal semi-aquatic animals. The interior is devoid of complex life.

Of course in global warming keeps up in a few thousand years it might be a great place to live - with everyone claiming to have "set aside" the nearly uninhabitable areas at the equator :).

Comment Re:It's one thing to think about this as a concept (Score 5, Informative) 87

Why should one have to forfeit it? We pay taxes for a reason. Any land that isn't already publicly owned and set aside for this purpose could be purchased from the current owners willingly (if they don't want to sell, buy equivalent acreage from someone who does).

Taxes are literally the way for all of us to collectively do things that it would be too financially painful to do individually.

Comment Re:Dystopian (Score 5, Informative) 87

It says 30% for "nature" - not 30% that isn't urbanized parking lot. The remaining 70% can be all sorts of utilized stuff that isn't really natural. EG farming takes up a lot of space. Its not natural, but I don't think anyone is too put off by a corn field or a peach orchard visually.

Comment Re:I fully support (Score 2, Interesting) 87

I mean in the US, the government already owns about 28% of all the land - most of that largely undeveloped. Its not really that hard to just say "keep that publicly owned land public and don't build anything on it". Or at least keep building to a minimum (eg hiking trails with an occasional bathroom along the way).

Comment Re:AI good for known tasks (Score 1) 85

It seems like an open question whether being repetitive and rule based is actually a virtue as an AI use case or not.

'AI' is an easy sell for people who want to do some 'digital transformation' they can thought-leader about on linkedin without actually doing the ditch-digging involved in solving the problem conventionally "Hey, just throw some unstructured inputs at the problem and the magic of Agentic will make the answer come out!"; but that's not really a a good argument in favor of doing it that way. Dealing with such a cryptic, unpredictable, and expensive tool is at its most compelling when you have a problem that isn't readily amenable to conventional solutions; while it looks a lot like sheer laziness when you take a problem that basically just requires some form validation logic and a decision tree and throw an LLM at it because you can't be bothered to construct the decision tree.

There are definitely problems, some of them even useful, that are absolutely not amenable to conventional approaches; and those at least have the argument that perhaps unpredictable results are better than no results or manual results; but if you've got some desperately conventional business logic case that someone is turning into an 'AI' project either because they are a trend chaser or because they think that programming is an obscurantist conspiracy against the natural language Idea Guys by fiddly syntax nerds that's not a good sign.

Comment Sounds like a disaster. (Score 2) 85

As a direct test of the tool that sounds pretty underwhelming(and it's not a cheap upsell); but what seems really concerning is the second order effects. Your average office environment doesn't exactly lack for emails or bad powerpoint decks; and both get chiseled right out of the productivity of the people expected to read or sit through them. The more cynical sales types just go directly to selling you the inhuman centipede solution; where everyone else also needs a copilot license so they can summarize the increased volume of copilot-authored material; but that only bandaids the "if it's not worth writing why are you trying to write more of it?" problem.

Comment Re:Investing in what? (Score 4, Insightful) 134

It's also not clear why we'd need investors if AI good enough to eat all the jobs exists. Even without 'AI' a fairly massive amount of investment is handled by the relatively simple 'just dump it in an index fund and don't touch it, idiot' algorithm; and even allegedly sophisticated professionals have a fairly tepid track record when it comes to actually realizing market-beating returns.

Comment Incredibly stupid. (Score 4, Insightful) 134

Obviously it's this guy's job to promote retail investing as a cure-all; because that's what he sells; but this seems transparently stupid.

If 'AI' has eaten all the jobs; why exactly would we have humans 'investing' for a living? Surely AI good enough to eat all the jobs could also match or exceed the performance of the average trader?

This proposal basically seems like UBI, but capitalism-washed with a pointless (and likely dangerous; given that retail noise trading is basically gambling for people who think they are too smart for gambling) financial services layer tacked on to avoid admitting that it's UBI by pretending that everyone is an investor instead.

Comment Indeed (Score 4, Interesting) 21

I've tried some of the AI coding tools. It works OK for some really basic stuff. If you need a quick 10 line function that does something very specific and you can describe that fairly accurately, its good. Anything that gets remotely complex though it tends to confidently spit out code full of bugs or even code that won't even compile.

Sometimes it even makes up calls to functions in a library that don't even exist (my only guess is that somewhere it parsed in someone talking about trying to call that function when they assumed it did, and that worked its way into its data as a function call).

Overall, it can be ok for some basic stuff, but its far from ready to just turn it loose on anything of value.

Comment Re:One can only hope... (Score 4, Insightful) 46

We may not have had the safety culture to the same degree; but, given the number of insecticides that are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors not miles off the efficacy of their more alarmingly named colleagues among the g-series and v-series nerve agents; it seems pretty likely that 50s chemists knew full well that they were poking some very, very, troublesome compounds.

Probably not in a position to tease out some of the more subtle neuroanatomical changes at low prenatal doses or the like given medical imaging of the time; but with a bunch of these we are talking about either compounds we worried about IG Farben tinkering with during the war or close analogs thereof.

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