This was the first starship test flight that bored me the entire time. A spectacular achievement. It's not a lowering of the bar, just the opposite.

I think Bari Weiss is going to be great at CBS News. Getting her on board was a real coup. There's absolutely no reason corporate media couldn't report interesting and useful news. They have all the infrastructure to do a good job -- especially the production staff and facilities -- all they've been missing is a brain. Like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

The Free Press is just flat out fun to read. There's no double speak, anywhere. The writers know their craft and they treat their audience like adults. Their comment boards are always full of people complaining from all sides.

My son writes contract proposals, another area where people try to cut corners by generating responses from requirement documents. Sounds legit, you would think. He tells me it's a boat anchor, dramatically slowing down delivery. The problem is when it guesses -- and it guesses A LOT -- there's no telling what ridiculous BS it will pull out of its learning corpus. You can't rely on it being even predictable.

And OF COURSE this post is immediately modded Troll because slashdot refuses to do a damn thing about the "0.1%" of the jerks who have ruined the moderation system by downvoting content they disagree with.

And utterly without any sense of irony.

Bluesky is up -- no, Bluesky is down -- well, it's down since inception, but now it's "leveled off".

But who cares and why, though? Honestly. Do what you like. Engage with whom you like. Forget about whether something is "popular", that's never a good measurement. Death, for example, is "popular". 100% of people engage in it.

No worries about an invader killing your people, or a madman rounding up the sick and infirm in concentration camps to be disposed of. No, we'll just off ourselves and demand the government cover our expenses. In Canada one in every TWENTY deaths is medically "assisted". https://cbn.com/news/health/ca...

Ah yes, those philosophers who doubt their own existence (but hope you'll buy their books.)

I've just discovered Scottish common sense realism, an 18th century philosophy that was a reaction against some of the Enlightenment who had gone off the rails in this regard. It was very popular among the founders of the US (we get the phrase, "we hold these truths to be self-evident" in the Declaration of Independence from it.)

Thomas Reid's essay, "An Inquiry Into the Human Mind" has a great take-down of this approach:

Descartes found nothing established that could serve as a deep foundation; so he resolved not to believe in his own existence until he could give a good reason for it. He may have been the first person to make such a decision; but if he could have actually done what he resolved to do—if he could have become genuinely unsure that he existed—his case would have been deplorable, and there would have been no remedy for it from reason or philosophy. A man who disbelieves his own existence is surely as unfit to be reasoned with as a man who thinks he is made of glass. There may be physical disorders that can produce such absurdities, but they won’t ever be cured by reasoning.

Descartes wants us to think that he got out of this craziness through this logical argument: Cogito, ergo sum [= ‘I think, therefore I exist’]. But obviously he was in his right mind all the time, and never seriously doubted his own existence. That argument doesn’t prove his existence—it takes it for granted. ‘I am thinking’, he says, ‘therefore I am’; and isn’t it just as good reasoning to say, ‘I am sleeping, therefore I am’? or ‘I am doing nothing, therefore I am’? If a body moves it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest it must exist then too.

A sports journalist for the Washington Post engages with an LLM to discuss articles she herself had written, and is appalled both by the number of errors. When she confronts its bug-laden responses, it meekly apologizes but doesn't get any better. After repeating its smarmy apology for the umpteenth time, the author begins to suspect that the LLM is actually malevolent. The entire "conversation" is laid out for all to see.

Infuriating to read if you know anything about what an LLM is and how it works.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."

We see this logic everywhere now: if the government doesn't fund [insert favored program here], then it will cost taxpayers money." Really? So, how much money was being spent on the Direct File pilot? Would it surprise you to learn it was $24.6 million? Some 140,000 people used it.

Cost per user: $175.00

That's MORE than TurboTax, even with a State return added on.

So, yeah, the government "saved" SOME people the cost of using tax prep service, but it absolutely did NOT save taxpayers any money.

The kind of diversity one finds in a cord of multiple strands, all of which are load-bearing, but each of which have slightly different properties that can optimize the cord's strength in the work you want to put it to is, indeed a better rope than one made of all the same kinds of strands.

The problem is that if you choose a diverse cord just for diversity's sake, you could easily wind up with a cord that is actually completely unsuited to the work.

A diversity of WHAT is the key question to ask.