I can provide anecdotal support for these findings.

Most of the career-successful people I worked with/under were bull-shitters who were good at social networking but frequently marginally competent at best. Supervisor level and upwards, this was disappointingly common. Some long term people felt safe and entrenched by the end of their careers and dropped the social networking for open rivalries.

There was an additional population of people whose sole goal was the public sector salary, job stability, and eventual pension. They tended to be lazy and/or incompetent. Occasionally they couldn't hold on and would burn out badly enough to lose their employment.

Finally, there was a third category of those who believed in public service (but were quite pleased with the salary, stability, and pension).

I'm not in China, but I would expect this to be a typical outcome anywhere the public service pay is attractive.

I've got two teenage kids, and they think AI is stupid. Their friends apparently just like to try and manipulate AI into being racist as a form of entertainment. None of them see it as useful or "cool".

It's not like there's a history of microsoft interlinking technology being a festering security issue that should trouble us when they report on ChatOLE or GTPCOM.

Most artificial boobs don't even look great. They always feel wrong. They can lead to loss of sensation and medical issues.

I had to use phone activation for Windows 7 Pro after a clean reinstallation on a Dell Precision workstation. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's had to use it in some situation.

"Deloitte report found that less than 6% of local government practitioners were prioritizing AI as a tool to deliver services."

Any word on whether that report had to be corrected after the embarrassing discovery of bot slop in it; as a number of other Deloitte gems recently have? They insisted that the case in Australia was on the up-and-up; though not so much as to refuse to refund some of the $290k they took for the job; not sure what the final outcome on their fine work in Canada ended up being.

The trouble with simplification isn't merely that it's a pain; but that there's only so much of it you can do without promptly wandering into the delightful world of undefined behavior; where the problem isn't merely that people don't understand what the law or the spec says; but that it doesn't actually address whatever the matter at hand is, even if you had an expert to interpret it.

When that happens you inevitably get moved to a more complex state: in jurisdictions that are serious about precedent, or markets where one implementation gains a commanding lead, whoever winged it most successfully at the time of ambiguity becomes(de-facto or de-jure) part of the new codification. In cases where it's more of a mixed result people might end up recognizing two dialects of a protocol or there will be a 'test' named after whatever judge pulled it out of nowhere because it sounded good that you then say you are applying in future cases to choose which of the uncodified behaviors to go with in a given instance. In some cases it remains more or less unsettled and the outcome is basically a surprise over and over and then the codification is basically that you just wing it; which is not ideal.

This is, of course, not to say that all complexity is created equal: the line between 'flabby' and 'parsimonious' is much more subjective than between 'internally consistent' and 'overdetermined'; but there usually is at least a gradient if not a bright line. What gets extra tricky, though, is that law codes (more than some other types of spec) are something that you need to write both for everyone and to cover everyone.

It's basically fine that AS15531or A478-95a(2019) are not really terribly accessible light reading. If you are dealing with now-aging military avionics or stainless steel cables those may well be you problems; but there's not a real sense of societal injustice in the fact that most people just want their aircraft flying and their wire ropes not snapping; so you have the luxury of nerding out however much your circle of professional specialists think is required by the problem and mandating accordingly. Something like probate law is going to end up happening to basically everybody, so the idea that it is impenetrable to the layman seems troublesome; but, because it happens to everybody, it's also not necessarily easy or simple to identify the equivalent of the 1040EZ case: maybe it's super boring and a guy in good health and generally agreed sound mind writes a straighforward will and then gets hit by a truck the next day. Or maybe some dementia patient's declining years see a fight between their children and hey, look at that, now we need a section on how forensic psychiatry will assess 'undue influence' in the context of whether you helped grandma with that will or whether you strong-armed a feeble old lady while she was in your care like your sibling you don't get on with well alleges. That sounds simple and accessible; and not at all like something that will either be completely impenetrable or fairly overtly allow a judge to just spitball it based on whether he hears the dispute before or after lunch and which of the potential heirs looks more punchable.

None of this is to say that Alaska's probate system is not a nightmare accretion, that seems most likely; but it's probably a nightmare accretion with more parts that are actually load bearing than it appears; and possibly one that doesn't have a structurally sound variant that is also simple(especially in potentially adversarial contexts, like probate law: where one of the fairly common instances is "it's as simple as what this will says" v. "actually, there's a complication"; and therefore rules for both what actual complications count and how they work in addition to 'here's how you read a low complexity uncontested will').

The details will differ; but it sounds like the critical distinction between people who can afford good counsel and those who cannot is being retained by this exciting new tool.

Wait. You just put a broken unit back on the shelf where the working spares go? In a story you tell to strangers on the internet about your superior efficiency of process? How do you think the correct supply of working spares come to exist at an organizational scale if people just quietly go and do that? Especially with things that can be broken in non-obvious ways that's basically the single most annoying thing you can do to whoever is responsible for ensuring that a specified supply of spares exists.

As hardware, replacing a phone is only about as hard as replacing a ballpoint pen; so anyone who thinks that the real problem is that an authorized phone technician wasn't on hand to re-seat the connector has a screw overtightened; but would you just silently put empty pens back in with the new ones as a fun eventual surprise who whoever reorders those?

I did, in fact, specifically mention that scenario. That would be due process for a criminal infraction which is the known (and once again, acknowledged by me) exception to the human right in question. The post I was replying to, however, did not mention due process or indeed anything that would normally be a criminal infraction. Also, seizing a foreigners passport issued by their own country is extremely unusual for non-criminal cases and even many criminal ones in most countries. In any case, please refer to article 13 of the universal declaration of human rights for what I was talking about.

Let's be clear here. I am very, very much against littering. I was also on an organ transplant waiting list and almost certainly would have died during the nearly decade long wait I would have had to go through if I didn't end up getting one without the waiting list. So, from a selfish utilitarian perspective, organ banks that remove the organs of litterers to provide to transplant patients would have been of great benefit to me. So understand where I am coming from when I say that is a morally repugnant idea.

I'd be...worried...about the viability of someone who couldn't learn to read an analog clock fairly readily if they had reason to; but it doesn't seem nearly as surprising that a fair number of people wouldn't know how to offhand. Not only are analog clocks a lot less common than they used to be; my experience has been that a lot of legacy clock installs stop getting cared about well ahead of actually getting removed.

Your basic battery powered wall clock isn't that accurate and needs its batteries replaced periodically; so somebody needs to care reasonably frequently for it to be active, not on the wrong side of a DST offset, and not far enough off correct time that it's not very useful for things like start or end of class(passing periods vary a bit by school size; but you'd really want skew solidly under 5 minutes, especially if you are using similarly dodgy clocks at both ends).

The fancier whole-building setups with wall clocks that get pulse-per-minute or per second from a central control module are more likely to not be skewed randomly; and tend not to get rearranged because they are built in to the wall; but also tend to be comparatively expensive maintenance items that are a facilities problem, because they are attached to the building and some oddball 90s-looking cage of cards you need a weird serial pinout and some garbage software to talk to; rather than a cheap office supply, so when they do fail they often just get left there and ignored.

I remember there being clocks in classrooms for basically the entire time I was going through schools, and the period I worked in one; but in high school things had clearly started to break down(the permanently installed clocks were explicitly non-authoritative; individual teachers did or didn't supply a wall clock depending on their taste; so those were in mixed supply but generally accurate if someone cared enough for them to be present); and in college the wall clocks were essentially entirely vestigial; presence, absence, and function mostly a byproduct of when a particular building had been built or renovated.

I'm honestly a bit surprised that the classrooms still have enough wall clocks with low skew to be able to assume that students are getting time from them.

All that is what you would expect, and your answer is a fine answer to the original poster. My post though, was in response to Bert64 and was to remind them of what the original poster was actually asking. I personally have not been to London in forever.

OK. So we'll just ignore the fact that the time frame up for discussion was 5 years ago, but somehow I'm the one being "revisionist" when you move it to 10-15 years ago? OK, let's go back three times longer.

15 years ago, we already had things like Siri and Watson. Various kinds of computer generated art had been around for decades and "filters" and other "intelligent" tools were all over the place in all kinds of graphics software, editing video live, etc. Sure, turning your face into Shrek, or an anime character, or aging or de-aging it live was still a couple of years away at that point, but the writing on the wall was clear from what was available that such things were right around the corner. So, yeah, I am very confident saying that the Slashdot crowd would not have been poo-pooing things that largely already existed at that time and were clearly being improved on constantly.

I will add the caveat that I suppose I am being a bit of a snob when I talk about the Slashdot crowd. I mean the actual, real, tech types here. I am excluding the ones who were posting serialized porn, ASCII nudes, thousand page posts of nothing but swastikas, etc. Or just people I consider not really worth considering. Sturgeon's Law applies here.

As for the product being terrible. I call it that because it is. Once it stops constantly giving me answers that make very basic errors, giving replies that contradict themselves, telling me at the start that "no, X is not the case", then giving all the facts that show that X is the case, etc. then maybe I won't find it to be so terrible. As it is, we keep seeing, over and over and over again articles about lawyers getting in trouble for submitting briefs citing cases that don't exist. How hard is it to not cite something that doesn't exist? Sure, it's improving. The fact that it may be good in the future does not make it good now, however.

Because of context. The AC said he was MAGA and he is not. I pointed out that he is not. It matters because that was what was being discussed.

I believe the standard on that the courts have normally upheld is that you have no requirement to provide an ID, but you do have to provide your name and address even without probable cause.