This is kind of whats worrying me to. Like, I totally get focusing on keeping kids out of harms way. As far as I'm concerned kids are the most important people and we're just keeping the seats warm for them. But, maybe we shouldn't be letting the bots flirt with ANYONE, because we actually know this shit can have deleterious effects on adults too, and you end up with people in bizare parasocial relationships with fucking spellcheckers and going off the rails, abandoning family and friends so they sit around wasting what precious little time they have on this cursed planet feeding training data to machines. It seems a recipe for a pretty sad life.

And thats not even touching on the actual mental illness stuff where people are having schizotypal disorders aggravated into full blown paranoid schizophrenia due to AIs bizarre compliant behavior.

Maybe we need to put some rules on this AI shit. I don't know, I'm out of ideas.

Yeah science videos are really getting brutalized by AI right now. Theres just floods of absolutely horseshit videos of the "SCIENTISTS DISCOVER PROOF OF GOD IN JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE" type shit that'll have some utterly banal voice droning on for 10 minutes about made up hallucinations from cGPT over a combination of stolen imagery and AI slop images. And you can see these vids having 1 - 2 million views filled with imbiciles on the comments "praise lord! i knew it was true" type shit.

Its really depressing when there are educators like Sabine Hossenfelder, Anton Petrov, the various Brady Haran (numberphile/computerphile/etc) channels and so on have been slogging away for years struggling to make whats often actually pretty dry stuff entertaining and having their viewership numbers utterly sniped by shit content farms.

Theres growing evidence from cognitive psychology that the primary differences between liberal and conservative people is rooted in thinking styles, and that these seem to have some degree of neurological basis. In essense liberals tend to be more pluralistic thinkers whereas conservatives are more polar thinkers. The end result is where liberals see differences and sort of go "Ok, thats interesting!" conservatives will see differences and go "Ok, thats dangerous!". This becomes particularly notable when encountering things that dont cleanly fit into categories (ie transgenderism, religious conversion, immigration, interacial marriages and other transgressions against category) but in general its anything thats not "us" is a "them" and to be feared.

Theres a whole bunch of conjecture and inquiry as to how this all works, but the main theory is its about how people process fear in the face of uncertainty. Some people delight in uncertainty, some people find it genuinely dyphoric. How you fit on that spectrum of uncertainy handling is likely to fit very close to your political identification.

The problem with the IOS (and Mac) MFA apps is they are strictly apple only affairs. In my own home, I've got an iPhone, a mac, a windows machine a linux machine and assorted black boxes (samsung tv, etc). I can get 1password running on all of them except the TV. The apple one only runs on the mac and iphone.

Too many people major in a subject they like, instead of ones that are in demand. So many people end up with a degree in an area with limited job prospects. Makes it look like college isn't worth it. Don't go to college JUST to go to college. You need a goal. Problem is few high school seniors are informed enough to make this decision, and we are seeing the results.

I dont think thats really too great a problem. The point is usually to have *a* degree, unless your really focusing on getting the job in your field in which case yeah, you might need to loosen up expectations.

Quite often people cite humanities degrees as one where its not job friendly, but in reality humanities degrees have employment rates in the 1-2% range (with some outliers) and often have pretty great wage outcomes, because employers value them for clerical work as they've proven skills in communication and thus have promise in managerial work. STEM is a little more diverse, some fields are proven earners, some not so much. But again employers will generally appreciate the analytical mind and the fact they've hung in there for 3-4 years on a project (the degree).

And a kid being railroaded into a major they aren't interested in is a kid liable to drop out and not finish the degree. My two majors where in philosophy and journalism. I work as a software engineer at a lab that does climate research. Its all good. You find your place eventually.

They're not.

Liberals defend mainstream Muslims from attacks on their freedom of religion and from smears related to their religion. Because conservatives do not understand nuance they decide this means Liberals love Islam and think its the best and want to marry it, despite those same liberals doing the same for pretty much any religious group that's under attack, as Muslims were after 9/11. See also Gaza where RWNJs assume all liberals hate Jews and worship Allah, or think Hamas is great, because they don't want to see innocent Palestinians killed.

I've only come across one "liberal woman" who actually suggested life might be better, in some limited ways, in countries like Iran, and she was a nutcase, not representative of liberals in general.

You need to get out more and realize there's more to life than cheering or booing every identifiable group of people like a fucking football team.

Unfortunately, the data isn't consistent. That's why they need to make corrections. The question is "Do the corrections make it more nearly accurate?", and that's really hard to demonstrate. When there's too much noise in the signal, it's really difficult to filter it out without losing the signal.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

The context of this is Microsoft changing software the person has already bought. It was something wanted and needed in its original form, it's not wanted in its modified form.

Did you mean to write "free"? I'm pretty sure it's included in the cost, rather than free in any meaningful sense. Perhaps you meant to write "Unwanted", or "forced"?

The term "thread" in this context is older than Slashdot. It originated on usenet, before the web existed.

> "Proves" might be too strong

Different fields have different standards of proof. The most rigorous that I'm aware of, is in mathematics, wherein a proposal that almost all the experts think must surely end up being true, can be heavily studied and yet remain "unproven" for an arbitrarily large number of centuries, until eventually someone finds an actual real-world use case for the math that you get if it's NOT true. (The poster child for this is non-Euclidean geometry, but there are lots of other examples.)

There's an old joke about three university professors from England who took a trip up north together, and on their way out of the train station, the journalism professor looked over at some livestock grazing on a hill, and said, "Oh, look, the sheep in Scotland are black!" The biology professor corrected him, "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black." But the math professor said, "There exist at least three ship in Scotland, and at least three of them appear black on at least one side, at least some of the time."

I think the real issue is warm parts of China selling to cold parts of India without including the features that aren't needed near the factory. We know lots about battery chemistry, but rural farmers have had more immediately relevant things to know about up to now and don't have a good source of information on this new thing the government is pushing, so they skip things that sound like luxuries and end up with something inappropriate for their purpose.

Sorry, no, that isn't the issue either. The problem the OP is running into is much, much more basic than that.

Forget, for a moment, that the ports are USB ports, and that the peripherals are USB peripherals, because as long as they match up (which they do, in the OP's scenario), none of that is the problem. The number of ports doesn't even matter, we can abstract away the 4 (or 2 + 2, same difference) and just call it N. The problem is that he's got N ports, and N peripherals that he wants to keep plugged into ports all the time, and that leaves N - N ports available to plug anything else into, if he needs to plug something in temporarily. But N - N is 0, so something has to be unplugged to free one up. That's a number-of-ports problem, entirely irrespective of the port type.

If you were proposing replacing the 2 USB-A ports with a *larger* number of USB-C ports, then your argument might have some relevance. But just changing the type of port won't bend the arithmetic in any useful direction. They could be upgraded to the new USB type K ports introduced in 2042, and it still wouldn't solve the problem: if there are still four ports and four all-the-type peripherals, there still won't be any unoccupied ports available for temporarily plugging in transitory things.

At least USB is (mostly) hot-pluggable. But, again, that's as true of A as it is of C.