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Comment Re:fuck this guy (Score 1, Insightful) 42

I disagree, I am glad that there are ways to make money with or on the internet, and that there are many useful services available, either paid, or paid for by ads. Sure, there's a lot of slop, nefarious data harvesting, or downright fraud, but with that comes a lot of good as well. Well beyond the things at our disposal back when it was still largely a thing of academia.

Comment Doesn't sound too bad, but... (Score 1) 153

To be fair: I don't think it is unreasonable to show a notification to make drivers aware of this offer. But it most certainly should not appear when driving, or get in the way. I would be okay with it if the screen showed a simple message: "Hey, you can use SiriusXM for 2 weeks, on us", when starting the car, and only once.

Other than that I would want an anti-enshittification law: the number and timing of ads on owned equipment and any online servces required to enjoy the equipment, and the available functions on that equipment or associated services, shall not significantly change after the service or equipment is purchased, unless a full refund is offered.

Comment Re:Fuck that (Score 1) 143

Hell no. In fact California ought to sue the FDA for not banning these dangerous foods. And residents should sue the state of California for not suing the NDA sooner. Then the FDA can sue universities for not doing timely research on this, and the universities can sue the food manufacturers. It's lawsuits all the way down.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 43

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 5, Informative) 43

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs.

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Comment Re:It WILL Replace Them (Score 4, Insightful) 45

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

Comment Re:Too Simplistic (Score 2) 84

The article states that they don't know the cause. They found a correlation between ultraprocessed foods and poor health, but they don't know what exactly in those foods causes the negative effects. They also cite scientists who criticize the definition, as some foods considered to be healthy are in the ultraprocessed category. So the article addresses both of your concerns.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1, Interesting) 297

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

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