Part of the government's job is to protect the health of the economy by breaking up monopolies and enforcing anti trust law. This is necessary in order to ensure that there remains opportunity for competition.

It isn't an easy thing to do, of course, especially when those with the most political power are the very monopolies and cartel bosses being regulated, but it is a necessary element of a healthy capitalistic economy.

Our current government isn't doing a very good job of that. And so, predictably, here we are.

** letter. SIGH.

If only there were a noun form of the adjective "female" used when applied to a human. Maybe something beginning with the word "w", I dunno.

The correct answer is for colleges to stop giving grades at all. Grades should be given by separate testing institutions whose only job is to assess and rate competence in various domains. The purpose of the college is to give you the knowledge and skills you need to do well on the test, but not to administer the test.

That matters because colleges are judged by how many As they give out. If they give out too few, students don't want to go there. Why would the? They know darn well that THEY will be judged by whether or not they got an A. So, colleges experience grade inflation because it draws students and money to the college.

Correct behavior is a product of correct incentives. With colleges providing both the education and the grade, they have every incentive to inflate. No amount of "honor" will fix that. Separate that out so that the college's only incentive is to educate well, and the testing institution's only incitive is to provide accurate assessments against objective standards, and the correct behavior follows naturally.

Your position assumes a specific purpose of the grade, which many disagree with.

Is the purpose to show how well the material is mastered? If that is the case, then a high set of A grades is no reason at all to adjust the material's difficulty level. The nature of the knowledge itself is the only determinant. Like, say, algebra. If the goal of the A grade is to show how well you have mastered algebra, and a lot of people are getting As, that does not mean that your course content is bad. It just means that algebra isn't very hard and the people taking the course are good enough to master it. People who want more of a challenge can go take calculus.

But if the purpose of an A is to show how much better you are than everyone else who took the same class, THEN too many As is a problem. But that raises a very important question about what the purpose of the grade should be.

There are people who are interested in using grades as an objective assessment of your capacities, and there are other people who are interested in using it to find "the best of the best" in any given domain. These are two different purposes and they are clearly in conflict with each other.

Did you actually expect the house to come with furniture, without an explicit statement that it's furnished?

What if the previous owner hadn't left yet, and the pictures were of the previous owner's furniture - would you have just presumed that you get their furniture?

I don't see any issue with this. Real estate agents used to virtually insert furniture via non-AI means. Here you're just going to be having an AI model that generates a depth map from the existing space and is then allowed to imagine in whatever furniture is described to fit into that depth map - it just makes the process easier / faster (letting the agent iterate through possibilities faster) and better looking.

AI isn't at that level. This is by far the most common misconception about AI, and you have fallen for it as well.

AI cannot reliably solve novel problems, nor can it reliably produce high quality work like a design for a bridge. We still need humans to do that. And, the evidence is right before our eyes: bridge architects still have jobs. If AI could do this, all the bridge architects in the world would immediately be fired, since they cost so much more than AI.

I must belabor this point: yes, we have seen AI do really complex things like generate really sophisticated code that was hard and that worked. But that does not mean that these AI can now do all the much simpler things that need doing in a software developer position. It seems like simple reasoning "wow, if AI can do something that hard, then surely it can do something this simple" but that is false. The pattern-matching that AI algorithms use is not the same as thinking a problem through (despite the much publicized efforts at accomplishing precisely this), and AIs still routinely get tripped up over simple things. Everyone who works with AI, including me, knows this, because it happens a lot.

And we have read articles right here on slashdot where harm has come from relying on an AIs work. In particular in legal filings. People keep thinking that AI's work is good enough precisely because it is designed to appear good enough. But it is not good enough once scrutinized.

So, we still need people with the mental skills to do the job. They have to be able to do it without the aid of AI in order to have sufficient competence to, at the very least, review and certify work that comes out of AI.

If we have a generation of students that had AI do their homework for them, and this was acceptable to the teachers who used AI to grade it, then we will have a workforce that is entirely bereft of competence. That will cause serious economic problems with real harmful impact to our lives. And it gets worse. We know that AIs hallucinate. They give false facts when asked direct questions, even if the true facts are available to them. You want those educating our kids?

Well, apparently colleges do, since AI is so much cheaper than teachers.

It appears we are going to have to keep learning this lesson, the hard way, for a while now.

Weapons detections systems send automated alerts. The specific form depends on the system. But no system is dialing up unanticipating randos on the phone and going, "Hello, police? I've got an emergency here!"

And unless the system had facial ID, and the police knew the "suspect", what they had to go on was the picture from the security camera, so they were already looking at the supposed "gun" in the picture and still saw fit to act like this.

I was not talking about frame tweening. I was talking about tools to create game assets, as was the article in question.

The job is only dangerous in the big cities.

You have some weird conceptions about big cities. Homicide rates aren't an urban vs. rural thing, they're a north vs. south thing . It's the south that has the high per-capita murder rate. Which is in turn because said areas are the poorest places in the US. The trend holds true even in areas that are relatively culturally homogenous - for example, there's not much of a difference in culture between northwest Texas rural counties and northeast Texas rural counties, but northwest Texas is much wealthier per-capita, and also has a much lower homicide rate.

The TL/DR: crime correlates with despair, and places like the Mississippi Delta are characterized by chronic high unemployment, low wages, and limited access to quality education and resources. This combines with a legacy of racial violence/mistrust and lax firearm laws, and the result is exactly what one would expect.

One could make the argument that, well, okay, it may be the rural south that has a high murder rate per capita, okay, but there's lots of people in big cities, so it's a multiplier. Yes, that's true, but there's also lots of cops in big cities, so it doesn't change their odds of being the one responding to a situation where shots are fired, to the degree that police departments are equally well staffed per-capita.

It's also worth mentioning that the rural crime rate trends in the US are much worse than the urban crime rate trends. I hate to risk derailing this by the meremention of Trump, but he tapped into a very legitimate wellspring of anger; the economic growth in the US over the past several decades has been very uneven, and a lot of people, esp. in rural areas, the rust belt, and the south have felt left behind, with insufficient care from politicians as to their plight. While the ragebait media landscape has tended to try to focus their anger on cities and minorities, as "evil outsiders catered to by elites", US cities are, frankly, doing quite well on average, and have thrived in the US's growing service economy. But people in the rural south, the Mississippi Delta, the rust belt, etc (outside of the "energy belts", like in west Texas, that produce oil, gas, wind power, etc)... their lived experiences of a lack of opportunity and declining communities are very much real. They're just projecting them (wrongly) onto big cities outside of their region.

Bad pay, no college education required, but granted the ability to exert power over others... exactly what sort of person do you think you're going to attract with that sort of job description?

Nobody called anybody. It's a weapons detection system. They're deliberately running it. The article makes it sound like ChatGPT got bored, started watching webcams, and decided to narc on the Doritos Guy. That's not even close to what happened.

From TFS, there's no indication either way of whether they had seen the picture before, and if I had to argue either way from the wording, I'd go with "yes, they had".

Also, when did we switch from calling weapons detections systems "weapons detections systems" to "artificial intelligence systems"? It's still true, but a much less useful choice of wording, and is probably going to make some readers think they were shoving video feeds through ChatGPT or something.

Also, in the picture, it was clearly their cell phone and how they were holding it that triggered the alert, not the Doritos bag.

"And your etymology is a fantasy. "

You've confused c.f. with e.g..

Only if you want your delivery to be very expensive. The article kind of didn't bother to mention that only the ZQ-3's first stage is reusable, so it's more like a "Starship-esque Falcon 9", both in terms of reusability, size, payload, diameter, etc..