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Comment Re:Many reasons for many different people (Score 1) 203

It's true that many people have self-serving reasons for hating LLMs.

About 1 million Americans have lost their job this year, with AI being a cited by employers.

I am certainly going to try getting ChatGPT to read and understand legal contracts before going to speak to a lawyer. The more I know, the better questions I can ask. I use a privately staged LLM to posed medical questions. Better than running the gauntlet of Canada's broken medical system. Yes I read articles from NIH. LLMs aren't a replacement for expertise. But these are concrete examples where LLMs threaten jobs while making ordinary people's lives better.

Job losses are a real concern, and people are right to be worried/concerned, even if economic change is good in the long run.

I'm more concerned by the cruddy quality. Ask it questions about the existence of God, and ChatGPT will say it has no opinion, and is NOT agnostic. Mmm, sure thing. Something is true/not true/cannot be talked about, if powerful people will get angry over what ChatGPT will say about it. Apparently there's as many people employed to "manage the message" as there are building the underlying useful technology. I find this pathetic.

The technology is amazing. It is a game changer. It'll be exploited by scammers. It has huge problems. It'll take time for society to adjust.

Comment Re:Writing on the wall? (Score 1) 203

Use Linux and MacOS, and iOS heavily. Gotta say that Linux is essentially hassle free. Very very few random changes to KDE system panels. Some minor stability issues with updating KDE. That's about all.

Mac has gone down hill a long way from the high UI standards of the 1980s. Using the control panel has devolved into a linear search. Stuff seems randomly organized probably due to Conway's Law. The worst feature is that you cannot uninstall itunes. The very existence of noTunes (so you don't accidentally boot itunes by hitting the wrong button) is a telling indictment on Silicon Valley's corporate culture.

Comment Re:It seems like another step to human irrelevance (Score 1) 203

Secondly, in capitalist societies like the US we know that business leaders...

Planned economies would likewise happily replace people with machines, if they could. The set of modern planned economies is very short: North Korea.

State capitalism -- where the state controls the decisions, but the profit motive remains, includes: China, Laos, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Eritrea... there's not a single country there that give a flying fsck about human rights.

Comment Re:Great (Score 1) 56

Devices like that normally advertise (or at least mention it) on the product page. It's supposed to be a security feature.

I don't have any personal experience owning a Windows S device, but I feel like I've looked at it before and simply trying to open a command prompt triggers a message about it and steers you to a setting to disable the S mode, with lots of scary language added about how if you do there is no way to put it back.

Comment Re:Great (Score 1) 56

--
I forget what 8 was for.

It was supposed to make Windows universal on personal computers, tablets, and smartphones. One interface for all three. Apps that ran on all three. Normalize an app store that set guardrails up on what you did on your computer, and brought Microsoft revenue just like the iOS App Store does Apple.

Comment Re:Good use. (Score 4, Interesting) 73

The main question is if the plant is still safe. It hasn't been used in years. Is it still in good maintenance? Was the design meant to be idled for years? What are the risks of restarting that particular design of reactor after all those years? Is the land there safe for workers of the plant after reactor 2's accident all those years ago? And what plans are in place to prevent what happened at reactor 2 from happening at reactor 1?

I actually don't know the answer to any of those questions. But I hope experts are actively asking those.

Comment Re:It would have been interesting... (Score 1) 48

Nuclear fission is dirty. Its waste products need to be carefully and securely stored for thousands of years. Don't get me wrong -- it's one of the cleanest options we currently have for scalable power generation -- but it's dirty dirty dirty. Fusion's waste products are safe and non-radioactive.

Oh, and even disregarding waste products, it's safer. Not entirely safe, but a fusion reactor explodes, nobody outside the blast radius is going to be hurt, ever. If a fisison reactor melts down, the place where that fission reactor was, automatically becomes a permanent synonym for "environmental catastrophe". Have you ever heard of this town in Eastern Europe called Chernobyl? I have too! So will our great great grandchildren.

If you tried to design a power source which was as scary as possible, you'd end up with nuclear fission. Again, it's one of the best options we have. But it's awful compared to fusion.

Comment Re: It a guidebook... (Score 1) 243

Really isn't. I haven't seen cursive anywhere but on documents in a museum at any point in my life. That includes signatures, which are more likely to be a squiggle than anything resembling actual cursive. There is zero point to mandatory instruction on it anymore (if there ever was- the idea that it was a faster way of writing is backed by 0 proof. And even if it was, the ease of reading script more than cancels out those speed gains).

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