Yea... I have long since forgotten most of my math. But I actually graduated with a minor in mathematics, basically because I only needed two more MA electives (Differential Equations 3, which, admittedly, was a beast and Advanced Number Theory, which was a "Why the heck is *this* a 400-level class?" class.) than I already had for my CS degree. A few years back, I ran across one of those "This is how kids are learning now under Common Core" articles. And DAMN!!! WTF sort of jobs do the people who came up with that garbage think they're preparing kids for? Counting out how many McNuggets to put in the little cardboard box? Because CC sure as shit isn't teaching them the math they need to be scientists or engineers.

On the plus side; the defective educations that kids were already getting at the primary level, combined with the current administration's war on higher education, means that my cohort of GenX, which is getting to be about the right age where it would otherwise be a concern, is going to have to worry a lot less about ageism than previous 40-somethings. So... yay for silver linings!

Yeah, but with RFK and "Doctor" Oz running the nation's health care, how can we even actually trust vaccines in the US at all anymore? If I'm going to get stuck with the needle, I want it to have an actual medication or vaccine in there; NOT colloidal silver or green coffee bean extract or essential oils or lysol or whatever other quackery has their attention at that moment in time.

Fortunately, I'm traveling overseas next spring. One of the things I'm going to get from my doctor at my next physical is a list of any boosters that are coming due any time soon. So I *WILL* be fully vaccinated because I will be getting my shots in a country with real medical leadership who practice and promote real science and medicine.

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.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Ummm... it's Ryanair. And the EU has been forcing US tech companies in general, and particularly Apple and Google, to demolish their security models, strip protections from mobile (and desktop and server) OSs, and give every fly-by-night outfit in the world unrestricted access to (In gates-speak) ring 0 or (to the rest of the world) the kernel. I mention microsoft and ring 0 in this context because it's another fine and recently notorious example of the EU's overreach screwing over people by demanding lax security. But "permissions" and "require"? Come on... this is Ryanair! They absolutely will harvest and sell every single byte that can get their filthy mitts on. I mean... google the name and read any site but their own. They really are just the worst.

And... again... it's Ryanair. So you KNOW their app won't be available on the legitimate App Store or Play Store. It will be on the EU-mandated Cydia Mark 2; which will inevitably degenerate into the same morass of spyware, malware, spamware, and all-around crapware that the original Cydia did back in the jailbreaking days. And with no app reviews, no sandboxing, no security checks, no memory or kernel protections? Damn skippy an outfit like Ryanair will trawl through you entire phone, and any account it is connected or logged in to, in order to spy on you and sell your data for every red cent they can extract from it.

Heh... I put off getting dear leader's dumbass "real ID" too. I mean... I have my passport, passport card, and global entry card, all of which actually benefit me. So why should I waste my time jumping through stupid and unnecessary hoops to appease dear leader?

In my neck of the woods though, the DMV simply forced the issue by no longer allowing online renewals; and now I have to actually go in to and renew my license in-person. So as long as I had to go through the hassle of the stupid and unnecessary hoops for my ID itself, I may as well jump through a couple more stupid and unnecessary hoops while I'm already stuck at the benighted place. And my California drivers license is now tainted with that mark of MAGA. Gross. Fuck MAGA. Fuck trump. Fuck ICE. And fuck realID.

The same thing will probably happen to you.

> On the other hand, if your card got refused at that
> grocery line - would you go back? Likely not.

Oh, I would absolutely go back. And after I unload my entire cart, including meat, dairy, and frozen foods; if they reject my card, I will just say "Oh? Okay. Never mind then." and I will walk right out... repeatedly... until they knock off the shenanigans.

Yeah, but I don't really blame people. LLMs work so incredibly well and produce amazing results. Even AI experts are impressed by the results and non-AI experts are often seduced by the results. Well, except for the anti-AI folks who, as usual, see all of the warts and none of the benefits, and are thus exactly as idiotic as the all-AI-all-the-time folks, just in the opposite way.

In truth, AI does mostly-great work and will replace many jobs over the next decade; translation jobs are very high on that list. But they need systems to double-check them, some computer and some human, because the mistakes AI makes are often hilariously bad (hallucinating relevant cases in legal filings) and often subtle and hard to detect. People want to replace people but expect AI to not need validation, even though most all-human systems have (and need) validation.

I'll admit that "good enough to get the point across" is often not good enough for support pages, especially for non-experts.

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

With a president who solves an existential threat by finding the best expert he can find, and using his own formidable political skills and charisma to run interference for that expert.

Seriously, Comacho was a meathead, but Iâ(TM)d vote for him.

Linux phones have been available in the past; I assume you can still get them. The question is: are they better, or just more ideologically pure? Because ideology makes you feel all warm and special, but is kinda shitty at paying the bills. Or actually working.

Sure. First, lower the copyright term to match that of patents. Second, restore the latter (both) to the original 14 years. Once there is a reasonable balance between all of the interested parties again, let's talk. But the conciliatory ship sailed with Lars and Hillary and has never had reason to return to shore. And so long as one side is an abusive cartel with regulatory capture with absolute power to screw over the other everyone else, fuck 'em.