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Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 285

That's a good point. Here on /. I can assume people know what open world games are. Out in the real world movies are probably the better analogy.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 285

The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

Comment Re:PR article (Score 0) 285

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

Comment Re:Wrong Name (Score 2) 285

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 285

professions that most certainly require a lot of critical thinking. While I would say that that is ludicrous

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

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 high-value scam (Score 1) 113

We see these ideas that are obviously nonsense all the time. This one has been picked apart by multiple people with industry experience already.

What these things are is essentially the venture capital version of the scam mails you get in your mailbox every day. If you make it big enough and insane enough, someone with more money than brains will think he spotted an opportunity that everyone else missed and will invest.

Why is it, you think, that 99% of these things vanish without a trace after an initial storm of publicity?

Comment Re:But it's a self-defeating loop (Score 1) 31

This.

My take on vibe coding is simple: Don't.

At least not the way most people understand it. I'm totally ok with having an AI do the tedious work. But only do it on stuff you could do yourself (i.e. you're just saving time). Because otherwise, you'll never be able to maintain it.

This, in general, is the whole problem: The entire "vibe coding" movement only worries about CREATING code. But in the real world, maintaining, updating, refactoring, reviewing, testing, bugfixing, etc. etc. are typically more effort than writing it in the first place.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1, Interesting) 289

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.

Comment Re:Good use. (Score 2) 74

Not a big fan of this, but I'm pretty certain they need that money to actually replace all the working parts of the reactor. Only the concrete shell will be reused. They could probably use the same amount of money to fix reactor 2 the same way, they are just not touching it because of history.

Comment Re:Computers don't "feel" anything (Score 1) 56

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.

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