Strangely, all were able to transition to Libre within the time frame.

Let me guess: when push came to shove the users quickly found out that the two programs were similar enough that they could make them work without any extra training.

It doesn't matter if they know about other tools or not because most of the time their work machines are locked down to keep malware off of them so that they're not able to install Libre Office even if they want to. Excel is all they have so they do what they can to make it work, for some minuscule value of "work."

In other news, the catholic church is suing OpenAI because they had the idea to simply make suicide illegal a thousand years ago and have been using it ever since.

Not sure if it's a trade secret or a copyright case, the news often don't mention the fine details.

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.

The movie analogy is old and outdated.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.

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.

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.

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.

Pedantic: Most theories posit that DM interacts weakly with the EM field.

But we do not yet know

(IIUC, there is a finite nonzero coupling constant between *any* two QM fields)

Only stupid people launder money with Bitcoin. SHUM!

OFC this actually exists: magic Bean Coin. It was an inflationary coin (holding coins generated more coins). I met one of the developers a few years ago. He was a really smart thoughtful principled guy. Just chose a really weird goal to throw himself into and not much formal economics education (but lots of "alternative economics"). I just checked first time in a decade, the 24 hour volume was like six bucks and the project webpage is gone

Of course the primary Gold Bug thesis is that Gold does in fact skyrocket up precisely when all other asset classes are discovered to be in a bubble

... and in Texas, you are getting it very hot in the summer and suddenly freezing cold in the winter and with insufficient electricity grid and rapidly diminishing water resources and increasing political strain with your biggest trading partner and a rising culture that is proudly pro-faith and anti-science

Jesus fuck you could not pay me to move there

Think about it for a few more seconds with your engineering hat on. The use case Bitcoin is designed for is peer-to-peer electronic cash. Internet money transfers, with no central authority.

That has two parts:

1. Internet money transfer
2. No central authority

Number 1 has been a solved problem for over a decade now. Between credit cards, ApplePay/Venmo/PayPal/CashApp/etc etc, cash transfer over the internet is virtually instantaneous and acceptably small cost.

Number 2 is of absolutely no interest to governments. They want a central payments authority, the ability to sanction, reverse, etc etc.

Crypto is an attempt to solve a usecase that governments do not have

Jewish people do something similar with their youth with bar and bat mitzvahs.

You might want to consider learning something about the subject you're going to rant about before going off half-cocked to avoid shoving both of your feet down your throat. Those two ceremonies are simply symbolic coming of age rituals without any secret sections, and you can find out everything you need about them by asking your Jewish friends, presuming, of course, that you have any.