The Guardian appears bereft of competent editors (thought... do the same people own them as own /. ? hmm...)

We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect.

No, "we all" don't. That's one of the first things I turn off in system prefs of whatever device/software — computer, phone, pad, word processor, etc. I leave it off. Predictive suggestions are fine; that can be a timesaver. Altering what I typed... no thanks.

I'm not the only one on the planet's surface who sports better than rudimentary spelling skills and can hit the keys (virtual or otherwise) I aim at. Most of the time, anyway. Plus, there's that whole "read before you publish" process.

I'd subscribe to it (and I despise subscriptions, so...) if it would end the advertising on the various devices. I look over there to see what time it is and some completely irrelevant ad is up. Or, I just bought Only-Need-One-Of-Thing, now it's trying to sell me another identical Thing.

But my guess is "the beatings will continue until morale improves."

As the current LLMs are basically what we will have for the next few decades

I've enjoyed reading most of your comments on this post; very clear headed.

However, this bit seems to me to be unfounded speculation rather than assured fact. The velocity of machine learning development is very, very high. LLMs are also only one aspect of ML. We have already seen applications well outside of text prompting such as drug discovery and protein elucidation where ML has made significant advances. There are ML driven robotics being demonstrated right now that showcase the ability to learn in situ. It seems to me, at least, that the ML development curve is highly visible, monotonically upwards, and notably steep. Which leads me to think that there is very likely a significant impact to gainful employment in the relatively near-term offing. I just don't know how you could make the statement I quoted and be confident in its predictive ability.

If thing's[sic] are so crushingly expensive why is consumer spending at record levels right now?

When the expenses the consumer must disburse — food, fuel/transport, housing, medical care, education, tax collections, etc. — are subject to record level price increases for whatever reasons (corporate greed, increased/excessive governmental spending, usurious interest rates, transport costs, etc.) then the consumer will be spending at record levels to continue to do so.

Even if an individual is in the increasingly smaller portion of the population where these increased costs aren't a problem for them, they're still causing them to push more money through the system. Being wealthy doesn't make food less expensive, for example. So... record consumer spending. At every level.

Other metrics indicate that this record spending is not a healthy economic sign. For instance, rising credit card and auto loan delinquencies are signaling increasing distance between income and costs. People are spending everything they have to in order to get by and that naturally shows up as "increased consumer spending."

Another factor is people's inability to evaluate what is necessary. Large numbers of people treat various combinations of things like Netflix, premium sneakers and sunglasses, new clothing, high end phones, coffee, subscription software and services, visits to fast food emporia, bars and restaurants as "necessary." These are expenditures that don't help reduce spending on actual necessities in any way, but can in many circumstances cause the ready funds to come up short (and earlier) against those costs.

Social conditioning is largely responsible for these types of financial blunders, but again, given a previously somewhat stable situation that cost the consumer less, the increases will result in increased consumer spending until they hit the limits of what they can spend. They may then turn to credit, and we are seeing the results of precisely that in the current spate of increased credit delinquencies. Using credit to "get by" is unsustainable. But when people have to cover food and housing today, they will make the move today that ensures that is possible — today.

I find it incredibly disrespectful.

Then don't do it. Problem solved. You're welcome.

Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief

How about these assholes process their grief their way, and the rest of us will choose our own paths without them pretending to be our parents or guardians?

If your life consists of trying to figure out how to restrict the ways other people relate to their losses, your life is a net loss to society. Or, more succinctly, you're a shithead.

If someone was willing to physically overpower me and force me to unlock my device, surely they'd be willing to hold a knife/gun to me to get a password

I believe you've forgotten about the various police forces. They're not likely to comprehensively torture you (in the USA, anyway.) But they are likely to manipulate you physically to unlock your device(s.) The police do all kinds of underhanded things here.

Fingerprint and FaceID are both vulnerable to physically overpowering the authorized user — trivially — to unlock it. Passwords are (well, can be, if you're competent) much more secure for circumstances short of actual torture.

how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.