That's the smallest of the problems. Just ask for quotes, and then contract the lowest bidder, but have them agree to a stiff penalty if the work is not delivered in the agreed quality and in the agreed time. That's how municipalities build infrastructure since there are municipalities (e.g. for at least the last 7000 years).

Something similar was actually debated in the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). It was proposed to forbid the public sector to offer anything for free which is provided by a company as a business.

I'd rather my software not get borked because an install was forced on me. I'll update when I feel like it, if ever. It's bad enough software companies insist every update changes the UI or removes features. Having to deal with a mangled piece of software is even worse.

The first thing I do is turn off updates or, in the case of Firefox, tell it to piss off when it autistically shrieks there's a newer version available because the option to never be harassed is no longer available (see above).

A corrupted database. Is that like you're holding your phone wrong?

It shows that these social media sites are run by thin-skinned, immature, poorly educated and selfish people.

That is a fantastic description of the guy who runs Shitter. Bravo!

At least until you're the one who got screwed over by somebody else and are demanding justice for yourself, in which case I guess it just sucks to be you.

Yup. That's why whenever anyone says if they're on jury duty they'll taint the jury because they believe people are getting screwed, I always respond with I agree with them. If I'm ever on a jury for a murder case I'll vote to acquit because I believe they should get the death penalty. Since that's not an option they can go back on the streets.

Anything that doesn't adhere to their weird, twisted interpretation of Biblical "law" should be outlawed according to most of them.

True, except if you have tattoos, lie, or continually remarry. Those are perfectly fine, but being born gay, nuh uh, that's a sin punishable by death. If you're poor, it's amost as bad as being gay. After all, no poor person ever gave anyone charity.

The recordings are technically public, in most cases, though I wonder if any confidential stuff gets recorded. However, the scarier possibility is that someone could actually modify recordings and transcripts to change the public record.

Exactly, but battery storage is very, very expensive. So someone somewhere is doing the math on whether or not it makes sense to invest hundreds of millions of dollars building a battery storage system and trying to figure out how long it would take to return the investment, and whether or not there's a better use of that capital right now. Meanwhile this is a signal to solar installers to stop installing more solar unless they're also willing to install some storage capacity. This is just the market doing its thing.

New York City lies at the same latitude as Naples (around 4050'). That's the Mediterran, not Germany. (Ok, in 1244, about 780 years ago, Naples was officially part of Germany, but Germany wasn't called Germany then, rather the Holy Roman Empire.)

Why I should invest 12,000 Euros in something I didn't need until now just to use up some electricity I don't need either, is beyond me.

I don't know the numbers right now, but I would estimate that only about 10% of Germany's homes have any type of AC to begin with. I for once, at an age of more than 50 years, have never lived in a home with AC, and I didn't miss one. Germany is much more to the North than the U.S., and Germany's southernmost point is still North of the U.S.-Canadian border. The highest temperatures in a normal year in Germany are mostly below the 100 F mark. The highest temperature ever, measured in 2019, for the whole of Germany was 41.2 Celsius or about 106.1 F, far lower than most places in the U.S..

Those would be powering an AI on the sunny side of things.

No problem. There are even more non-dairy options for the glue, than there are for the cheese itself.

I don't know if I've met any humans quite that dumb.

I *have* met humans dumber than the smartest dogs I've known, and attempting to interact with those humans was profoundly disturbing.

Because computer software (such as an LLM) is written by humans and designed to interact with humans, there's a familiar interface that feels computer-ish, and so our expectations are tempered and interacting with it isn't particularly disturbing. But I suspect, if it were using speech synthesis and embedded in a high-quality faux-human body, and given control of gestures as well as speech, it would probably freak everyone out.

The red squiggly underlines in word processing software and the like, are fine. That's not what we're talking about. Users can look at a proper noun with red squgglies under it and go "Oh, haha, La-a's name isn't in the spelling dictionary, gosh, I wonder why not", and there's no need to do anything about that, because you know what's going on and nothing has _happened_ other than alerting you to the non-dictionary-word nature of the name (which you were likely already aware of). That's fine.

What we're talking about here, rather, is smartphones, mostly, and their extreme and pervasive use of automatic corrections that many users would prefer to turn off but can't figure out how. You type one thing, and your phone automatically changes it to something else different, without consulting you, so then somebody gets a text asking "can you pick up some quips?", and it's really not obvious that the thing that's wanted is cotton swabs, because the message they got isn't what the other user typed. There are multiple subreddits entirely devoted to the tragedy, hilarity, and heartbreak resulting from misunderstandings that stem from this issue. The real problem here is that the autocorrect feature is on by default, and it shouldn't be. If users had to turn it on in order to use it, they'd be far more likely to know how to turn it off, so then when they try it out for fifteen minutes and find out that it causes more problems than it solves, they could just switch it back off. Given the frequency with which it causes larger problems than anything it was designed to solve, it really really should be off by default.

Or, people could learn how to pull up Google and type something like "How do I turn off autocorrect on Android?" But we're talking about regular end-users here, so that might be asking a bit much.