Boomer here, and an early adopter - had my first PC (Commodore PET) in 1979. So I stay on top of tech trends... and I avoid most of them like the GOOD TIMES! virus. All that is just to establish my 'net creds so I can explain why I still use Facebook and pretty much nothing else, unless you want to count /. which I visit maybe once a week when I'm bored.

The thing is... everybody I know is on Facebook. With a single post I can update a couple hundred friends and relatives all over the world on life-changing (or more often these days, life-ending) events, and likewise they can share their lives with me. I have umpteen browser extensions to filter out most of the garbage, so I can use Facebook exactly as intended: A quick way to keep in touch with people I love.

What I don't need: An echo chamber for political rants, a lolcat-of-the-day meme factory, celebrity news, faux product reviews, pundits telling me what to think about world/national/local events, paranoid conspiracies, shallow 280-character fluff that doesn't convey any actual information, or a nonstop firehose of every random thought that flits through the collective hive mind of the world (I'm talkin' to YOU, Twitter) etc. etc. etc.

Yeah, I remember the early days of IRC and even the pre-IRC days of dialup chat services like Diversi-Dial. That's how I met the nerd girl who has been my wife for 35+ years! The shine wore off decades ago, but there are advantages and disadvantages comparing old vs. new: Of course IRC wasn't commercialized at all, but it was also a barren wasteland populated only by other early-adopter geeks. Nowadays of course online dating is the number one way for people to meet, but in 1988... not so much. So it's nice that even my most techno-illiterate friends and relatives at least know how to get on Facebook and post pictures of their grandchildren. Back then, I gave up trying to teach my mother how to send email. Now I spend my days explaining to folks why "Reply YES for a free gift!" is a bad idea.

Where am I going with this? Hell, I don't know. I stopped listening several paragraphs ago. Get off my lawn.

Stupid question... if the material is behind a paywall, how did it end up in the training data to begin with?

Tuvalu has been "on the brink of extinction" for at least 20 years - the oldest article I have found so far goes back to November 2002.

The highest point at the Tuvalu islands is only 15 feet above sea level, making it the lowest (closest to sea level) country on the planet. This makes me wonder how they still exist at all. Do they have no hurricanes there? How much of this "sinking" is attributed to natural erosion vs. climate change? NB: I'm asking this in good faith, not from a climate denier POV. Just because the climate is changing and the sea levels are rising doesn't mean that's why this area little more than a sand bar is taking on water

Yup. I couldn't figure out why my cheap Walmart off-brand knockoff of Sudafed stopped working on my crippling sinus headaches, so I spent the extra cash and started getting name-brand Sudafed... which also didn't do a thing for those headaches. Only afterwards did I look closely at the ingredients and realized they had pulled a bait-and-switch on me. "PE" no longer stands for "pseudoephedrine" which works great; it stands for "phenylephrine" which, as anyone who has tried the stuff already knows, doesn't work.

Those sinus congestion headaches are so bad I literally wish for death to end the pain. Thankfully I can still get it if I show my ID, which is certainly worth it for the relief. I don't know what I'm going to do if pseudoephedrine gets completely banned in the US.

That being said, I do understand the tighter controls over pseudoephedrine. When I first discovered how effective it is, I bought it by the truckload and used WAY too much, usually 2 or more *a day* every single day to prevent the headaches from ever even starting. After a couple of decades... big surprise, I was starting to shake uncontrollably and couldn't sleep for anything. So I weaned myself off and now I only take it after more conventional pain meds don't work. But when I do need it, I need it right away.

Too late!

There was a similar chatbot like ELIZA around the same time, called PARRY. PARRY was written to simulate a person experiencing paranoid delusions. In 1972, ELIZA's creator Weizenbaum and PARRY's creator Colby put the two together to see how a conversation between them play out. It was absolutely hilarious.

Wait until we find out that the entire swimsuit edition was created by Dall-E.

They lost me at "government funded." It's like Scrooge promising "A Christmas goose for everyone! Cratchit, go buy a Christmas goose for everyone out of your own savings."

I'm one of those ADHD Aspies who can't process auditory information well or quickly. It doesn't matter if the meeting is live or video (or audio only); I get so distracted that I miss pretty much everything that follows "Now listen carefully, this is important." My eyes just glaze over. I have to take copious notes at every meeting - which in itself makes the experience worse because I'm trying to type as fast as the speaker is talking, and if there's an accompanying slideshow I have to also take screenshots.

I have tried for years to get my company to use our multiple collaborative platforms - Teams, Wiki, Sharepoint, whatever - to post mission-critical information or even just useful but not urgent information ("Let me introduce our new team, and I'll name all 256 members so you can get to know them..."). No dice, because the sense of active participation in a community is more important than organizing important information in a way that can be retrieved as needed for review later.

But we already know Amazon's business model: Accept ads from any and every scum-sucking weasel who claims to sell what you want without making any effort at vetting the company or their products. All they want is the advertising revenue for making sure that product shows up high in your search results.

"Honey, look! Everyone else wants $55,000 for a 2023 Prius but here's one called LuckyCarLily offering a 2024 model for only $6000! and they include free shipping!"

Car dealers are the embodiment of evil, to be sure, but at least when they're physically located near you there is some legal recourse when, not if, they screw you.

As a bible thumper myself, it grieved me to see my church friends jump on the Trump Train like he was the messiah he claimed to be. He only started catering to the religious right when it boosted his campaign; prior to that he didn't have a religious bone in his body.

When asked for his favorite scripture, he vaguely referenced that he liked "that eye for an eye thing" - which of course Jesus explicitly refuted. For every open insult to people of faith, for every slap in the face of military heroism, they just dug in their heels and doubled down on their belief that Trump, and only Trump, could save the world. They wrote off these and many more anti-Christian comments with the excuse that "He's still a new Christian, give him time to grow" or "He's a flawed vessel, just like King David who sinned but was still God's favorite."

But if we make that excuse for Trump, can't we make the same excuse for his GOP rivals, or gasp! even for Biden?

By "help users find discounts" they mean "railroad users into sponsored products".

Is it unfair if the mod affects all players equally? Sure, I can see my enemies more clearly (using your example), but they can also see me more clearly. How is that unfair?

Seems to me it's only cheating if it gives one player/team an advantage that the others don't also have.

Yeah. A site has to carry a level of trust almost impossible to meet by my standards before I'll click on anything that's not .com, .net, .edu, or .gov. Yes, I realize that even those TLDs can certainly host malicious sites but *for the most part* they are better policed than J. Random TLD.

What specifically did he say about AI that pissed them off? Googlespace turned up thousands of articles giving detailed analysis or direct quotes about China, but I can't find anything he said one way or the other about AI.

Before we jump on the gross overgeneralization bandwagon let me stress that I work with a number of Indian engineers, and they are terrifically smart. But my company takes pains to vet the applicants in person and test their abilities before we hire anyone.

Microsoft, not so much. We also have had a support ticket open for months because their every response is like they're waking up to a new world each day, even when it's the same CSR from one call to the next. They give us pointless, time-consuming tasks and then spend days before saying "Thank you for the response, I will escalate this to the team."

Early on in the process, they were on a call with us doing screen sharing and advised me to flush my browser cache. I thought it was a stupid idea since the problem affects every user at the company but it wasn't a big deal. Then they wanted to know the results of a diagnostic query, and I showed them how the diagnostic query fails - producing a blank dialogue box instead of any useful information.

So you can imagine how gratified I was, two months later, to have the same guy (after repeated "escalations" to a higher-level team) say "We have found the cause. You just need to flush your browser cache, then look at this diagnostic page to show you the source of the problem." Big surprise, flushing my cache for the 100th time didn't change anything, and the diagnostic page still showed an empty dialogue box.