It just means that the proxies are very unusual thermometers, where each one shows a large error bar. If you are looking at aggregated data, the error in the single datapoint averages out, and they are a very good replacement for actual measurements.

We use proxy data all the time, and no one complains, but if it comes to historic weather and climate data, everyone suddenly is an expert in measurement theory. In fact, all measurement itself is using proxy data. We can't experience electric current to some precision. Instead, we are measuring the force induced in a wire. And as we can't experience force very precisely, we cause the force to tense a spring, and then we read out the angle difference. Do you argue that the angle of distortion of the spring is not the actual current read-out, but some massaged data, which should be treated as such?

That's exactly what we are doing. Each measuring instrument has a label indication the expected error bar of the measurement. But if we do it for proxy temperature data, it's suddenly something we should refrain from?

It's not Trump Jr. who was hired as an executive for an oil company and was paid MORE than an Exxon board member for a country his daddy just overthrew. That was Hunter and Ukraine.

Which didn't happen.

I get it, Trump is a worthless human being. But Biden was way worse even when he had a functioning brain.

Celebrating dictators certainly falls under a worthless human being, but praising a fictional character who ate other people definitely falls under a non-functioning brain.

Tell use you don't know what censorship means without telling us you don't know what censorship means.

You are misrepresenting what working from home means. In 2023, I've clocked in 202 days working from home. The team I am working with is distributed over three countries and five locations. We have conference calls three times a week. I am providing support in several countries. It's completely irrelevant from which place I am providing support. All together, we are ten people.

There are customers with some equipment where I am the only one in the region with working experience, as all the others in the company have already retired. When they have an issue, that's the rare occasion when I go on site. The contract will run out probably in 2026, but for the time being, I am still providing support. If I am not available, there are some engineers who remotely will support the technician, who goes on site instead of me. This is a task I've taken with me from a former position.

There is no point for me to go to an office, as I am the only one within about 300 miles who does the same job than I do. And in fact, the only office my company has in my country is 300 miles away. All other offices were closed during the last five years.

A few years ago I was talking to my gen Z kids about internet research and said, "well, Wikipedia isn't a bad place to start." They said their teacher told them never to use Wikipedia because anyone could edit it, and my wife backed that up (she worked for the schoolboard at the time) and said the teachers all tell the students never to use Wikipedia. I said, "well, Wikipedia's not perfect, but what do they suggest to do instead?" The answer was, "just type your question into Google." FFS. I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous, and having Google use generative AI to blather some authoritative-sounding BS isn't going to help the matter. LLMs are just built to generate text that statistically looks similar to text it trained on. It's neither thinking nor reciting verbatim, so it's the worst of both worlds.

I thought if you want to launder money, you find a guy named Danny and "invest" in his laser tag business.

No, you need to find a guy named Donny and "invest" in his golf course(s).

Considering these companies are still functioning without any issues, that term does not mean what you think it means.

Also, this is good way to cut costs. Clearly their high flying salaries and perks weren't justified if things are still working.

Do you seriously believe someone added that as a typo or a copy/paste error? It wasn't a "mistake." It was a "regret."

Most of the people working at Disney studios now think Bambie Thug would be an excellent role model for little kids.

because he's waaay more mentally unstable than crazy Joe.

Mentally unstable is the perfect description. The makeup wearing con artist praised Hannibal Lecter:

I'm not against all AI. I like the idea of using AI to find new protein folding configurations, or using it for automatic pedestrian detection, or helping with industrial automation. What I really dislike is when someone asks an LLM a question and assumes they're getting back a well reasoned and authoritative response. The whole point of an LLM is word/token prediction. All it's doing is taking the text of a conversation up to a certain point and statistically predicting what the next word or token is, with some randomness thrown in. This does a reasonably good job of mimicking chitchat and small talk, like how we just zone out to chat about the weather, but it's not "intelligent". It's literally a random text generator, heavily weighted towards text it's already seen. Don't assume it's correct. Don't rely on it's output. Never put it in charge of decision making. That's all I'm asking.

And then there was me thinking that those machines are highly parallel.

This is accelerated AI.

ChatGPT4 has also been getting steadily dumber and the reason is depressing: it's the users.

Everything people type into ChatGPT is added to its training data. The theory is that it will learn to adapt and respond more intelligently, but the opposite has happened. The people using it have made it dumber, lazier, and overall less useful. I can type the exact same prompt to output DIY construction plans or building perl scripts or whatever other complex task I've done before and the results are strikingly worse.

But even in its reduced capacity, ChatGPT helps me too much in my daily tasks to stop paying for it; let alone stop using it.

So, wait, are farmers no longer capable of driving the tractor manually?

Seriously?