Your mistake was teaching your car phenomenology.

There's one killer app I'd absolutely love: Name tags. I want facial recognition and a person's name to pop up over their head like in an MMO. Give me that, and shut up and take my money. Even if it was privacy-limited to, say, only showing me names of people in my contact list it'd be worthwhile.

FWIW, the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart places HCR's "Letters From An American" as "Strong left bias" (on a scale of "Skews left", "Strong left", "Hyper-partisan left", "Most extreme left"; numerically, -13.5 out of a maximum of -42.0) and "Generally reliable". So slightly farther left than I had suggested, but I'll accept their evaluation. She's not "far left", in any case.

- A popular Washington state high school Spanish teacher was recently FIRED after reading a passage from "To Kill a Mockingbird" - responding to a dare by his students. In fact, that same book is now BANNED in multiple âoeprogressiveâ high schools.

- The latest edition of 1984? Prefaced with trigger warnings, and a new introduction apologizing that its characters arenâ(TM)t diverse enough.

I'm pretty much Lefty McLeftface myself, and I agree with you that these things are stupid. While I don't know the political leanings of the schoolboard in question, I'll note that banning books outright is not a typical leftist approach. Most of us would go with, "Yeah, this is a teaching moment," which is what it sounds like the teacher in question did. The book is about racism, it would be pretty dumb to try to eliminate the racist elements. I don't think most lefties would try to prevent teaching "To Kill A Mockingbird". I suspect that most of the objections come from right-wingers who feel oppressed by any suggestion that whites have historically oppressed minorities in the US.

Speaking of teaching moments, that's pretty much what your description of the new 1984 forward sounds like. I haven't read that edition myself so I can't really comment on it. Doesn't sound like it affects the text of the novel itself though, and it may even clarify it by giving context. Like I said, I don't know. Haven't read it.

As for LLMs' characterization of Heather Cox Richardson, I'd need you to show your work on either of those claims. I'd be interested to see the unfiltered chat logs of the prompts and responses. FWIW, I think LLMs in general have pretty much the same accuracy as a Magic 8-Ball. Blind faith in anything Grok or the others say is itself the height of stupidity.

As for HCR herself, I'd put her in the "left-leaning" category. Her letters tend to mix relatively neutral descriptions of the events of the day and her own mildly leftist interpretation of them. Definitely not neutral, but if you think she is FAR left you need to re-calibrate.

Came here to say the same. I live in the middle of the woods in the northern most part of Michigan. Believe me, I hate the little buggers with a passion. I have no moral qualms about eradicating them en masse. But I do expect there would be unforeseen consequences of randomly eliminating a chunk of the food chain.

"Dear Slashdot, how important is it to learn how to efficiently use the tool that I'm going to need every day for my entire career?"

The answer should be obvious. Yeah, you can get by without it, but even if prompting AI becomes the "programming" of the future you still gotta type your prompts. If for no other reason than your officemates will throttle you after listening to you giving voice commands all day.

I admit it, I'm an old fart. Here's a nickel, kid, go get yourself a better computer. But I learned to touch type on manual typewriters in high school in the early 80s because I knew I wanted to be a programmer and I knew it would be useful. I have never regretted it even once.

TLDR version: The system is engineered to be too complex for humans, which is the mark of a very very badly designed system that is suboptimal, inefficient, expensive, and useless.

That's only true if you assume the purpose of the tax code is to spread the cost of operating government fairly across the citizenry. That's not the case, at least in the USA. Here, the tax code is designed to shift the tax burden away from the class which writes tax code (politicians and people wealthy enough to make those politicians sit up and beg for scraps) and towards the classes which don't (all the rest of us schmucks). With that in mind it's a very well designed system. The fact that it needs a computer and an advanced degree to understand aren't bugs, they're features.

In short, if you can afford to get enough of an education to actually understand the tax code, you're almost certainly in the class which benefits from the convoluted nature of it.

RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science

Well, if *that* doesn't sound like the opening location shot of a kaiju movie, I don't know what does!

Great! This means that when I'm in the zone working on a particularly grotty problem I no longer have to wait for the phone or email or slack to break my concentration. The concentration alone will automatically trigger a concentration-breaking alert! Can't wait to see what this does for productivity.

I spent practically my whole career as a maintenance programmer. Bugs that escaped to the field came back to me to find and fix. Shifting the bulk of coding to AI scares the willies out of me. Not because it would make my job obsolete, but because it would double or triple my workload with some of the most esoteric, inscrutable, and just plain bad code ever seen by mortal man.

Look, we've all pulled up old code and said to ourselves, "How the hell did this ever work in the first place?" AI code will be worse. Oh, sure, you can ask the AI to explain it to you... LLMs are really good at that. Well, really good at coming up with an explanation, anyway. Not so good at the whole "correctness" thing. But the explanation will sound great!

Every day just reinforces that I picked exactly the right time to retire.

I love that this article comes immediately after "Chicago Sun-Times AI Writes Listicle Hallucination". This is exactly why I gave up Google as a search engine, the AI garbage is just too annoying.

Wait, back up. "AI shops for customers". Do they mean AI shops on behalf of customers? Or that AI itself is purchasing Wal-Mart's customers? We need clarification. This could potentially wind up being a whole To Serve Mankind scenario here.

In my experience, that's not what you want. The classes I took from professors who wrote their own books were difficult to understand, and asking for clarification just got me a response of "It's in the book." Yeah, I read it. I still have questions.

On the other hand, I had a professor who didn't write the book but whose research was described in the book. IMHO, that's the guy you want for a professor. That's the guy who actually knows his shit.

Exactly this. I have no problem with a terminal patient wanting to try a Hail-Mary experimental treatment. I'm concerned about the entire industry of conmen trying to sell fake cures in place of actual medicine.

You know what would make this work? Require that any treatment given under this program be free, cost covered entirely by the clinic and/or whatever company is developing the treatment. If it's truly an experimental treatment, something intended to eventually get approval and be made generally available, then this works. You've got a willing volunteer here ready to go, let's see if the treatment is effective. Chalk it up to the R&D budget and everybody wins. You'll make the money back in spades when it hits the general market.

If the proponents of the bill object to this, maybe (just maybe) they're actually more interested in making a quick buck now than they are in the outcome of their "experiment".

I write this as someone who watched a friend slowly die of cancer because some conman at a "medical tourism destination" convinced her that it was better to literally shoot coffee up her ass than to get the chemo her real doctors recommended.

disingenuous
adjective
: lacking in candor
also : giving a false appearance of simple frankness : calculating

Security professionals are not being disingenuous. They're being 100% truthful that it's not possible to design a backdoor that only the good guys can use. It doesn't matter that it's not the *only* possible attack on encryption. It's the one being proposed now. This is an argument about the proposal.

Sure, there are other arguments against creating a backdoor. That doesn't make this one disingenuous. From a technical perspective this is the most relevant. It's not possible. "I cannae change the laws o' physics, Cap'n!"

And damn Star Trek to hell for popularizing the idea that you *can* break the laws of physics if you yell hard enough at the engineer and demand it. Obviously the lawmakers have watched too many episodes where Scotty pulled a miracle out of his ass and saved the ship. We need more episodes that end with the Enterprise sitting dead in space while the Klingons zip past at warp 9 on their way to plunder Earth. "I feckin' told you the engines would blow, Cap'n. But you wouldn't listen to ol' Scotty, would ya? The guy who graduated top o' his class in Making Shit Work 101 at the Academy."