Fact-free speculation always makes for the best opinions.

Worth mentioning as well, in regards to privacy, is that modern digital identity schemes can allow for granular disclosure of personal information datapoints, meaning their introduction can improve the privacy situation in many circumstances.

Trump has a problem with the truth. He keeps saying the Iranians agreed to things that they didn't and is angry when they don't follow what he imagines they said.

But the bigger problem is Iran isn't negotiating with Trump. They are negotiating with the USA. The USA went back on the last deal the Iran made over nuclear fuel enrichment. The USA attacked and assassinated the Iranian leadership while the Iranians thought the USA was negotiating with them. No matter what the Iranians agree to there is nothing stopping the USA from attacking or changing the deal. The USA signed a treaty to protect Ukraine from any aggression when Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, the USA has torn up or threatened to rescind trade agreements with their closest friends. There is no arbitrator or court that the USA needs to answer to. Which means there is no deal that Trump can sign that is worth the paper it is written on.

Granted it is definitely nice having the choice between shifting or not. I probably split my time about 50/50 between auto and manual mode.

If you and I want to enter any kind of contract we have to uniquely know who each other are. If you don't have a single, national ID, I then have to know your name, date of birth, address, phone number, previous addresses, mother's maiden name etc so that I can uniquely identify you. And then we just assume companies need to know our slashdot id, sex, eye color, height, sexual orientation, weight...

Five years ago when I bought a car in America the manual was roughly $1000 cheaper than the automatic.

That is believable. A sole developer at a law firm will have random tasks (like, "find out what is in this dbDOS PRO database we found during discovery"). As such, a lot of your time is spent figuring out how to do things that will only have to be done once. Traditionally, you would have spent time in search engines or StackOverflow trying to figure it out. Now AI is acting as a type of advanced search engine for you.

So your work is like the ideal use case for AI.

Businesses are pro-consumer by definition

Businesses use consumers to make money. That's not the same as being pro-consumer.

That's not really true. Science is a tool for testing hypotheses. It doesn't really care where the hypothesis comes from. In this case, the hypothesis is that the human brain can be perfectly simulated by a Turing Machine, which is a reasonable hypothesis.

If they just accepted that as true, it would be unscientific. But if they actually test their hypothesis, it's not unscientific.

At the time when he said that, the number was closer to 90% than to half.

Now it's easier to target, and easier to figure out which advertising is wasted.

A random generator will eventually create the works of Shakespeare.

A current LLM will never create the works of Shakespeare.

I know what I told you. I told you that, for a start, read the IPCC working group 1 report "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change".
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6...

The way you can tell when people who claim to be skeptics aren't, is that when you tell them where to find the answer to their questions they don't want to hear it.

I have never tried to sell AGI. (And I most certainly don't think large language models are AGI, or are ever going to evolve into AGI or anything like it.)

I've kept most formats, but abandoned tape in all formats.

I LP, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and stream.

And rip.

Ripping replaced my tape deck. Make my own "mixtapes" only now they're playlists. I rip vinyl to MP3 like I use dto make tapes for my car or walkman.

Streaming is for Suckers, and for Convenience.

Physical is permanent (to some definition of "permanent")

I just bought my first paper manga in a while, after reading the digital. It's so good it's no shame to double-dip this one, get the author her 100 yen per book.

I love Media OCD's tagline: You'll own nothing and be happy -- only the "nothing" is crossed out, and "everything" is gratified in.

Probably when Chinese fabs really start churning out DDR5 and high end flash memory. That's the truth of it, it's a gift to them.

I have a bunch of friends who go to shows and buy the CDs, just as other merchadising stuff, in order to support the artists. I, myself, have about a dozen on a shelf, but I actually listen to them on-line.