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Comment Re:reading all day (Score 3, Insightful) 117

I was very sad when I first noticed Amazon reviews of books with reader comments such as, "Too many long words", "Old-fashioned language", etc. Try reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or anything by Dr Johnson, or even light reading like Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. Some people nowadays would find Mark Twain too heavy and complicated.

Comment Re:Anti-intellectualism, hedonism, or ressentiment (Score 1) 117

"At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future" by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie.

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence -- which is strongly genetic -- was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

Comment Re:That whooshing sound you hear... (Score 4, Interesting) 44

Just about 40 years after the first big "AI" bubble back in the 1980s. At DEC there was cautious optimism, and even that turned out to have been considerably overblown. The guys in the AI group, who wryly called themselves "the artificial intelligentsia", were the first to admit that they were mainly working on expert systems. There was a lot of progress, and some useful software was written. But nothing like the immense wave of marketing hype had suggested.

Back about then, some enthusiastic junior guy brought our manager the latest Gartner Group report explaining what a great future DEC had and all the fabulous technology. Barely glancing through it, he grunted "Still drinking our own bathwater, I see" and returned to his spreadsheet.

The really funny thing about that is that the whole of today's "AI" hype, with the LLMs and all, is just that: drinking our own bathwater.
The software absorbs as much of the Web's written content as it can, and essentially learns how to spit out more of the same. No wonder it reflects our prejudices! No wonder people discover it can't actually "think"!

Comment Re: A valuable life lesson (Score 1) 66

For whatever reason he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that I literally had it installed inside of a VM to reverse engineer it, I just refuse to install adware shit on my bare metal OS just to bind keys to an already expensive mouse.

Classic Dunning-Kruger. Or, by analogy to Gresham's Law, bad thinking drives out good. It's a serious social problem.

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