That's not the purpose of the clothes ads. The purspose isn't to show a woman watching the ads how the clothes would actually fit her, the purpose is to let her imagine that wearing those clothes she can look just like the model who is wearing those clothes in the ad.

I actually agree completely. Had AI been used to solve certain specific engineering, medical and scientific problems it would've been a very useful tool to be used alongside human insight and understanding. Unfortunately current LLM 'AI' is specifically designed to give ready-made answers to any user questions. You ask ChatGPT "how do I do X?" and it straight up tells you the entire solution. That's by definition something designed to replace human thinking rather than augment it.

There's already a major problem that many young people today don't know how things work 'under the hood'. For example from what I've heard many young people just don't understand the basic concepts of an operating system, like files and directories, because they're used to just clicking on apps and letting them do their magic. You really don't want to make things any worse, but a tool that promises to magically answer any questions you ask it is guaranteed to make things so much worse.

What is meant by 'productivity' exactly? Take software development. There are 'software developers' today who copy-paste most of their code from internet and produce barely-working shit crawling with bugs. In that case, LLMs would save time on multiple google searches and forum questions and theoretically replace them with just one prompt. Unless AI produces something that doesn't compile because it hallucinated a bunch of fictitious headers and libraries. So now you can produce shit buggy code much faster. Is that the kind of productivity we want?

For people who at least to some extent know what they're doing, I'm not sure AI would be any help. I've always found doing code reviews difficult. You need to understand the approach the other person used, tune yourself to their way of thinking and see if there is anything they've missed. I've always found it easier when I'm asked to just solve a problem in my own way. In that case, working with AI would be like code-reviewing someone who doesn't understand what they're doing and just copied all the code from internet (because that is literally what LLMs are doing, with a sprinkling of hallucinations). That would definitely not help productivity.

In case someone thinks I'm referring to some super obscure OS for uber-geeks, I meant MacOS, or OSX. I kan't spel toadai.

Surely you've heard of Firefox? It's a web browser, articles on Firefox are regularly posted on slashdot. uMatrix is an adblocker - see this, there's a number of other adblockers out there. Here's more on i3 and xorg if you're intreseted, but basically it's Linux stuff. There's MaxOS as well, though I'm not a fan personally, the point is, there are alternatives to the Windows shit out there.

Time to go on a hamburger and chocolate diet, guaranteed bankruptcy protection.

Sure feels like that sometimes

The whole 'claim to ancestral homeland' is complete bunk as far as I see it. Some extracts from European history:

Take UK. Originally it was inhabited by Celtic people, such as now live in Ireland, Wales and to some extent Scotland. Incidentally, most of Europe was inhabited by Celts, including modern-day France, large parts of Spain and Eastern Europe. Then Roman Empire (whose capital was in modern-day Italy) happened and Britain was romanised, with large number of people from elsewhere in the Empire settling there. Then, as the Empire declined, the Romans left Britain, shortly after that there was an invasion by Angles and Saxons, which were Germanic tribes. Many of Germanic tribes, incidentally, originally migrated from modern-day Scandinavia due to climate change and overpopulation. For a while Angles and Saxons controlled Britain, mixing with the locals, until there was an invasion from the North, by Vikings, who were obviously from Scandinavia, and from the South by the Normans (who were French but also descendants of Vikings).

In the meantime in the Eastern Europe the Celtic and other people were displaced by Slavs, coming in large numbers from the East. Hungary is an interesting case. Some Hungarian historians claim descent from Huns, who were originally believed to originate from modern-day Mongolia or perhaps western Siberia, but most historians agree actually descended from Magyars, who were originally nomadic people who mass migrated to what is modern-day Hungary (more or less) from somewhere west of the Ural mountains (in modern-day Russia).

I could go on and on but you get my point. People are driven from one place, due to war or environmental changes or other factors, are in turn driven out by other people and so on and so forth. History is dynamic like that. Now imagine all of the people in Europe and elsewhere in the world (because these kind of migrations weren't limited to Europe obviously) all decided to 'reclaim their ancestral home'. Hell, go back a few hundred thousand years and we all came from Africa. So maybe The Scramble for Africa and all the colonization was just Europeans reclaiming their ancestral homeland?

Vibe coding exists because programmers aren't willing to work for a minimum wage. Mind you, even minimum wage is too expensive for the MBAs, they're probably fantasising about pressing a button and getting software written instantly and for free, minus whatever they're paying to rent the LLM that's writing the code. Not that it's anywhere close to the realm of possibility.

And programmers "gating keeping" [sic] knowledge? You could teach yourself to program from all the open source code you can freely download off the internet. How many sites / forums are there where people ask for help with programming and other people happily advise them? There's far less gatekeeping of knowledge than law, finance, I'd say most other professions where there is some knowledge you could gatekeep.

Not the best example I think. In that case a lookout driver would absolutely not be convicted of murder, accomplice to murder at most but most likely not even that. This is more like if someone you know to be a burglar asks you for some lockpicks, or a known terrorist asks for some explosives. So you're still guilty as an accomplice, but you didn't actually commit the crime in question.

Death sentence for this is way way out there (never mind the fact that UK does not have capital punishment). To start with people he sold the phishing kits to wanted to commit fraud, so if his tools weren't available, they would've used someone else's tools. The alternative tools wouldn't be as effective probably, so the total amount stolen would be smaller, possibly much smaller, so he's personally responsible for a part of that 175M, but not for all of it. Besides, it's a stupid 21 yo kid who thought he outsmarted the system. He can still be rehabilitated and turn his talents to more socially useful pursuits. Seven years is probably too short considering he'll probably be out in a fraction of that time with good behaviour, especially considering UK prison overcrowding problems. If 7 years actually means 7 years, it's probably OK.

Yeah, if you're banned from paying it only makes sense together with legislation requiring minimal security standards like backups, offline storage etc. If ransomware encrypts your crucial systems (and you have no backups) and you aren't allowed to pay, then your only other options are to rebuild everything from scratch, which will likely be a lot more expensive and cause massive service disruptions, or cease operations altogether (and since the law is targeted at "crucial infrastructure organizations", not really an option). On it own, the most likely outcome is that people will just stop reporting ransomware attacks and/or start hiding ransom payments as other expenses.

As soon as you hear the phrase you immediately imagine an unwashed unshaven man in a tinfoil helmet waving his arms wildly. It's a way of trying to dismiss an argument without considering its merits. Conspiracies have always been a thing. Just from US history, Watergate, MKULTRA, Bay of Pigs are all accepted history now. People lie, and unfortunately people in power are not an exception. So theorising that there is a conspiracy is just as valid as any other theory. Of course, just as any other theory it should be plausible with respect to people supposedly involved and at the very least should not contradict basic logic.

The UN lacks any means to enforce any resolutions it comes up with. Unlike, for example, the EU, UN members have no legal obligation whatsoever to follow UN resolutions. Even the theoretically binding UN Security Council resolutions can't be enforced, so if a UN member chooses to ignore it, there's nothing you can do about it, short of maybe kicking that member out of UN. And all other resolutions are purely advisory. So in its current format it will always be pretty much a ceremonial institution. It's a symbol of an aspiration of a united human race, but not anything more than that really.

A UN house based on population would be dominated by South and East Asian countries - that where most of the population is. If the goal is to stop "tiny little dictatorships" from "teaming up on nations with the wealth and population to actually do anything ...", that wouldn't be effective. E.g. Bangladesh has about 170 mil population, and Democratic Republic of Congo has 109 mil, while Australia has 27 mil and Netherlands 18 mil. Which of those countries are more able to "do anything"? See this.

You could instead have a house based on GDP, but that would immediately have all the third world countries complaining about colonialism by other means and so on. UN is about a ceremonial show of world unity, you don't want to ruin even that. And then even that wealth-based UN would need cooperation between the US and China to be able to do anything, how likely does that seem at the moment?

Indeed. In simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, you can easily brute-force calculate the most optimal decisions and just use those. In more complex games, where you can't brute-force calculate all the optimal decisions, you have to use strategies, like playing in a very attacking, or a very defensive way, or, if it's a card game, bluffing a lot. Those already introduce suboptimality - if you're locked into a very attacking mindset, you can easily miss more optimal defensive decisions. Simple games otoh often don't even support strategies.

Also if they define 'rational' decisions as those that increase the likelihood of winning the game the most, then people often will have other goals when playing a game. For example someone might want to win in the most 'fun' way, or the most 'dominant' way, whatever that means to them. Or they might want to win in the simplest fastest way possible, if they have a headache and/or other things to do and places to go. Or, as mentioned by couple of above posts, people might want to avoid game decisions that can be seen as 'dishonorable' or 'cheap' or 'unsportsmanlike'.

Applying a narrow mathematical definition of 'rational' is flawed even from the point of view of wanting to win at all costs - psychological factors can be very important in games. Making less optimal decisions which you know will cause your opponent to make even worse decisions is completely rational from that point of view. But defining rationality as wanting to win above all else when playing a game is I think a bad definition. Unless there's some kind of significant material reward involved, people play games in order to have fun. So from that point of view playing in a way that is the most fun to them is the most rational way of playing. Of course some people can only have fun if they win, but not all.