Also, look up Trent Reznor's "Slam Bamboo" band before Nine Inch Nails.

It's only local to China in the sense that they choose what {packages/CCP poison} go in there.

For all values of u, Linux is local to u in the sense that u chooses what packages go in there.

Ha ha, Linux already has..

# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'

.. d'oh! Never mind.

And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?

Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.

But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)

Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at copyediting than an average human, but I haven't kept up so I'm ignorant of their performance. (All my "AI" experience is that I used Claude twice to, it turned out, fix some typos in some RoR config initializers.) But whether an AI service is as good at copyediting as a human or not, it's that user's choice and, as long as they sign off on the work and really take responsibility for it (declare the words to be their opinion), then I've got no problem with them doing that, whether it uses LLMs or Markov chains or human slaves or Searle's Chinese Room.

The words will be judged by their quality, not provenance.

That said...

Here's a similar story where I'd probably come to the opposite conclusion(!), despite the clown in it pretty much doing what I preach above, though he was using the AI service to do a lot more than copyedit. Behold this 3M expert witness cross-examination (134 page PDF) in the Watson Grinding case. It's slow going at first, but eventually you'll be laughing and cringing like in a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fuck. I don't know.

Being an unskilled but charismatic person has been a desire since the start of human trade. Ask the first person doing the worlds oldest profession if they'd rather have charm or technique to earn their keep. Humans have always wanted the cheap, fast fix for the ego.

Facial recognition is really neat technology, and we are all slightly better off thanks to its development. It's also imperfect, and nearly-guaranteed to be a net negative if you fully trust it, without human verification.

If you want to come out ahead by using cool technology, you're going to have to think about how to use it. There just isn't any shortcut around thinking.

If you have something which is only 99.9% reliable, that can be useful but it's going to be wrong sometimes. How are you preventing that wrongness from breaking your system? Insulting (much less turning-away) regular, recurring, paying customers is usually considered a really bad move, generally resulting in lower profits.

Free money falls out of the sky. Should we take it? Today we'll be interviewing Republicans, and learning that the answer is No because asceticism is a fundamental ideal that we should all strive toward. Burn a sacrifice instead!

As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

AI isn't inherently bad, the system under which AI is being developed is. Capitalism commodifies everything, including humans... slavery is the logical end state of capitalism, commodifying not just the factory or the raw materials, but the worker themselves. In a non-capitalist society, it wouldn't matter that AI ingests and reuses creative output... creators are not beholden to capitalists in order to have food or housing or healthcare. In a non-capitalist society, AI would not be trained on winner-takes-all modalities. We get to a Star Trek world where you can conjure up damn near anything you want in a holodeck by leveraging AI... but only if it's in in a NON-capitalist society.

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.

It's much worse than that; you would end up preventing anyone else from doing it for 20 years, until the patent expired. Of course that would make Slashdot!

A 300 million dollar 387-foot professionally crewed yacht NOT maintaining an effective emergency channel watch, and not responding to the US Coast Guard when called upon, is definitely suspect even in the most complimentary light.

This is a story about humans in distress reaching out to a billionaire's boat. If your response is buh-buh-buh-insurance or buh-buh-buh-maritime-law, you're pretty firmly missing the point. This is ultimately Zuck's PR crisis regardless of how many levels of indirection he can employ to cover his ass liability-wise. He owns the boat. He hired the people. His monkeys. His circus.

His monkeys. His circus.