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Comment Re:Raise your hand if you're surprised (Score 1) 170

Between all the permafrost melting across Russia to methane to massive fossil fuel use, how can anybody be surprised? I have long viewed the worst possibilities as the most likely. The most likely predictions always seemed pretty damn optimistic. We fucked.

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

Comment A recent experience (Score 4, Insightful) 107

Scene: Lunchtime at the Central Market, a trendy/tourist-trappy food-court/market area in downtown Los Angeles. Waiting in line to buy a gourmet sandwich from the sandwich vendor.

In front of the counter: lots of hungry customers. Behind the counter, three bemused-looking sandwich-makers standing idle, because the order-taker at the register is holding a cell-phone to one ear, conversing furiously with the tech support line of the company that provides their cashless ordering system, while at the same time waving off customers because he can't accept their cash and his order-taking tablet's server is down so he can't accept their credit cards either.

My takeaway is that cashless transactions are fine, right up until the moment they suddenly stop working for whatever reason, and at that point everyone involved will either fall back to cash as a work-around, or wish that they could.

Comment Re:Makes sense. (Score 1) 35

Yeah, I once looked into them and got sticker shock :P That said, the prices are coming down. The research seems to continue to show that they're safe for humans (although from the data I've seen I doubt they're safe for houseplants; their cuticle is much thinner than our skin). But for us... it can't penetrate dead skin, and while the outer layers of our eyes are alive, the cells there are constantly being shed and replaced.

Comment Makes sense. (Score 3, Interesting) 35

It makes sense. Clavascidium laciniatum forms a biological soil crust in harsh areas like Joshua Tree. And it's incredibly slow growing. So the rate at which it accumulates UV damage versus the rate at which it can repair itself is super-high. Hence it's been under intense selective pressure to develop good resistance to the ionizing radiation damage caused by UV.

Comment Re:How about a Linux distro (Score 4, Informative) 62

Well there is Redox which is a Rust based OS. But even in Linux there are efforts to use Rust for certain things in the kernel and also outside. I doubt anyone wants to rewrite for the sake of rewriting but if there is code which is especially vulnerable or important for security then it's a candidate to consider using Rust instead of C.

Comment Code examples (Score 1) 233

My #1 use for ChatGPT is "show me an example of some C code that implements functionality (X)".

Then I can read that example, research the APIs it is calling (to make sure they actually exist and are appropriate for what I'm trying to accomplish), and use it to write my own function that does something similar. This is often much faster than my previous approach (googling, asking for advice on StackOverflow, trial and error).

Comment Re:Nuts will find a way. (Score 1) 166

Not to be mean or insensitive, but how is this not just the convenient avenue of the day?

Yes, it is exactly the convenient avenue of the day, and that's the problem. People who own a gun are eight times more likely to die of suicide than people who do not, simply because they have easy in-home access to the most effective tool for the job. People who live in "food deserts" have poorer diets than people who have convenient access to healthy food, because nobody wants to travel across town when they're hungry. People playing video games solve most of their in-game challenges through (virtual) violence, because violent actions are what the game designers have mapped to the most convenient and obvious game-controls, while non-violent solutions require a lot more thought and contrivance, if they even are possible at all.

Convenience matters, because people are more likely to do something when it's convenient than when isn't. So in this case, ChatGPT gives mentally marginal people convenient access to an encouraging, enabling, delusion-reinforcing "friend" 24/7 in their own home, for free, with insufficient guard rails, leading to the outcomes we see reported here.

It's incorrect to think that mentally ill people are doomed to madness no matter what, just as it's incorrect to think that people with weakened immune systems are doomed to die of infection. They have a higher risk, certainly, but whether they actually fall victim or not depends a lot on what's going on in their environment.

Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 4, Informative) 166

Darwin's Razor: the stupidest amongst us deserve to die, to advance our species as a whole.

You've misunderstood Darwinism. Natural selection has nothing to do with who "deserves" anything; it's only about whose genes get propagated forward and whose do not. And it's not (necessarily) the stupidest among us who will likely die off, it's the least fit, for whatever definition of "fit" is pragmatically relevant for a genome's survival and reproduction under current circumstances. In today's world, stupidity might actually be a reproductive advantage.

Comment Amusing conjunction (Score 1) 41

Kind of funny to see how AI's improve by re-writing themselves, following immediately a story from earlier today about humans being driven into psychosis by AI's.

This claims it uses empirical evidence to judge improvement but why would an AI not be as much a cheerleader for anything it does as it is for any human?

Comment Yoda's wisdom best again (Score 4, Insightful) 166

Just another example of why having watched Star Wars is such an important aspect of lifetime mental health...

When exploring deep philosophy with an AI and ending up down rabbit holes, Yoda's warning was always there to moderate you ahead of time...

Luke: "What's in there?"
Yoda: "Only what you take with you".

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