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Comment Re: Say what you will re: free trade or protection (Score 1) 106

nd they're raking in cash thanks to the massive increase in the price of oil from Trump's war in the Middle East.

Ukraine is seeing to it they don't by destroying oil refineries. Right now there are at least 5 big refineries out of commission for the next month or more. That doesn't include reduced loading capacity at several different terminals which have been struck or pumping stations which no longer work.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 61

Why is it problematic? As I asked, how is this any different than asking people to help with a particular passage? If they give you suggestions and you act on those suggestions, is it not "fruit of the poisonous tree"? It's not your work any longer, is it? It's the work they gave you.

I am not defending the wholesale use of AI in writing. I'm asking only about specific lines or maybe a paragraph, where you know it's not right, but aren't sure how to correct it.

Beta readers are technically doing the same thing. You give your work to them and they offer you suggestions for changes or edits. No different than AI/LLM.

Comment Question (Score 4, Interesting) 61

Let us suppose you are writing a story/book and you know there are places which you just can't quite get the wording the way you want it.

If you plug only that portion into an LLM and ask for suggestions, would that be considered "cheating"? If so, why would that be any different than asking someone, or someones, to read what you wrote and offer suggestions?

I'm not saying that's what happened here, clearly it was all written by a machine, but is using such a tool to edit your work or get suggestions, bad?

Comment Re:Why are people calling these things âoepre (Score 1) 132

They're not gambling if you have a real-world stake in an outcome addressed by one of these markets.

I have a real-world stake in the outcome of a roulette spin. Either I win money or I don't. How is that any different than saying I win or lose if something happens or doesn't happen on one of these markets?

Comment Re:Most requested feature...that you removed (Score 2) 98

For some reason, the Control Panel is still here after 10+ years of trying to get the Settings app to be feature complete

Because Control Panel is the best and fastest way to find what you want. It is clearly laid out, descriptive, and allows you to get things done.

Whereas, Settings is configured as if someone threw a ball of yarn into a box and let a cat play with it, then the cat threw up from playing so hard.

Comment Re:Similar to that of Pluto, but let's sensational (Score 1) 31

I looked up the figures a few days ago - but having since driven to the other end of the country, I've forgotten the precise details. IIRC it was something like Goofy having a higher aphelion - so most of the time (and length of orbital arc) it is going to be further out than Pluto (by a few %, but it also has higher eccentricity, so it's aphelion is lower than Pluto's (and indeed, Neptune's ; which is also true for Pluto). Since orbiting objects travel faster at aphelion than perihelion, that makes the average orbital period of Pluto and Goofy the same (or their year the same, or their semi-major axis the same ; these all mean the same thing) despite Goofy travelling further per orbit than Pluto, with a faster arc near perihelion.

You see the same sort of thing with, say, Uranus, Neptune, and 1P/Halley ; Halley and Uranus have quite similar orbital periods, but Halley's aphelion is well out beyond Neptune's orbit. the long period it spends out there is counterbalanced by the 3 year long Sun-dive it does form (approximately) Saturn's orbit, to the Sun, and back out to Saturn's orbit.50-odd% of it's orbital path followed in about 5% of it's orbital period.

Just because Newton's laws are quite simple, doesn't mean that their consequences are simple. Just ask (if you can get his bones to talk) one J. Kepler, who had to work out the orbits from raw observational data, unsullied by Newton's theoretical framework.

(It still sometimes astonishes me that there is no simple way to calculate the length of an arc of an ellipse or it's total perimeter - you have to do a really complicated, progressive approximation calculation for each specific shape of ellipse. Which, when you realise that Kepler would have had to make hundreds (thousands?) of such approximations while reducing Brahe's data, explains why Kepler came up with at least one relatively good approximation to the length of an ellipse's perimeter.)

Comment Re:Tax is the wrong term (Score 1) 24

One aspect of enshittification that people don't talk about much is that sites do need to make money to continue. They can't be free forever.

Yes they can. If musicians, software companies, and movie producers don't need to be paid for what they produce, these sites don't need to be paid either.

Comment Re:Synthetic (Score 1) 109

An AI has no capability to have feelings

And what is a feeling? Based on Wiki:

According to psychologist Carroll Izard, feelings are best understood as the conscious experience of emotion, arising when an affective state reaches awareness.[4] William James similarly proposed that feelings result from the perception of bodily changes in response to external stimuli, thus forming part of the emotional process.[5] More recently, affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp hypothesized the role of subcortical brain systems in generating core affects that underlie both feelings and emotions.[6]

In other words, a feeling is a reaction to an external stimuli. Since reactions are nothing but the neural connections in our brains responding to the external stimuli, there is little reason to say an AI, with its digital connections, can't respond to external stimuli in a similar fashion.

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