...When we called them programs? Or executables? I mean, they do end in .exe for a reason...

I think there's way too many people who imagine AI to be some sort of Stuxnet, and they're letting their imaginations run wild. It's all pareidolia at work. AI is just an amalgamation of training data. Think of it like hamburger...when you look at what comes out of the meat grinder, you can't say to yourself, "That morsel came from the shank, and that little bit must be the filet, and that tidbit there came from the rib." It all clearly came from somewhere, but when blended together, you can no longer distinguish its individual parts. There's nothing at all intelligent about AI, but we perceive it as such.

Can we perhaps stop trying to anthropomorphize an algorithm?

It's just absolutely sad to think about how many billions of dollars have been burned by Meta on such stupid things. Hey Zuck, how's that metaverse going for you?

Imagine...with that same amount of money, we could have created a program that would give everyone free access to a four year college education. But to hell with all the Socialists, because clearly this monstrosity will generate more economic growth than free college for all.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Here's my reality:

1) AI is not 100% accurate.
2) AI supplanting human thinking is a process known as Cognitive Offloading, which significantly harms learning.
3) NAEP scores have been steadily decreasing since around 2010, which research has shown has been due to the integration of digital technology inside the classroom.

Fuck our corporate overlords. They want to destroy our public schools. Don't let them drive the proverbial nail into the coffin.

If one single blog post can create so much uncertainty in these businesses that it triggers an 800 point drop in the Dow, what does that say about the fragility of the businesses themselves?

I bought myself a hybrid a few months ago. Auto start/stop on it makes perfect sense, especially when the electric motor is there to do part of the work. I have to actually concentrate hard to even notice when the engine fires up or powers down.

On the other hand, when it's a pure ICE vehicle, I'm not a big fan. Most of the time it's tolerable, but three months ago, I was driving an Expedition that shut off the engine while I was idling at a frontage road waiting to make a turn onto the street. When I began my turn and hit the accelerator, the engine turned over, fired once, then stopped, and I got an error on the dash telling me to put the car in park and power-cycle the car to restart it. I was so glad I was on a frontage road with no cars behind me, because I swear I would have panicked if I was actually on a street with a car telling me it needed a "reboot".

The last time I drank two cups of coffee in a day, I had to wake up three times at night to pee. My bladder just can't handle that much caffeine anymore. Guess I better embrace my destined dementia demise.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia.

I was in the Philippines last November attending a wedding. The groom was a member of the Philippine Coast Guard. He said the #1 problem he dealt with was illegal fishing. The #2 problem he dealt with was trafficking of women and children. He said they seize at least one boat every month with hundreds of passengers. These women (and parents of the children) actually pay brokers to transport them over to Thailand, where they are promised employment. Then, when they get to Thailand, they're smuggled through the country into Laos, Cambodia, or Burma to work in these locations managed by crime families, often managed by the Chinese mafia.

Never forget: slavery still exists today. The western world just outsourced it to poorer countries.

Daddy Bezos has to cut a check to keep the lights on.

I feel like my mind has just blown itself to pieces just now. How on God's Green Earth did humanity decide to value a company that lost $12 billion dollars in just Q3 of 2025 at $830 billion dollars?

Our court will protect the rich interests of Bayer, because they only work for the rich. Bayer doesn't want to have to fight 50 potential lawsuits in 50 states; that's too many election fund donations they'd have to make. Much cheaper to just pay off the feds to make the ruling for everyone.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Well, thank you for the discussion. It has been a long, long time since I ever had one like this before on Slashdot. I wasn't expecting this conversation to continue well past the story expired past the front page, especially as this site slowly fades into obscurity.

I can clearly hear through your words that your worldview is a product of your financial success, and you attribute that success to hard work, fortitude, and tenacity. I am happy for you.

But the fault in your arguments is that you believe that everyone else in this country has the same opportunity for success. That is not the case. I've tried to convince you otherwise with numerous links and citations, but you dismiss each source as biased without reviewing the evidence within. Your "System 1" brain, as Daniel Kahneman would put it, is quickly dismissing information that does not align with your present worldview.

But that is OK, because I've been there too.

Having worked in public schools for 20 years now, the vast majority of school board members just went along with rubber-stamping about 99.9% of everything that was recommended by school officials. They had practically no reason to not trust what was happening in their school. Also, a majority of board members I've worked with didn't have college degrees, so I think some of the materials presented to them might have felt a little over their heads in the first place.

What's really concerning is that, when it comes to policy, at least in our state of Minnesota, there's a Minnesota School Board Association that has actual lawyers that monitor state statutes and craft template policies for school districts to use. Most adopt them without any modifications, because why argue with the lawyers that do this work professionally?

I guess a more accurate title to this paper should be "Usurpation of the School Boardroom".

The context remains the same; greed is greed the world over. And greed, left unchecked, can never, ever, be satisfied with what it has; it only wants more.

But you're fooling yourself if you think that corruption is limited to countries without rule of law. For example, the Philippines has a constitution; it has rule of law; but it is a very corrupt country. And you're truly fooling yourself if you think corruption doesn't exist in the United States; they just have a different way of facilitating it. For example, politicians get bought out every day by corporations that "donate" to political action committees in exchange for the passage of legislation favorable to their business operations. And this current administration isn't making any attempt to hide the corruption; before our very eyes, Venezuela's president was kidnapped and replaced with a leader more favorable to providing the United States with exclusive oil contracts. Trump himself said that he didn't notify Congress about the operation, but he did notify oil companies. And you know they didn't get that information for free.

In the US, we do exploit child labor. We've just outsourced it to other countries, to give corporations plausible deniability that they have no knowledge of the exploitation, despite how well known it is. If you're buying anything with a Lithium Ion battery, then you, in America, are paying for cobalt mined by children in the Congo. If you're buying any chocolate, then you, in America, are paying for chocolate harvested in the coastal West Africa region picked by children. And if you really want to enlighten yourself, feel free to look through the entire list our government has on goods we buy produced by child labor here.

And I'm trying very hard to tell you, many people don't have the choice you think they do. You naively believe that everyone working fast food is a teenager finding a starting job? Have you even been to a McDonalds in the last ten years? Many, many fast food workers are working double-shifts or multiple jobs just to make ends meet. But don't just take my word for it. Take your pick of good reporting that has documented the struggles of real people who are stuck, and listen to their reasons as to why it hasn't worked for them to escape where they're stuck.

I'm glad we have something to agree about with the Farm Bill. But don't just throw the baby out with the bath water on it. A lot of it is necessary to provide food stability for the country. But there is a lot of pork and waste that has become baked into the bill, and a lot of both rural and corporate America that is now trapped in dependency on its government welfare. Which means that, if you do throw the baby out with the bath water, it would so greatly disrupt food production in this country, it would lead to drastic food shortages and upheaval.

You are displaying a great example of availability bias, where you're using immediate examples of recent events to quickly reinforce your existing stereotype. Yes, we have had two significant commercial airline accidents in the United States this year, the Potomac Mid-Air Collision and UPS 2976. But these are outliers in an otherwise continual trend downwards for accidents and fatalities as a whole in the commercial airline industry. You cannot deny these statistics. And we can use these accidents and learn from them, which pushes that trend-line further and further down each year.

Commercial airplane travel is incredibly safe, and it continues to get safer, assuming no current president decides to mess with air traffic controllers, regulations, and enforcement.

...while we ignore our safety and maintenance needs on the planes

I vehemently disagree. Airplanes continue to be the safest way to travel, and airlines are mandated to follow maintenance schedules routinely. Because insurance. If airlines (at least in the US and EU) don't follow standard safety and maintenance procedures with their aircraft, then they have an accident resulting from that, the FAA and NTSB will discover the negligence, and then ohhhh boyyyy, there'll be hell to pay.