I don't believe that new hires should be looking for entry-level jobs, unless you mean the sort of jobs that basically require a college degree in order to even do the entry-level work.

The two things that college education were supposed to provide were either the foundation of education for being a leader, or the foundation of education for research. The latter has morphed into all sorts of disciplines, particularly into engineering, but the former still applies to an extent. If the job is truly entry-level for a great many possible workers then it shouldn't need a college education to get it, and a college education might well be wasted if going for a career track that starts out that way.

Part of the problem, arguably the biggest part, is that employers are looking for college degrees for jobs where having a degree doesn't mean anything. It means loads of people are going for expensive education just to get a rubber-stamp because HR departments are using that degree as a pass/fail. That's a terrible use of a college degree. That practice needs to end. Use college degrees where they're actually needed. Where they're not needed, treat them as a, "that's nice..." and move on.

...it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

There's also a consideration in terms of the emissions and other environmental degradation that was suffered as a consequence of manufacturing it.

If it was environmentally far more costly to produce the vehicle than to operate it, or if the environmental cost to produce a replacement vehicle is higher than operating an existing vehicle, then removing an existing vehicle from the road is a foolhardy move.

Similarly, if someone only barely drives their vehicle, then the environmental effects of driving the vehicle are limited even as the vehicle ages.

I happen to own one of the last of the rear wheel drive Chevrolet Impalas from the mid-nineties. My car had six thousand miles on it when I bought it when it was seventeen years old. Even now I have only a little over 43,000 miles on it at 30 years old. That vehicle is not causing a lot of further environmental harm. I drove it daily for around seven years, I was averaging around 5,000 miles per year commuting those years.

If a government wants to do something useful, implement emissions standards laws, and enforce those emissions standards laws. That's what they do where I live, any passenger car made from model year 1967 is emissions tested to the standards it was built-to and it must pass unless it's registered with collector's insurance and not allowed for business/commuting. I don't like the headaches of emissions testing, but it's also not so much a burden as to make it untenable either.

I'm sorry, but we've had tools to stack images as layers and to apply those layers as watermarks or overlays or even as 'frames' for decades now. The police department featured here has just demonstrated that they do not have a process that follows some kind of standard, they are using undocumented processes and random software that itself is probably undocumented to demonstrate evidence.

I could fully expect defense lawyers for cases that relied on the courtroom presentation of photographic evidence that features this police department's watermark or logo or other manipulation to challenge that evidence in an appeal. The police have already demonstrated they did not follow a documented chain of custody for handling and processing that evidence, so where the conviction was reliant on that evidence it might well be able to be excluded on a retrial if the court agrees that the police cannot demonstrate how they processed it.

When it comes to enforcing the law, stupidity may as well be malice.

I crack the occasional joke in telework meetings. The summaries from systems trying to process these meetings are often skewed by the jokes.

AI does not have the ability to detect the ultimately-irrelevant part.

From the article:

Oh please... The reason they're calling these things bi-folds for a single fold and tri-folds for two folds is because wallets have been using those terms in just that way. The bi- and tri- refer to the number of segments, which is the part that those shopping for wallets cared about. They didn't care that two segments meant one fold, they cared how two segments doubled-over fit in a pocket or purse. Likewise they didn't care that three segments meant two folds, they again cared how it fit where they wanted to store it.

Apparently you can't, given the code-page limitations of Slashdot.

And how many of those applications allow for a human being to be removed from the workforce?

Just from the summaries that you posted alone, it looks like it will take highly technical staff just to have the capability to review the AI returns to confirm if they're even workable or not.

Most of those also look like improvements that add essentially new capability rather than replacing human capability. They might even be adding to the number of people employed because in addition to the teams doing the primary work, there's now an AI step in the development process to take the human work to try to further refine it. If that AI step itself uses humans dedicated to the AI team as researchers/engineers/developers then this doesn't look like AI replacing workers, particularly the majority of white-collar office workers who would have probably had the job title "clerk" decades ago.

It may well be that AI manages to do to the data-processing field what the introduction of the electronic computer did to the records and processes clerks that handled all of the on-paper applications, requests, filings, proposals, and other tasks, but so far I am not seeing AI managing to do that to most rote office work. Frankly I've seen more of a change with the introduction of combination security and visitor badging systems that are now replacing building receptionists. Maybe that change will come, but so far it doesn't look like the people who fall into the vast chasm of nontechnical "office workers" are under immediate threat from AI.

To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work in the corporate world has been meeting summarization technology. Basically the AI attempts to interpret what was said in the meeting in order to deliver a summary.

I call it semi-useful because it doesn't understand nuance, varying slang terms versus official terms for industry-speak, and it can't even handle wisecracking.

I suppose that in a forensic-ish role it could help because it could analyze large datasets to find patterns, datasets that are so large that it's difficult for humans to evaluate all of the conditions, but whether or not this actually happens in a corporate role is hard to say. Most of the really huge data-processing AI systems are being overtly managed by developers. The biggest companies might be able to self-manage this, and other large companies not in this line of work might well sub-out this systems maintenance to technical services companies to maintain it on their behalf, but whether or not this trickles down to smaller companies would very much depend on how much it costs, and really how good the results actually are.

If I was middle-management I would be very cautious about embracing AI. The -GPT systems of the world have already demonstrated how utter crap they are sometimes, and my guess is that the sort of AI that will be available to them to potentially replace team members will be more like that and less like big-data AI. Those middle-managers will find their own roles diminished if AI comes in like this CEO thinks it will, and that not only threatens these middle-managers' positions through garbage-out, it also threatens to turn these middle-managers into the frontline white-collar workers again as they have fewer and fewer people to supervise and are now just keyboard-monkeys themselves.

For Ford and other manufacturing companies, I expect they will continue to push for savings in the manufacturing side of the house more than the administration, marketing, sales, and management sides of the house. I expect that they'll use it in the combination of design and manufacturing to attempt to produce product designs that require fewer and fewer people to be involved to actually manufacture said products. This is particularly an issue for automakers where their contracts for manufacturing labor might require them to pay workers when the plants are idle because the plants are being retooled for different design or because the company mispredicted sales forecasts and overbuilt and needs to idle until inventory is reduced. I could see them wanting to reduce the number of actual workers because then they don't have to contend with labor considerations for manufacturing tasks that don't involve humans. But that may not even be a matter of AI, that may just be more white-collar engineers working on how to design for the factory even more than they do today.

How much of this sort of announcement by corporate leadership could be attributed to misdirection? Threaten the positions of the office workers closest to them to distract while laying off the manufacturing workers at the far-flung plants?

If the voters are experiencing their own entry-level Dunning-Kruger Effect, then they are possibly voting because it simply sounds good, not that it's actually correct. They have been convinced, but whether that convincing is because the information is actually good is another matter.

If we could tell when people were actually worth listening to versus just being able to sound good, we wouldn't have the sorts of problem with how we choose leadership that we have either.

It's not that reddit is completely useless, but I have found that since it doesn't generally take even the minimal effort of signing-up for a specific-purpose forum in order to start commenting, there's a lot of people suffering the low-knowledge stages of the Dunning-Kruger Effect weighing in with uninformed opinions on subjects that think they're contributing something meaningful. Because their account allows them access to virtually the whole site (as so few subforums are restricted and the nature of that restriction is all-or-nothing rather than read-only until approved to post) they feel comfortable and confident weighing-in even when they have nothing of value to add.

For technical forums elsewhere, where a forum might be dedicated to a particular subject, usually only those with an express interest will bother to sign up for an account in order to post. The majority of new accounts are people with questions to ask and they start out suitably abashed because they have a problem that's stumping them. Some enthusiasts or experts with real experience also sign up, and end up forming the early core of those providing good answers, and in time many of those who started out asking questions reach a point where they're skilled and experienced enough to provide answers.

But to maintain growth a site really wants as many users as it can get, so low-quality results are almost inevitable for a site to grow to the point that it seems self-sustaining. Many of the forums I've been on for niche topics are a labor of love for their owners rather than truly profitable.

Stuff I've wanted to know hasn't been readily available for a long time anyway. I want to know things like:

• maximum brightness, if the screen is legible outdoors in full sun
• battery life at maximum brightness
• If the keyboard still has physical pgup/pgdn keys or not
• max effective speaker loudness
• how upgradable the RAM is
• how the rear corners are, in terms of trying to actually use it on a lap

Some of this stuff can be found out through vendor sources but a good chunk of it can be a PITA to find without getting hands-on with the laptop. As a consequence I've either bought used or bought from places like Costco where I can get a feel for the device. If I'm going to drop $1500 I want the thing to work to my tastes and ambiguity in such a transaction is annoying.

If you have to contact the admins to justify yourself rather than even being as simple as pre-signing-up through a web form and then the admins reviewing signups to approve then that's only one step from not being able to sign up at all.

A whole lot of print publications that later went hybrid and then online-only didn't make it even five years past the end of their print versions. It's surprising that they managed to go over a decade without closing up.

And to be frank about it, I'm surprised that the lights are still on at all here on Slashdot. Can't sign-up for new accounts anymore, they're clearly not trying to keep the site alive through new users, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day I go to pull up the URL and instead get a thanks-for-all-the-fish message.

I'm opposed to for-profit prisons because it adds further incentive to criminalize activities and to increase sentencing. I further take exception to the notion that prisoners can work in a given occupation for basically no real compensation, but once trained would be ineligible to work in that given profession once released from prison. Wildland firefighting immediately comes to mind as an occupation that relies fairly heavily on prison labor but where ex-cons are generally ineligible for hire after being released.

But the entire nature of the criminal justice system is pretty messed up here. Sentencing is uneven, consideration for some kind of reprieve is also uneven, and incarceration conditions are uneven and outright draconian in places. We don't even really know what we want out of it either and so many people think in terms of absolutes that there's no grounds for consensus or negotiated compromise.