My wife works in a library. Some of these people become not just defensive, but outright hostile. Part of the problem is socioeconomic and education based. A lot (not all but a lot) of people using libraries on a daily basis don't have much formal education and have little experience with computers. Much of my wife's work is just helping people do very basic tasks, like showing someone how to open a Word document, or how to download or upload a file for a job application. So for probably some of these patrons, ChatGPT must seem like magic. The interface is simply typing what they want, and even highly misspelled or garbled requests will generate something like a coherent response from it, so they don't even need to know what any icon means. And if one is dealing with people who often literally don't understand the difference between a file stored on a computer and a file on the cloud (to use one common example) then even explaining the idea of an AI hallucination is going to be an uphill battle.

As is the case for almost all international treaties, enforcement mechanisms are limited. Egregious violators will get pressure from other countries. Many countries will depend on citizens to enforce it. For example, in some countries regular citicizens can file lawsuits when their country is not fulfilling treaty obligations. But generally, when countries sign on to international treaties, most involved countries also pass internal legislation to comply with treaty aspects. This is the way for almost all international treaties, and it largely works. People have an idea that international law doesn't work but the vast majority works fine, and we often just notice the serious failures and breakdowns, not all the stuff that is quietly working on a day-to-day basis.

If you bought one of these things, you deserve it. :)

This reminds me of a story too. I was working at a place just rolling out Microsoft Office 365 and the whole 2 factor authentication thing. We started looking at the devices people had registered for MFA. Obviously, you mostly had various smartphones and a few people even used iPads or other tablets. But this one guy had a Samsung smart fridge as his device. He explained that, "I work from home and have a desk in the kitchen. So it's easy to confirm the authentication from the refrigerator screen. And this way, I know I won't just lose it someplace like I might lose my phone!"

But seriously, I really dislike this trend of making basic home appliances Internet connected and/or computerizing them needlessly. My old Black & Decker 4 slice toaster finally gave out on us last week. I was shocked by how much a new toaster costs now! I was expecting to run out and grab something for maybe $20 or so? Nope! Many of the highly rated models are well over $200! The cheapest I could find was about $45, for one at Costco that has 2 digital strips down the front. One side lights up with icons of toast, in various levels of darkness, and the other depicts all the different foods you mgiht toast; bagels, waffles, pastries, toast...

We got it home and tried it out, and guess what? When you select toast with a darkness of "3 out of 6", shown as a medium brown? It absolutely burns it! The lightest setting just ejects warm, untoasted bread. I couldn't find any point to a setting on the thing other than the second-lightest one! Highly inaccurate. All of this seems really unnecessary, when the light/dark knob on my old toaster worked just as it was supposed to.

 

The machines that can run Windows 10 but not 11 really have no legitimate reasons they're incapable of using 11. It's generally artificial barriers put up by Microsoft because the chips lack a feature or two they're trying to make a new standard.

In a few cases, it's literally nothing more than an oversight! My co-worker was just telling me about a specific model of Xeon CPU he's got that has some long "sub-model" vs a simple model number like 5360 or 5500 or what-not. It has every single function in it that Microsoft says is needed by Win 11, yet you can't put 11 on it. Why? Only because Microsoft neglected to list its specific model/sub-model in its database it uses to determine the machines capable of installing 11 on them.

If they want all these people off Windows 10, they could design 11 so it runs more like 10, with a few of the features disabled that require the instructions the older CPUs lack, when it detects those processors.

Apple did this with iOS multiple times already. A new iOS version still runs on older phones but with a few features disabled if those specific features need the newer phone's CPU to work.

On one hand, every parent of kids or teens today has to feel the struggle with social media influencing their journey to adulthood. Sometimes it's just a harmless fad that generates a ton of sales for some useless toy or gadget. But often, it's about the added complexity of a world where their "friends" can be people anywhere in the world who they only communicate with online, and who parents are often powerless to "vet". It's about questions of "bullying" and how far an institution like a public school can really reach to address it, when it starts happening online. It's about uncertainties of whether all the "screen time" creates real mental or physical health threats.

But when it comes to technologies like a chat bot? I don't think there should be these legal expectations that they do such things as guiding people to other resources to get help for the issues they talk to them about. I don't even think the authors of these chat bots necessarily considered the idea a pre-teen would confide everything in one and treat it as their "only true friend"? As a rule, they're harmless as long as they're not actively suggesting adult or illegal activities, so giving them "age ratings" of 12+ makes perfect sense.

Troubled kids or teens need to be given REAL help and warned away from relying on automated AI solutions.

Ha! Same thing I thought. The reality, whether you're talking New Orleans or anyplace else is -- the money gets spent to repair and protect the areas that bring in the most continued wealth. Racism has nothing to do with this.

If you have an area that's full of tourist traffic or that continually draws in the super-wealthy for amenities like the great golf courses or waterfront or ?? You've got an area that generates enough revenue, it cost-justifies having to rebuild there occasionally when natural disasters strike.

Everyone else is living there at their own risk, really.

To be honest, I noted LONG ago that "withdrawing cash from out-of-network ATMs likely has a fairly big cost" and tried to avoid it. I never kept up with exactly what those fees were, after that. I simply learned to plan ahead better. If I need cash, I tend to take it out from my own bank or credit union and if I need it broken up into smaller bills? I try to spend it someplace that has to give me cash back on the purchase.

Last I checked though, most big credit unions are part of a cooperative network so you can use any of their ATMs without any fees (at least up to, say, 20 transactions per month).

Much of what you wrote is wrong or misleading or more of a rant than anything with content. You didn't respond at all to the point that the environmental damage here is tiny. But I do want to address two specific bits which are the most contentful parts:

This is confused at multiple levels, but does almost touch on a valid point. It is true that a lot of people were awful maskers, and lifted up their masks all the time, or had terrible seals, making their masks not function. And then you had people doing things like wearing masks in indoor restaurants and then taking them off when they sat down to eat as if their dining table was somehow protected. And if you go back to Slashdot, you'll see me explicitly saying that all of this was awful behavior. People failing to mask properly isn't a problem with masks though any more than people dying in car accidents due to not wearing their seatbelts is a sign that seatbelts don't work. And the point about car windows out non-airtight cars misses something we figured out pretty early in the pandemic, namely that outdoor environments in general were pretty safe.

People didn't need a hundred vaccines, but we're still getting new covid variants, and vaccines are still helping prevent people from getting seriously sick. Vaccines worked, and they drastically saved lives. Here is a really good essay about that https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-2-key-facts-about-us-covid-policy which shows how prior to the vaccines, death rates in the US among Democrats and Republicans looked nearly identical and only after vaccines showed up they started diverging. There's one easy explanation for that. And it is worth noting that the author there Nate Silver, generally takes the position (and argues explicitly in that piece) that mask mandates were not substantially effective, even as vaccines worked really well. It may be worth realizing that while you somehow see vaccines and masks as interconnected issues, they aren't, and not everyone falls into the vaccines-bad-masks-bad and vaccines-good-masks-good categories. To use two fun anecdotes: One of the most strict maskers I know was a couple who were highly anti-vax and was also taking HCQ as a preventative. One of the most vocally pro-vax people I know is a Rabbi who despised not getting to see his congregant's faces and was pushing for the vaccines so people would feel comfortable unmasking. Maybe don't treat all matters as some giant soccer game with two large sizes?

Completely true and also true that this is a problem. But note that these are tiny levels of pollution which if not for the controversial nature of masks would likely be getting little attention. For example, they estimate that this lead to 214kg of bisphenol B into the environment as their upper bound. But in 2010 around 400,000 kg of bisphenol A were released into the environment with slightly smaller numbers for bisphenol B https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0882596309001407. Since 2010, there's been a concerted effort to reduce bisphenol release, but even if that's been by an order of magnitude, this is a a less than 0.1% increase in worldwide production. Similar remarks apply to the microplastic production where the ratio is even more extreme.

Yeah, this is a very good analogy for what the concern is.

No, the concern is that as these systems get better, they will be substitutes for the sort of exploration and connection making that a mathematician needs to learn as a fundamental foundation for doing research. Using an LLM to suggest approaches and connections can be useful, but it doesn't give the same underlying basic skill set to do deeply original work.

The emphasis here is interesting. The users were impressed by it, and comparing it to a junior researcher is wildly better than earlier systems. And the warning at the end is precisely relevant because the systems are starting to have some potential usefulness in research. I'm a mathematician and this sort of very mixed experience with ChatGPT in the GPT5 form is close to my own experience. Relevant recent anecdote:

Relevant math background: the Gaussian integers are the complex numbers of the form a+bi where a and b are good, old-fashioned integers. For example, 2+3i or -1 +2i are Gaussian integers. Any integer n is a Gaussian integer since you can write it as n+0i. But say or 3- 0.5 i would not be Gaussian integers. Also notation: We write x|y to mean y is a multiple of x. We can use this notation in our regular integers (so for example 2|8 but it is not true that 3|8 ) or in the Gaussian integers where we are then allowed to multiple by another Gaussian integer. For example (2+i)| (2+i)(3-i). A good exercise if you have not seen the Gaussian integers before: Convince yourself that 1+i | 1+3i.

It also turns out that the Gaussian integers have an analog of unique prime factorization just as that in the usual integers. The Gaussian integers also have a notion of size called the norm. For a given Gaussian integer a+bi, the norm is a^2 +b^2 .

Recently I had to prove a specific Lemma where I needed to find all Gaussian integers and where both are Gaussian primes, and b|a^2 + a +1 and a|b+1. I had as a template a very similar Lemma in the integers which was a Lemma which said exactly which integers and b such that b|a^2 + a +1 and a|b+1. I worked out the proof, essentially modifying the version in the integers. Then, I did something I've often been doing after I've completed a small Lemma, namely giving the task to ChatGPT or another system and seen how they've done. For prior iterations (GPT3, ChatGPT , GPT4, 4o) this has almost universally been a disaster. But this time I gave the task to GPT5, and gave it the integer version to start with. It tried to do the same basic task and produced a result pretty close to mine, but it had multiple small errors in the process, to the point where I'm unsure if using it would have sped things up. But at the same time, the errors were genuinely small. For example, in proving in one subcase the system claimed that a specific number's norm needed to be at most 9, when it needed to be at most 10. These are not the sort of large jumps in reasoning that one saw with GPT4 or 4o. It might have been the case that if I had given this to GPT5 before proving it myself and then had corrected its errors I would have saved time. I generally doubt this is the case, but the fact that it is close to the point where that's now plausible is striking.

The internet bubble burst in the late 1990s. We still have an internet and the internet is if anything more useful and ubiquitous than most people predicted in the late 1990s. There likely is an AI bubble, but if/when it bursts we'll likely see the same thing. A technology can have a lot of potential and staying power and also be part of a bubble.

Investment right now is hard since Trump is making everything unstable. People do not want to invest when there's instability. Trump's administration has also taken an extremely anti-EV and anti-solar/anti-wind position, which means for the next few years, all the obvious use cases for these systems will be at best precarious.

That shrinkage has been almost exclusively in the United States, while the standard of living around the world has gone up with poverty rates going down almost everywhere and with drastic improvements by other metrics also. See e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty . And even in the US there's evidence that the rise in inequality slowed down and even reversed in the last few years. See discussion at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down-now. So if there's a problem, it is US policy specific, not about computers or any other tech, and even in the US the trend isn't clear at this point.