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Comment History of Posted Prices (Score 1) 161

Until the 18th Century there was no such thing as "posted prices", unless prices were set by government regulation (only certain staples, and rarely). Instead you always had to dicker with the seller to arrive at what you would pay.

In the mid 1700s Quakers in Pennsylvania decided they did not like dickering since it meant both parties were trying to deceive the other to their best advantage. It also meant bad will if person A found out he paid more than person B for the same goods. To eliminate this troubling daily moral dilemma they introduced the startling new idea of offering goods at fixed prices that were posted for all to see.

Oh, how not 21st Century can you get? The idea of prices being fair and equitable, and honestly posted for everyone! How quaint! Our corporate masters have decide that we all techno-rubes to be fleeced as efficiently as data harvesting and AI can make it!

Comment This is the Path to CEO AI Psychosis (Score 5, Insightful) 38

Nadella is not showing psychosis here, but the fact that he thinks his chatbot hack of a webpage is evidence of something important show him on the road to get there.

CEOs “play with AI,” develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work.

But these top-level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.

In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs.

Comment Re:Test This! (Score 4, Insightful) 84

Here's the thing. A paid ad clearly labeled as such is an annoyance in something you are paying for. But, do you trust any chatbot provider not to train their bots to push you to buy products they want you to buy without disclosing it? Whereas Google says their rankings aren't affected by payments (other than their promoted link) they are awash in advertising cash. Chatbot vendors, especially OpenAI, are desperate for revenue.

Comment Re:Blaming a single cause (Score 1) 89

we still don't know why this particular civilization disappeared without a record of what happened.

We do have records. We just can't read them. The Harappan language has never been deciphered. There are about 5000 inscriptions known.

That droughts led to the end of Indus Valley Civilization has been surmised for decades, this study provided a much more detailed account of the process.

For people to settle in "untouched tracts of land" you need to have water to irrigate it. Large empty areas on Earth require water for them to be "tamed".

Comment Re: That's a bad look on Marriott. (Score 1) 46

Its not a matter of who it is "on". It is a matter of intelligent handling of the affair from a HOSPITALITY company. This was an opportunity to build a good-will relationship with people staying at Marriot, which could be easily spun into a positive press event for the company.

But "enlightened capitalism" is a fiction it seems.

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