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Comment Re:Who gave Paul modpoints? (Score 1) 81

I am not even going to assess Biden's compos mentis. Maybe it was some medication or some benign reason, it doesn't matter. But what I can say is that his performance during the debate caused many of the die hard democrats to declare him incompetent and made it acceptable for media and pundits to turn on him (which they never did before).

What phrase would you use to describe that, other than "spoke incoherently"? I mean, I can think of some medical terms that might apply, but that's how I would describe his debate performance. He wandered off the subject, had trouble forming a complete thought... basically like a Trump speech, only he paused a lot when he lost his train of thought instead of rambling about illegal aliens eating pets or whatever.

Comment Re:Bye bye Wikipedia (Score 5, Insightful) 21

Even on for authors, of encyclopedia articles, and this notihing wrong with telling ChatGTP to, "take this list of bullets and write it up as a paragraph."

Until it hallucinates and adds something that wasn't there or changes the meaning significantly. In my experience, AI is really good at screwing things up in ways that nobody expects. And if the people making the changes aren't subject-matter experts, but are just doing drive-by edits to try to make things more digestible, they might not notice the errors if they are subtle enough. Allowing any random person to do stuff like that could potentially cause a lot of damage really quickly.

Nor is there anything wrong with asking it to make a diagram of some process etc.

Until it steals the chart blatantly from somebody's published book, and Wikipedia gets sued for copyright infringement. Wikipedia isn't just trying to protect itself from erroneous data. It's trying to protect itself from liability. With user-uploaded content, the user can self-certify that they have the right to upload it, and apart from user incompetence, that's usually going to be good enough. With AI-generated images, it is impossible for a user to know for certain whether what they are uploading is infringing, and would be hard to later prove which AI generated the diagram to transfer the liability to the AI company.

But the biggest risk, IMO, would be asking it to make a chart with numbers from some table. It could manipulate the numbers, and if someone isn't checking closely, they might not see the error, but the incorrect chart could easily mislead people. AI-based chart generation seems way more likely to introduce errors than a human copying and pasting the table into a spreadsheet and generating the chart with traditional non-AI-based tools.

Someone else is going to clone wikipedia and the authorship will no doubt migrate to where they are allowed to use contemporary tooling.

And after a few months, people will complain that the content is constantly wrong, the editors over there will give up trying to keep the error rate under control, and anyone with a clue will come running back to Wikipedia.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 1) 174

t depends on if they send you a tax notice or not. There was an outfit in Ohio that I used to purchase a lot of electronics from. One year I got a note from them listing my purchases, and that I would have to pay taxes on. That was a pain in the ass.

I think they got "caught", or had new accountants or something. But yes - if you can avoid the sales tax, it's a significant discount.

Interesting, I've never received any such notices....but most of my stuff is one off buys...not repeated purchases from a single site...

Comment Re:Who gave Paul modpoints? (Score 1) 81

I agree on why Trump got a lot of his votes. We have ample evidence that there is a very racist and misogynist element within the "conservative right."

The conservative right wouldn't have voted for Harris anyway. That's not why he won.

He won because the Democrats care about whether their candidate stumbles across words and speaks incoherently, so Biden was pressured to step down, and Harris was forced to step up at the last second, with nobody really knowing who she was or who she stood for, thus limiting her ability to bring voters out.

He won because the Democrats weren't clueful enough to get Biden to fully step down and make Harris the next President immediately, which would have given the public months of seeing her actually lead the country.

If he really was struggling, then he won because Biden did not step down and let Harris take power before people started questioning whether he was fit to be in office.

He won because Biden did not recognize that he would have a hard time running again and allow an open primary.

He won because the Republicans were able to paint it as a coverup of Biden's feeble-mindedness, and the Democrats weren't able to show people that struggling mentally when you're physically fatigued isn't inherently a sign of dementia.

He won because Democrats had too much class to use the dementia card on Trump, either first or in retaliation.

He won because too many people conveniently forgot what a disaster he was during his first term, and too many people gave him a pass for the economic damage he did, and the folks prosecuting him for crimes were way too slow so it was still going at the next election.

He won because Kamala Harris was a center-right Democrat who tried to put on progressive clothes to get votes, then swung back towards the center again to get votes. Her time as a prosecutor draws into question her progressive bona fides. That meant the left didn't come out to vote.

I really don't understand why the only two women candidates that Democrats have run have at least appeared to be at the authoritarian end of their party. That doesn't win the presidency unless you're running as a Republican. Both of these candidates were mistakes. There are plenty of women in the Democratic party who would have been better choices.

In short, there were so many things wrong with her candidacy that it's hard to count them all. Gender and race were likely not a meaningful part of why she lost, or at least there are so many other confounding factors that it would be impossible to pin it on either of those.

Comment Mars is still the goal (Score 1) 73

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

Comment Re:How would you protect children at scale? (Score 2) 111

I just saw the other one, and posted on it. The point still hold, how at the scale of Facebook would you really keep kids safe?

You don't. That's what parents are for. Parents taking care of their own kids scales easily, because the number of parents is linear in the number of kids being monitored. Facebook taking of everyone's kids scales exponentially in the number of users, because anybody could be talking to any kid.

What they should be suing for are better tools for parents to monitor their kids' activity on Facebook. If you give the parents that, and if you force child accounts to have an associated parent account, then the responsibility falls on the parents, as it should be.

Any other approach would be insane beyond reason.

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