Ah yes, those philosophers who doubt their own existence (but hope you'll buy their books.)

I've just discovered Scottish common sense realism, an 18th century philosophy that was a reaction against some of the Enlightenment who had gone off the rails in this regard. It was very popular among the founders of the US (we get the phrase, "we hold these truths to be self-evident" in the Declaration of Independence from it.)

Thomas Reid's essay, "An Inquiry Into the Human Mind" has a great take-down of this approach:

Descartes found nothing established that could serve as a deep foundation; so he resolved not to believe in his own existence until he could give a good reason for it. He may have been the first person to make such a decision; but if he could have actually done what he resolved to do—if he could have become genuinely unsure that he existed—his case would have been deplorable, and there would have been no remedy for it from reason or philosophy. A man who disbelieves his own existence is surely as unfit to be reasoned with as a man who thinks he is made of glass. There may be physical disorders that can produce such absurdities, but they won’t ever be cured by reasoning.

Descartes wants us to think that he got out of this craziness through this logical argument: Cogito, ergo sum [= ‘I think, therefore I exist’]. But obviously he was in his right mind all the time, and never seriously doubted his own existence. That argument doesn’t prove his existence—it takes it for granted. ‘I am thinking’, he says, ‘therefore I am’; and isn’t it just as good reasoning to say, ‘I am sleeping, therefore I am’? or ‘I am doing nothing, therefore I am’? If a body moves it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest it must exist then too.

A sports journalist for the Washington Post engages with an LLM to discuss articles she herself had written, and is appalled both by the number of errors. When she confronts its bug-laden responses, it meekly apologizes but doesn't get any better. After repeating its smarmy apology for the umpteenth time, the author begins to suspect that the LLM is actually malevolent. The entire "conversation" is laid out for all to see.

Infuriating to read if you know anything about what an LLM is and how it works.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."

We see this logic everywhere now: if the government doesn't fund [insert favored program here], then it will cost taxpayers money." Really? So, how much money was being spent on the Direct File pilot? Would it surprise you to learn it was $24.6 million? Some 140,000 people used it.

Cost per user: $175.00

That's MORE than TurboTax, even with a State return added on.

So, yeah, the government "saved" SOME people the cost of using tax prep service, but it absolutely did NOT save taxpayers any money.

The kind of diversity one finds in a cord of multiple strands, all of which are load-bearing, but each of which have slightly different properties that can optimize the cord's strength in the work you want to put it to is, indeed a better rope than one made of all the same kinds of strands.

The problem is that if you choose a diverse cord just for diversity's sake, you could easily wind up with a cord that is actually completely unsuited to the work.

A diversity of WHAT is the key question to ask.

The slashdot moderation system is a broken-down piece of junk which gets abused ALL THE TIME, just as with this post. There is not the slightest troll-like thing about it.

A troll is someone who posts an INFLAMMATORY message with the intent of upsetting the reader. A troll is MALICIOUS.

This post is eminently reasonable. It has a moderate tone, not inflammatory in the least. It is interesting and clearly an opinion. It is sincere.

If you look at my ID, you will see that I have been a reader here for a very long time now. The quality of discussion here has always been a mixed bag, but moderation at least made it possible to quickly surface the interesting posts. Over the course of the last decade, however, moderation has been abused not to identify actually bad content, but to suppress disfavored content.

If you disagree with a post and you mod them down because of it, you are abusing your privilege. When you are a moderator, you are to judge the QUALITY of the conversation, not the CONTENT. No one elected you Chief Censor.

Slashdot desperately needs to add a feedback mechanism to report abusive moderation, and to ACT on that feedback by removing moderation privileges from abusers. Slashdot can still be interesting and worthwhile to read, but not if the site runners allow crap mods to proliferate like homeless drug abusers over-taking the sidewalks.

The interwebs are full of loons. LLMs are just vast rooms of cracked funhouse mirrors. Proceed accordingly.

I am most definitely a form-follows-function guy when it comes to tools and appliances. My impression of Dyson products has always been that they design the look and feel first, and then iterate like crazy until they can make the damn thing work at a minimal level. They find tons of ready buyers because the look and feel is truly awesome, and they sell it as a truly awe-inspiring price to match.

At an early point in the development of the Internet, I was called in as a software consultant to prepare a technical recommendation on how to stop people stealing music using the Internet. The Internet, I told them, is the world's largest digital copying machine, and the only way to stop it from being used to copy music would be to build an anti-Internet of equal size. Since that is entirely impossible and ridiculous, you need to stop trying to figure out how to constrain distribution, and instead use it to your advantage to make money *by* distribution.

I was not asked back to complete that project.

Thankfully, Google figured out how to do exactly that. It made deals with the major licensing agencies. It added a way to automatically identify content so copyright holders could be properly credited. It gave copyright holders the choice of either suppressing their content or taking the ad revenue. It took several decades, but eventually it became clear that it made much more sense -- and much more money! -- to let Google allow the content but redirect the revenue. This wasn't always perfect, but it's getting better. If you are a premium subscriber, part of your fee gets distributed to copyright holders in the same way (and that's one of the reasons the fee is so large, comparatively.) Google itself takes a rational administrative cut, similar to the cut that managers and agents have taken in the business. And, they're working on adding a content creator subscription model, so that directed subscriptions can be sent to creators, and not just ad revenue shares.

Again, this has not been an easy transition. Some copyright holders, especially music, continue to hold onto the belief that they can make more money working outside YouTube. It's still way too easy to game Google's copyright Content ID system.

But the people at Google are pretty smart. YouTube is a global phenomenon, for good reason.

I don't say that lightly. The amount of useful information I've obtained from YouTube videos is amazing, and totally unexpected. One of the most important properties on the web today.

"are *not* from another US government cut-out".

When, oh when is slashdot going to give us a damn EDIT feature?

As we've learned after watching so many international organizations come to a complete halt after USAID's funding was withdrawn, the US spends a *lot* of money on "research", and a lot of that finds its way into the EU, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

So the French and the Germans are launching multi-million dollar initiatives to "sponsor" researchers. I'm fine with that, as long as those millions are from yet another US government cut-out.

Frankly, we're spending way too much here. We absolutely need to get back on our financial feet. Something's got to give. We can't fund every body's pet research project. Go get your own money.

FB Marketplace works very well, as evidenced by its growing popularity. You can't argue with success. It should be no surprise that FB is trying to capture more and more of its community. Every social media network -- especially X -- wants to do the same.

This is room for much more consolidation. Personally, I think folding online media service offerings (movies, news, music, etc.) into a user's primary social media account is a great fit. How many different content services are consumers really going to pay for? Anything more than 2-3 I think is just too many, no matter the cost. Besides, you already have your circle of friends and contacts at the social media site, folding these other services into that circle just gives you all that much more to converse about.