I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

It's time YouTube gets some actual competition. Maybe it'll force them to revert some of the enshittification it's been going through. The crap is near unusable these days.

I don't know a single person who ever said that they want more or bigger touchscreens in their car.

Quite the opposite. I want physical controls and so do most people I've talked to. This is a car, not an iPad. Most of it I should be able to operate without taking my eyes off the road. And a touchscreen doesn't offer that.

In fact, Euro NCAP agrees. If you want a 5-star rating, you need physical controls.

The only people who want touchscreens are the car manufacturers, because it's cheaper and easier.

Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.

Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.

If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.

"Can we get it in cornflower blue?"

Don't mock it. Cornflower blue can be valuable.

That's a good point. Yes, it could be Anthropic simply making sure that they can't be blamed if someone doesn't disclose AI usage. Now they can say: "We did everything we could to make sure AI usage is visible".

Though I doubt it'll hold up in court unless the watermark is obvious. Because, again, the law requires disclosure. I don't think a hard-to-detect watermark would satisfy that demand.

Musk's data center near Memphis, KY has been illegally using pollution-producing methane-gas generators since day one even though he said they would be temporary. He does not have a permit for these generators and conveniently, the site is located near a poorer section of Memphis.

Needless to say, the EPA has not done anything about this even with its own decision of illegality.

No need to switch to generators when you can use them from day one and not have to worry about doing anything under the current regime.

The destruction of rare books is the issue. I'm 100% down with scanning rare books, preserving IP rights for the IP holder, and digitally publishing the rare books for the masses. That makes sense.

But they're not doing that. They're literally destroying rare books simply to scan them FASTER, minimize expense, and feed the AI/LLM. That's not okay.

Instead of rare books, let us rare video games or computers. Let's say someone bought a rare version of a Ninentendo system (an early edition) and said, "You know what, I'm going to see what happens if I apply a larger and larger force to it. Let's see how long it stays intact."

Mind you, they did a 3-D scan of the system so you can digitally see it, but the physical copy no longer exists.

How many of you would raise a stink at destroying it?

If not Nintendo, pick something you like and go back to its earlier days where something is rare and someone wants to destroy it, just because.

One of the things people complain about the digital age is loss of information. Sure, these books "exist" in a digital form today, but what about in 50 years?

This is why physical books are still superior to digital. We can still read books/scrolls/clay tablets from centuries ago. It is doubtful the same will be said for digital books.

Yes, it's a trust issue. I'm glad he understands that, but I'm not hopeful that he or the industry knows what to do with that information.

Normal humans would work to earn trust by doing good things and not doing bad things. Corporatists, however, just know how to wage PR campaigns both overt and astroturf. That won't work with this issue.

Don't wrap the government, other companies, or the entire tech industry up in this. Let's focus on the AI industry and Anthropic. People are suspicious of the AI industry and Anthropic because:

1. Chips: AI industry chip demand is so extreme that it's sending tech advancement BACKWARD at the personal level. For what?
2. Electricity: AI industry is chewing up MASSIVE amounts of electricity (and exhausting huge GHG as a result) and affecting pricing and availability for neighbors. For what..?
3. Water: AI industry is literally thirsty because they want to use evaporative cooling. This is/will waste water... for what?
4. Enshittification: The AI industry has convinced less-tech-competent industries that today's LLMs are ready to replace humans. They're not ready, but they're replacing humans for work and their product is shit.
5. Obvious Abuses: From Flock to DOGE, AI has shown to be most immediately useful at exploiting legal shortcomings, the stupidity of the masses, and zero-day vulnerabilities.

Everything's getting worse for everyone except the rich and everyone's congratulating AI for the job well done. So ya... there's a trust issue and it's well-earned.

For me the visualization of direct collapse black hole formation is that there's still a huge mass of gas falling in, at the boundary of the new black hole nearly dense enough to direct collapse itself. The blowback would compress the inflow over the density edge and you get a whole cloud of black holes.

Too simple.

The problem is that the lathe doesn't pretend to be a human, nor was it designed to look like a human. But AI bots are.

AI is here to stay. At least until the Butlerian Jihad. The problem most people have with AI pretending to be human.

And it's not required by the EU AI Act. They require disclosure. That doesn't mean watermark. It can be a note attached to an image, it can be a statement on the website where you post that image, etc. - Anthropic is overreacting, because as I read the law, the fact that you are inside Claude doing stuff would already suffice.

The thing the law goes against is people connecting you to an AI chatbot in customer support while pretending that you're talking to a human. Or AI bots posting to social media without revealing that they are AI bots.

It's pretty cool that they're seeing where the supermassive black holes come from. The models of what's happening in there must be amazing.