Linkedin (like Facebook) has evolved to one of those sites that it feels like the digital equivalent of shopping a wet-market in Wuhan.

On the one hand, ai is indeed getting better at writing banal fluff pieces that fill the Internet.

On the other, human writing is growing so awful in both subject and quality (this morning's bbc contains an article where one of their interns sprightly explains she's been able to train her self to wake without an alarm clock, golly!) that little of value is being supplanted.

Hell, I expect an ai editor of slashdot would post fewer dupes and likely be better at summarizing the point rather than cnp'ing whole 1000-word articles for the front page.

That last one really chaps my hide. Those mountains of fake drama posts punctuated by the 'negative parallelism' structure (now I have a name for the thing I hate.) It's everywhere and it's infuriating.

All you can do is try to ignore it and focus on your own (AI-free) stuff. Of course anything you post online will then become free AI fodder. It's hard to get away from it.

It's only local to China in the sense that they choose what {packages/CCP poison} go in there.

For all values of u, Linux is local to u in the sense that u chooses what packages go in there.

I can't see any point to this other than providing LinkedIn ai training data.

  I *want* ai to keep clearly sounding like fucking ai (although, being honest, I can't think of a single post on LinkedIn that didn't sound like it was written by a robot, ever).

Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.

Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.

On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.

AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.

Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.

There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.

"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.

She wanted it, and she actually likes it. I found it ridiculous when I drove it, but she likes all the creature comforts. More power to her, I just avoid it. I think I'm a more of a driver-centric experience sort of person. She likes all the bling and frilly features and does not drive as much as I do.

Oh, so you don't have kids.
Parents don't get the luxury of "giving up" because it's too much work that might be wasted anyway.

I don't disagree with you that they probably WILL see stuff on the internet but... the reality is that most kids are what ~8bn people would call normal and aside from "your team" pushing trans propaganda like this, will NEVER SEEK IT OUT because most people find it gross. So while they absolutely will see sexual subjects on the web, likely it's normalizing, not degenerate. Which is why the trans-propaganda campaign is working so hard, it's an uphill fight against young people's normal inclinations, you need to 'get them while they're young' to try to move the frame of acceptability. We see it, we understand it, and we (& they) reject it.

Sorry for your loss. Hey, at least you have apparently legions of political sheep willing to sacrifice their children for your ideology.

Your opinion has been filed appropriately.

Ha ha, Linux already has..

# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'

.. d'oh! Never mind.

Everything in this space lately has been a huge turnoff. Modern cars were never so physically capable, safe, and smooth handling, and yet they are absolute garbage in the human interface department. Giant touchscreens and gadgets are the equivalent of chrome and giant tailfins gone amok in the 1950s.

Quite happy with my 2016-era Mazda with a basic infotainment setup, bluetooth to my phone which has everything I need. My truck that I use to haul things occasionally is 26 years old. I have a bluetooth to cassette adapter in that one (a lawful-evil wedding of technology) and yet it works fine.

The wife has a Tesla, and while it has an amazing powertrain, it is just so aggravating to interface with in so many ways. No buttons for the mirrors. No buttons for the wiper. (there's one button on the end of a stalk to activate the wiper+spray automatic thing) If you leave the auto-wiper on it randomly activates and smears the windshield in the driest of weather. The door handles are terrible. The lack of any kind of physical controls for climate and entertainment is terrible. It is super distracting to try to do anything while driving. It calls home to mother and reports on everything you're doing. The auto dimming mirror, like all auto-dimming mirrors, doesn't dim enough nor when you want it to. The adaptive cruise control constantly slams on the brakes on highways with grade level intersections or if you're coming up on a hump on a road that hasn't been graded flat. The insurance is sky high. The tires wear out quickly due to the weight, and are very expensive. Anything saved in gas is made up for in those other things.

You can see where they had all these ideas and just didn't think them through. Whereas traditional auto manufacturers understand a lot of these things and even on their electric offerings still have plenty of physical buttons and not-ridiculous interface peculiarities. I got a ride in a friend's Hyundai Ioniq5 a little ago and it was great. Felt like a regular car with lots of buttons. But they are priced as such that any savings in gas is made up for in the overall cost of ownership of the car. So you're not doing it for that, you're doing it just to have the other features of an electric car or feel better about yourself. I don't feel it's worth it for that. My cars are paid for and the daily driver is absurdly cheap to fuel and maintain, so I'll stick with it until some sanity returns to the modern car market. (unlikely...)

And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?

Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.

But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)

Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at copyediting than an average human, but I haven't kept up so I'm ignorant of their performance. (All my "AI" experience is that I used Claude twice to, it turned out, fix some typos in some RoR config initializers.) But whether an AI service is as good at copyediting as a human or not, it's that user's choice and, as long as they sign off on the work and really take responsibility for it (declare the words to be their opinion), then I've got no problem with them doing that, whether it uses LLMs or Markov chains or human slaves or Searle's Chinese Room.

The words will be judged by their quality, not provenance.

That said...

Here's a similar story where I'd probably come to the opposite conclusion(!), despite the clown in it pretty much doing what I preach above, though he was using the AI service to do a lot more than copyedit. Behold this 3M expert witness cross-examination (134 page PDF) in the Watson Grinding case. It's slow going at first, but eventually you'll be laughing and cringing like in a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fuck. I don't know.

Insofar as you're being honest about being a libertarian, I genuinely apologize.

Hairsplitting semantics and pretending not to understand idiom are such standard leftist tactics, I admit, I presumed.

To your point, then: Auschwitz was legal, according to German Criminal Codes in 1942. So... to you, not "murder"? Yes, I think this is a stupid point to make and a stupid argument, but you seemed to assert a narrowly-defined concept of murder, just seeing how far you're willing to go? If you are consistent, and affirm that being legal, the Holocaust wasn't murder, I guess you ... win? I would absolutely concede the point.

Do you believe children should be exposed in any way to adult sexuality?
Particularly hypersexualized dancers with sexually suggestive names, acts, gestures, themes?

The fact that you're even asking suggests you're either
- deeply disingenuous or
- a pedo yourself

The answer, in case you're searching for it? It's NO. Just LEAVE THE KIDS ALONE. They don't need to be groomed, thanks.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/new...

"....The performer in drag was none other than the president of the PTA at P.S. 96., Frankie Quinones. Video shot by Morales shows him twirling and gyrating to a song by '80s Puerto Rican performer Iris Chacon.

On an event flyer, the drag show was only billed as a âoeSpecial Surprise Performance!â

Morales questioned what organizers were thinking.

âoeHe got on all fours on the choir stand, he laid on his back, raised his legs, opened his legs wide open. What made you in your head think that was appropriate for elementary school students?â Morales said."

I didn't care what adults do to/with each other, not even faintly but I draw the line at degeneracy with children and kinks that involve them. Even (shudder) with their parents enthusiastic consent.

If it's just about representation and being seen, why aren't they lobbying to dance in front of the elderly?

Thank you, I appreciate your post.
Next time I need to demonstrate to someone
- how the Left seems to treat words like magical spells
- how they like to pretend they don't understand something
- how slashdot has been ideologically captured .... Now I have a single, succinct post to show them. Very neat.