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.

And you think the fact that carbon dioxide has steadily increased over the past 150 years or as we pump a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a coincidence? You honestly believe that there is zero connection between pumping gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and there being gigatons more carbon dioxide in the air than pre-industrial times? Completely unrelated events?

Ha ha, Linux already has..

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

.. d'oh! Never mind.

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.

Spirit is kaput. Google is picking up wreckage from the scene at scrap value.

But you do make a point that most people underappreciate. The Spirit airline experience was bad, but one of the bigger factors in the poor experience was that everyone on the planes were extremely grumpy. You could avoid being nickel and dimed but there was no escape from the foul mood. No other airlines have ever come close.

Facial recognition is really neat technology, and we are all slightly better off thanks to its development. It's also imperfect, and nearly-guaranteed to be a net negative if you fully trust it, without human verification.

If you want to come out ahead by using cool technology, you're going to have to think about how to use it. There just isn't any shortcut around thinking.

If you have something which is only 99.9% reliable, that can be useful but it's going to be wrong sometimes. How are you preventing that wrongness from breaking your system? Insulting (much less turning-away) regular, recurring, paying customers is usually considered a really bad move, generally resulting in lower profits.

Free money falls out of the sky. Should we take it? Today we'll be interviewing Republicans, and learning that the answer is No because asceticism is a fundamental ideal that we should all strive toward. Burn a sacrifice instead!

As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

This is the attitude that causes people to die. Americans deal with hotter temperatures every summer. Texas gets over 40 C in the summer every day. Install AC and be done with the problem. No one needs to die from overheating!

European windows don't work well for portable ACs. One, they don't usually come with screens which are typical in the US to keep bugs out. Two, they open from a hinge on the side. So, you basically need a way to cover the whole window space if you open it at all.

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.

It's much worse than that; you would end up preventing anyone else from doing it for 20 years, until the patent expired. Of course that would make Slashdot!

Last time I checked, we don't live in 1850. Slavery is a distant memory. It was outlawed 160 years ago. Jim Crow and redlining have been illegal for over half a century. Any systemic racism going on today revolves around DEI, which damn near all corporate America follows.

I already told you I'm a progressive Dem. I'm not going to defend Trump and his administration's bullshit. The Dems were around long before DEI. Not all of us agree with that philosophy. Plenty of us disagree. Equality should never have been replaced with equity.