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Comment Re:Citation required (Score 2, Informative) 317

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there is a faction that wants to intentionally erode the public's trust in government services.

That's not a conspiracy - it's quite genuinely the conservative modus operandi for nearly all public services. That is precisely what they've done with the postal service, education, financial oversight, etc. And they haven't made it a secret, you can just watch the videos and read the statements made by organizations like the Heritage Foundation and others.

Comment I have never understood this. (Score 2) 160

Why would it matter if you go to bed at 11 and wake at 7?
Or go to bed at 10 and wake at 6?
Or hell even go to bed at 4 and wake at 12?

Why are the numbers on the wall so important to you? People post insane comments like, "but the kids would have to catch the bus in the dark" ... then just start school at a different number when the sun is up. We shift our schedules around constantly for events. We shift our *school* and *work* schedules around constantly for any number of reasons. Social inertia is just an illusion in this debate. There is no reason to be switching the clocks or to care which direction we pick (though standard time obviously aligns better with the rest of the world). If schools in one region open a half-hour or hour later than another in a different part of the same timezone then so be it. And yes - you can do the same thing with timezones, there is no reason that "4:32pm" should be different in different parts of the world, let alone country.

It's like we're living in this insane numerology cult that isn't even aware of its own existence.

Comment Re:Critical Thinking Skills (Score 3, Insightful) 115

... you can't possibly believe that this means 'critical thinking skills' in the traditional, logical sense.

This means: Can you quote the appropriate bible passage to justify Trump's latest actions? Can you articulate why Fox News is so consistently more accurate than CNN? When did Columbus navigate the Gulf of America?

AI will never venture beyond the documents *they* provide. It makes them the ultimate purveyors of truth.

Comment Re:This "research" is laughable (Score 1) 62

No - this is good research, it just isn't "magical slam dunk science" many are conditioned to expect from years of watching CSI.

Tightly controlled studies involving humans are *very* expensive and *very* difficult to control the logistics of. The purpose of the study is to examine if there is a reasonable possibility of a link - and if so it would justify more detailed, controlled studies. That's how actual science works, you build up the research and multiple groups look at it from multiple angles, you don't solve a problem in one "magical" paper.

was the heart failure related to takeout *containers* or to the type of *food* that is typically put into takeout containers?

The study finds that some connection exists - it might well be the type of food, or how the food was prepared, but that's something you address after the initial connection is shown, from this sort of paper.

Who boils takeout containers...

Affectively - many restaurants. Hot food from the kitchen is placed directly in containers, then bagged and put in thermal bags for delivery. Boiling in this instance is a simple mechanism to replicate the affect, and see if dosage increases over time. The researchers show this impacts the rat gut biome. This justified looking at the problem in more complex species and a variety of heating methods.

Who exclusively drinks water boiled in takeout containers?

The point is to show a simple transfer mechanism - heating water in the container - is sufficient to impact the rat gut biome. This shows us it isn't dependent on oils or other materials from cooking process, hot water alone is sufficient. This is textbook good science - they have eliminated confounds despite your claims to the contrary.

Comment Re:Stack Overflow violating license terms and TOS? (Score 1) 90

AI isn't "learning" anything - it just has obfuscated storage and retrieval. "Meshing" together 10, 100, or 1000 copyrighted/licensed works is still infringement - on every single one of the works - even when the works only form a portion of the language model.

Comment Re:The cost of one subscription (Score 1) 151

No, no, no. That's now how LLMs work.

First - we already have precedence: the fee for a library copy is already significantly more than a single-user copy for traditional printed media. Those library copies are modeled on a multiple, but limited usage. In the case of LLMs the usage is vastly larger than the a traditional library and deserves to be negotiated higher.

Second - LLMs aren't just 'reading' the material, they are republishing (indirectly) for *every single response they generate*, and here's the real kicker - they are republishing (indirectly) even for seemingly *unrelated* responses - because every document used in the training is part of the language usage - both for what it chooses to say, and what it chooses to *not* say.

We can go around touting 'information wants to be free' all we want, but somebody has to put in the effort to collect that information and produce a coherent overarching concept. If we as a society don't provide some compensation model then we have the classic tragedy of the commons setup. Meanwhile *disinformation* already has a ready supply of funding.

Comment blatant loophole (Score 1) 35

This opt-out model is obviously absurd:
  1. legitimate sites create original content and add robots.txt specs to opt-out of AI training
  2. web-scrapers copy content and post to a numerous ad-laden sites, sans robots.txt
  3. Google/OpenAI consider themselves free to use the content from those sites without limitations.

It's just data-laundering. It gives the illusion of good, corporate citizens while simultaneously incentivizing Google/OpenAI/whomever to *not* identify the original source of data.

Comment Re:Somebody doesn't know what a bank is (Score 1) 151

I clear around $450/yr on my card.

Tell us you're too stupid to know when you're being scammed without saying the phrase, "I'm too stupid to know when I'm being scammed." You didn't "clear" $450 - you got back a fraction of the overcharge that these minigames create via friction in the market.

... this is how capitalism works ...

Nope. Actual capitalism is premised on the notion of an open market. And "open" requires unfettered access to buy/sell. These minigames obfuscate the buy/sell mechanism beyond our ability to track beneficial trades. This leads to... well, people like yourself thinking they "clear" money through these schemes, and indeed being quite brazenly convinced that falling for the schemes is a positive indicator of their own cleverness.

Comment Re:Everyone wanted a $15 minimum wage (Score 1) 226

Once the Kiosks are developed and debugged, they will likely be deployed even in places like Mississippi and Puerto Rico where wages are much lower since the NRE is a sunk cost.

This is a fallacy common amongst the managerial staff - the belief that NRE comprises the bulk of project expense. The reality in every system I've seen successfully deployed is that (1) development never ceases, it is an ongoing expense (2) ongoing support & maintenance costs have to be on par with the initial NRE costs, to keep the project at a steady-state. Fail at either of those pieces and the project withers and is soon obsolete. Raising the standard requires an ongoing output of effort & expense - it is not a one time event.

Comment Re:writes about the names these birds already had (Score 1) 101

It matters because as our cultures become interconnected were are working to unify the nomenclature - to have a 1:1 relationship between names and concepts. When that name has a grotesque backstory, it is unacceptable.

It's the same thing and nobody is complaining or saying we should change the English pronunciation to the Chinese one.

1. Yes we are unifying towards using single names - it takes time but it is the natural progression of language and human nature. We are lazy by design, and having multiple names for the same concept is inefficient. 2. If the names are benign it is of little consequence, when the names are explicitly racist in nature then we should give them priority.

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