ChatGPT is struggling to produce valid SQL even for basic stuff. I use it to produce technical stuff, but everything is checked against at least 2 other AIs and is hand-verified by me, because otherwise there are too many errors.

This is not even close to usable for anything technical.

On one project, after 8 months, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (combined) have managed to produce a technical specification that is as riddled with errors as a draft document produced by an engineer, so one could (I suppose) argue that it's not worse than a human, if given sufficient time. However, the specification has probably cost millions - if not billions - in electricity at this point. If the same amount of money had been spent on human engineers, over the same length of time, my guess is that the document would be of much higher quality and much closer to something that could be implemented.

True, I would never have been given that kind of cash, so it has democratised wasteful spending, but that's not necessarily useful.

No necessarily. It often took many months for a Fortran IV programmer to adapt to structured programming. Habits can be hard to break.

Yes,

The medical community wasn't sure at first, but data came in pretty quickly once it started being investigated. This is typical of science: you start out knowing nothing, you learn more and start knowing "maybe but we're not sure", and you keep on increasing your level of certainty. But too many people were dazzled by the early "maybe" and turned their ears off to avoid hearing the "but turns out not."

Hydroxychloroquine actually is a miracle drug. It's just not a miracle drug that cured COVID-19.

If their primary source of income was sucking money from credulous fools by touting quack cures that are actually dangerous, I am not going to cry about their "primary source of income" getting cut off.

I do worry about free speech, however.

I wish I had an answer to the question of how to stop the flow of misinformation without damaging free speech. But I don't.

Sorry, but thermodynamics is real. Entropy is real.

OTOH, some choices are more destructive than others. If you pay attention, you can pick the less destructive ones. (But we probably *are* beyond the carrying capacity of the planet for our species. This isn't a certainty, as there are many different approaches, but I believe we're past the carrying capacity using every approach that's been tried up until now. Including "pastoralist" and "hunter-gatherer".)

Intel banks on Apple publicly saving an American trainwreck to butter up the orange utan for favors.

That's it. It's the only strategy here. None of this would happen absent Trump.

Or possibly what it means is that the segment of people who want that capability is small. (I would have been part of that segment a decade ago, when my eyes were better. These days Txt message on the phone are too small to read.)

Your valid point is that it's no longer adaptive. But it *was*, and social customs tend to persist long after their utility. I'm sure you can think of a few currently being stressed in the US.

Is it really? I think it's more personal than political, though in general it gets really fuzzy when political views take aim at individual identity.

His ammunition had obscure internet meme references that are used more by the alt-right than the left, though it's really hard to tell because Internet extremists apply many layers of irony, making it really hard to tell.

No, his political motivations are not very clear.

Except that Crooks was also tracking events of the Democratic candidates. He wanted to shoot a prominent figure, it didn't matter which side. Ryan Routh was definitely political, but he wasn't any sort of left-winger. He voted for Trump, then supported Bernie, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I think it's highly likely that Robinson was similarly all over the place, but likely less clear since he was young probably didn't think much about politics.

No, I think he was probably already further to the right, but moved at least some of his views to the left. You do know who Nick Fuentes and the groypers are, right?

This almost earned you a "Foe" tag. I haven't impugned your intelligence or other personal characteristics. Keep it civil, please.

Indeed, left-wing violence is on the rise, but that's coming from a point where right-wing violence utterly dominated the space for decades. Don't go assuming that your side is somehow less violent just because they've been relatively quiet this year. And although I'm actually not on the left, if I were I wouldn't assume that my side is inherently less violent, either, because the opposite was true in the 60s.

The only correct reaction here is to condemn political violence, full stop, and not to care what the motivations of the individuals were (though, obviously, I have a sick fascination with understanding their motivations and spend way too much time digging into whatever we have).

Note that condemning political violence, full stop, is not what Trump and the GOP leadership are doing. They're condemning only violence from the left and ignoring violence from the right. This is very bad for all of us left, right and center.

What makes you think it wasn't?

Like the flat Earth conspiracy theories, the COVID conspiracy theories are really amusing, and for the same reason: The theorists can offer no plausible explanation as to why the alleged conspirators are doing the dastardly thing. During COVID, the best rationale on offer was "To control us!". Okay, but if someone wants to control you, don't they generally use that control to make you do something that benefits them? If I built a mind control machine, would I use it to make people give me money and sex, or would I use it to get them to turn in a circle three times before going to bed?

The best the flat Earthers can come up with is "It's a plot by NASA to get money from the government", which they then "prove" by ginning up some math that shows that the cost of deceiving the world just happens to be about the same amount as NASA's budget. Except that actually disproves their point. If I'm going to create a hoax to extract government funding, I definitely don't want to spend every penny of the funding on running the hoax. That's just working for a living, and if I'm a scammer it's exactly what I don't want to do.

It has not, though keep in mind that you don't actually kiss their cheeks, you kiss the air next to their cheeks. What touches their cheek is your cheek, if anything (often there is no actual contact).

Huh? Right-handers writing left to right and top to bottom have no problem with this. When you go to the next line, you don't touch the line above. It's above, and the pen extends beyond your fingers, so your fingers stay well away from the just-written line. If you're a left-hander, going to the next line isn't the issue, the problem is smudging the just-written characters on the same line... except that left-handers often avoid that problem by cocking their wrist sharply to move the edge of their palm up out of the way so it doesn't touch the just-written letters. That then means they might smudge lines above. They make it work, mostly, but it's tricky.

The point is that people are investing vast sums of money to create elaborately-packaged boxed sets that are simply too vast to be actually enjoyed (apparently, the new boxed set Thunderbirds will include heavily restored footage that simply wasn't capable of being included in earlier releases), and upscaling a puppet show to 4K and still have it watchable is far from trivial -- those puppets were never made to be seen on such large screens at such high resolution. The scale of investment into making this publicity stunt and boxed set is incredible, the cost of the set isn't low, and the value of the material that's in the set - even to die-hard fans - isn't nearly as great.

Goblin/Guardian: The Lonely and Great God is an even more extreme example and includes 270 minutes of backstage footage, a large pack of publicity photos, scripts, and a tacky plastic sword. It's an extremely limited edition special collector's edition and the resale market is pricing it as though it includes a couple of solid gold ingots. People will certainly binge-watch the episodes once or twice, which will undoubtedly be in much higher resolution than the rare streamed versions, but not even the afficados will be watching all the making-of footage and the scripts will doubtless be on the Internet somewhere. Unlike high-end sci-fi, though, the storyline is simple so the difference between the scripts and fan-produced transcripts won't be vast. (It was a very good storyline, I was impressed, but it was hardly a case where the tiny nuances matter.) But K-Drama is milled in unimaginable quantities, so much so that many series just can't pick up any kind of audience and are abandoned. It's not produced for repeated watching and the odds of any show, however good, being repeatedly watched (the way fans repeatedly watch LoTR or SW) is essentially zero. But someone had to trawl through all the footage to put together the set, make the booklets, etc, and that wasn't cheap. The boxing is elaborate.

The importance of storytelling is high, but none of these are sophisticated stories. They're all pretty much on-par with Smith of Wooton Major - a great little read, but not one I'd pay £500 for, even if they did throw in a plastic sword. I'm not convinced anyone is buying these sets for the content, even though the content is enjoyable.

The degree of investment is phenomenal, the sophistication of presentation is exceptional, and the fans are buying in quantity. I'm just not sure what the benefit is, on either side.

Exactly my point.

MAGA assumed from the outset that he must be far-left, both because it confirmed their own biases and because they didn't want to believe otherwise. They did the same thing with the kid who shot Trump, though he turned out not to really have any political intentions.

It's actually pretty plausible. The alt-right has been pissed at Charlie Kirk for years, especially Nick Fuentes' groypers, who have considered Kirk a race traitor. And there is some evidence that Robinson had sympathy for groypers, though at some point he decided he was gay and probably started to get pissed about Kirk's anti-LGBTQ screeds. Perhaps he shifted left generally, perhaps he remained generally right-leaning except on those issues, we don't know. The only information we have is a vague claim by his family that he had become more political and that he disagreed with them.

We really don't know that for sure. On balance I think he probably had shifted pretty left, but the evidence is ambiguous at best. Maybe we'll learn more, but it's possible we'll never know unless Robinson decides to tell us.

If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Robinson's politics were pretty muddled and his main reason for hating Kirk was the LGBTQ stuff.