Now pay all artists decent royalties, without minimum number of plays etc.

Unlike Microsoft Office of course. That wasn't pushed at all on schools with very heavy discounts and the option to also buy heavily discounted for home use.

/sarcasm off

This is the most California thing I've ever read. Unconstitutional, unenforceable, and a massive increase in costs and bureaucracy; they hit the trifecta! I wonder if printer manufacturers that bake their own bread will be exempt once their checks to the governor's presidential campaign clear.

Incidentally, this is the kind of stupid shit that helps Trump and people like him get elected over and over.

There's a very clear pattern when we look at who benefits in any given gold rush and while there's a few big winners that fuel the mania, the vast, vast majority are losers.

And then there's Nvidia, happily selling shovels all day.

No, of course not, because he's stuck in his dogmatic viewpoint. He doesn't actually know much about LLMs, but he's got a ton of beliefs about them. And you have a hard time changing peoples' beliefs.

That was definitely a problem two years ago. I did just check in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and all reported 3 correctly. The problem with people throwing out these sorts of criticisms isn't that they're all wrong; it's that they're ignorant of the leaps in progress being made. These models are rapidly improving and it's getting harder to find serious gotchas with them. They're still weak in some areas (e.g., spatial reasoning), but for serious power users who know how to prompt them well? They've become insanely powerful tools.

Not gods; tools. But really, really strong tools for huge variety of tasks.

I've used ChatGPT to write code and Gemini to debug it. If you pass the feedback back and forth, it takes a couple iterations but they'll eventually agree that it's all good and I find that's about 90-95% of the way to where I need it to be. Earlier today I took a 6kb script that had been used as something fast and dirty for years - written by someone long gone from the company - and completely revamped it into something much more powerful, robust, and polished in both its code and its output. Script grew to about 20kb, but it's 10x better and I only had to make minor tweaks. Between the two, they found all sorts of hidden bugs and problems with it.

I concur. Being a Microsoft Certified Professional implies that security is one of your lesser concerns.

Self-hosted Atlassian products seem to be just fine.

As for what "they said", they also said this cloud shit would be cheaper. It isn't.

Flash was a tool that made content creation really easy. Go to albinoblacksheep.com (or a similar site) and witness it in all its glory with classics like "gonads & strife" and "the end of ze world".

It's downfall was that it had horrendous security and could be exploited by nearly anyone with a few brain cells. It _had_ to be superseded by something better. Microsoft tried with SilverLight (also a security nightmare), and I think an open standard like HTML5 is better than a big corp standard.

Meh, in 2000 they hit some milestone and made a big deal about it:

https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/02/24/0954216/slashdots-10000th-story

Seriously though, I remember /. from before user accounts. You optionally could write your name under a post, or be anonymous. Due to privacy concerns I held off creating an account for a long time, and I lost my 1st login so I'm on my second account now. I've wasted a lot of time on this site and occasionally return.

The discussions back then were a lot more interesting and in depth, I really miss those. Sometimes a gem pops up and really enlightens me on a subject or gives me a new perspective.

And CowboyNeal was a revered member in the slashdot polls, now he feels like some abandoned toy in the attic, and I wish he wasn't because the option sparked some great (silly) discussions.

Wikipedia is an interesting concept and it works decently well as a place to go read a bunch of general information and find decent sources. But LLMs are feeding that information to people in a customized, granular format that meets their exact individual needs and desires. So yeah, probably not as interested in reading your giant wall of text when they want 6 specific lines out of it.

Remember when Encyclopædia Britannica was crying about you stealing their customers, Wikipedia? Yeah, this is what they experienced.

OK, an outside observation.

If people don't have health insurance they won't go to the doctor because it's too expensive, up until the point that their body breaks down and they either die or are so far gone that treatment consists of painkillers.

If they do have health insurance, they can go to a doctor and they can have an illness diagnosed a lot earlier and have effective treatment.

ACA enabled access to medical care if you needed it. I may oversimplify a number of things but that's how I see it.

If you spend time with the higher-tier (paid) reasoning models, you’ll see they already operate in ways that are effectively deductive (i.e., behaviorally indistinguishable) within the bounds of where they operate well. So not novel theorem proving. But give them scheduling constraints, warranty/return policies, travel planning, or system troubleshooting, and they’ll parse the conditions, decompose the problem, and run through intermediate steps until they land on the right conclusion. That’s not "just chained prediction". It’s structured reasoning that, in practice, outperforms what a lot of humans can do effectively.

When the domain is checkable (e.g., dates, constraints, algebraic rewrites, SAT-style logic), the outputs are effectively indistinguishable from human deduction. Outside those domains, yes it drifts into probabilistic inference or “reading between the lines.” But to dismiss it all as “not deduction at all” ignores how far beyond surface-level token prediction the good models already are. If you want to dismiss all that by saying “but it’s just prediction,” you’re basically saying deduction doesn’t count unless it’s done by a human. That’s just redefining words to try and win an Internet argument.

They do quite a bit more than that. There's a good bit of reasoning that comes into play and newer models (really beginning with o3 on the ChatGPT side) can do multi-step reasoning where it'll first determine what the user is actually seeking, then determine what it needs to provide that, then begin the process of response generation based on all of that.