Yeah, I'm not buying it.

What is this mysterious small business? If it actually exists, I guarantee that I can contact someone who matters with less effort than it took to participate in this thread.

I have never had a problem contacting the owner or equivalent at a small or medium sized business. It's not difficult. Hell, I once had a two-week long correspondence with the owner of the orchard that produced the specific bag of apples I bought at a large national chain. I took less than five minutes to track down an address from the tracking info on the tag and send that first email. If you can't contact anyone more important than a clerk at a small business you're physically at, you're not even trying.

Even if they don't want to regularly stock whatever product you're after, unless you're a raging asshole, odds are close to 100% that they'll order it special for you, provided that it's available from one of their regular suppliers.

AI: Just 10 years away since 1956!

You can't talk to a human at a local business?

Sure... Whatever you say...

Indeed. A simple fact you'd think would be obvious to anyone with even a superficial understanding...

I suspect the term 'hallucination' was coined specifically to make the phenomenon seem more like a software bug that can be fixed, rather than an inescapable consequence of the system working correctly.

That's what more and more people are discovering every day.

AI is a toy, not a tool. You're definitely not the problem.

Two world wars might have had something to do with that. I'd say they did remarkably well, given the circumstances.

The conclusions you're drawing from whatever pop-culture article you read that mentioned Calhoun's torture chambers are ... questionable ... at best. Go look at Jonathan Freedman's experiments. I believe there was another, more recent experiment where they gave the mice toys and ways to entertain themselves that didn't end in disaster, but I don't remember who was involved and can't seem to find it with a quick search.

Calhoun, if you didn't know, turned out to be quite the crackpot with his "extracortical prosthesis" and "word brain" nonsense. Overpopulation seemed to make him just as mad as his mice.

Being a reliable partner is why America is as powerful and influential as it is. That orange dipshit has destroyed that completely. The consequences of our failure to remove him from power back in February will be severe.

I knew you were stupid... I had no idea you were that stupid!

DEI policies make it more likely, not less likely, that actually competent people get hired. Unless you think being a white man with the same last name as the boss counts as "actual competency".

The sad reality is that you just can't compete on a level playing field with all those women and brown people.

I used to briefly on BlackBerry (OS7? It's been a while). It wasn't long after they acquired Torch that their browser was the best in the mobile space, even beating out the best desktop browsers in features and standards compliance. iirc, they were one of the first with WebGL support. (iOS Safari kinda had it, but you needed to jailbreak to get it.) After than, there really wasn't any reason to use Opera on anything other than a dumb phone with J2ME.

For the record, I've never posted to Slashdot from the toilet, from Opera or any other browser. If it takes you so long to shit that you get bored and need a distraction, see a doctor.

I did nothing of the sort, you illiterate troll.

It is true that 0.1% is not as much as other uses, sure, but that doesn't mean that it's an insignificant amount. A broken leg is not nearly as bad as two severed arms, but that doesn't mean it's a trivial problem. A bomb that blows up an apartment building is still national news even though it's nothing compared to a nuclear bomb.

This same ridiculous argument can be used to dismiss all but the single largest problem:

Alice: "x is a problem."
Bob: "y is a bigger problem than x, so it makes more sense to be concerned about y!"
Carol: "z is a bigger problem y, so it makes more sense to be concerned with z!"

Golf courses are a serious problem. So are data centers. Pretending otherwise is as absurd as it is dishonest.

My point was that you're a lying dishonest scumbag. You've more that proven that.

You have a lot of trouble reading, don't you?

I put just as much effort, if not more, into my replies as was put into the posts to which I reply. Using a small percentage to make a massive quantity appear insignificant? That's not only lazy, it's dishonest. You got a significantly better reply from me than you deserved.

If you want better replies, write better posts. If you want courteous replies, don't be a dishonest scumbag. It's really that simple.