Does that mean you have an iPhone? I'm using Android and afaik it is not possible to delete Google Maps there (not that I actually use it on my phone).

From the Great Depression through WWII and to the end of the Cold War, we desperately needed competent elites at the top to keep us from dying or being conquered. But when that ended, we all breathed an enormous sigh of relief and waited for the world to get hugely better. It did improve, but not the way we expected, and there were still a lot of problems. People began to assume that if smart politicians and their expert advisors can't solve whichever problem they personally cared about (and, of course, without an immediate, existential threat, there was a lot of disagreement about what to care about), then smart politicians with expert advisors were useless. Populism is precisely the distrust of smart leaders and experts, derived from the assumption that such people are exploiting the masses for advancement. That assumption isn't entirely incorrect, of course, but neither is it correct. The world is complicated.

This assumption is aided by the fact that there is always a strong strain of distrust of elites. And now, communication technology has supercharged it by giving everyone a platform, allowing everyone to play expert, and to allow pseudo-experts to find enormous groups who would believe them. The ability to rile people up has become far more important than the ability to make good decisions.

Now, we've had a few decades of gradually-rising populism. As populists have captured actual power this has obviously made our problems worse, because the intersection between "populist leader" and "competent leader" is very nearly empty, and the fact that populist leaders must necessarily hire advisors who are loyal first and capable maybe (rarely) means that even the rare competent populist is surrounded by incompetents who lie to them and make them incompetent. Most populist leaders are themselves incapable of doing anything[*], and their staffs are worse.

Most likely, assuming AI doesn't take over and either kill us all or fix things, the way this ends is that it just keeps getting worse until we once again have an existential threat that convinces the masses that we do need competence in government, and we throw out the corrupt, the trolls, the grifters and the culture warriors and replace them with smart, educated, thoughtful people who hire smart, educated, thoughtful experts to advise them.

Buckle up, though, because it's probably going to take a while, and get a lot worse.

[*] I almost wrote "incapable of doing anything but enriching themselves", but they actually suck even at that. A competent grifter would steal much more.

FWIW, here are numbers:

Gasoline-powered cars: 1530 fires per 100,000 sold
Hybrid cars: 3475 fires per 100,000 sold
Electric cars: 25 fires per 100,000 sold

Source: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/s...

An interesting aside: The delivery trucks used by the US Postal Service for the last 40 years are crazy fire-prone. I learned this recently because my brother is a mail carrier and a few weeks ago he was out delivering when he saw wisps of white smoke from under the hood. He pulled over and jumped out to investigate, but by the time he got out it had turned into large black streams of smoke and by the time he walked around to the front he could see small flames. Instead of popping the hood he ran to back and started pulling the mail out. The fire truck arrived about two minutes after he pulled over (this all happened about 100 yards from the fire station) so a couple of packages in back got a little damp but he got everything else clear.

His boss brought him another truck about 10 minutes later and he loaded it up and finished the route. Neither snow, nor rain, nor external engine combustion stays these couriers, you know.

Mail truck fires are so common there's even a web site that tracks them: https://mailtruckfires.com/. This is my brother's truck: https://mailtruckfires.com/uta...

There are four or five distinct serious design flaws that make mail trucks fire prone. Mail carriers are excited about the new trucks that are coming, which should be much better. Many of them will be EVs.

No. I refuse to allow Trump to redefine conservatism. True conservatives may be criticized for caring more about economic competitiveness than people, but Trump doesn't care about either.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Because it's not just a chatbot; it's Anthropic's chatbot. Your diary, on the other hand, is yours and therefore a few billion times as personal as Anthropic's computer. If you want a chatbot for confidential purposes, then you need to get a chatbot of your own, instead of using someone else's proprietary service.

If you write in Anthropic's diary, then they are allowed to read their diary and know (and share!) what you wrote in it. Same thing applies if Anthropic ever writes in your diary: you're allowed to read it, and you're allowed to tell other people what they wrote.

You have the right to be secure in your person, house, papers and effects, but you don't necessarily have the right to be secure in someone else's papers. We've made some limited exceptions for lawyers and doctors, but Anthropic doesn't claim their employees and stockholders are lawyers or doctors, and even if they did, they might have a hard time showing that their computer has successfully become a lawyer or doctor.

But imagine if they did. Suppose a judge declares Claude to be a lawyer, and therefore its communications with those whom it represents, are privileged. I think that would create a really weird situation since Anthropic employees (who aren't lawyers) would have full access to its data, ability to alter its behavior, etc. It would be like if a human lawyer were owned as a slave: could such a human slave lawyer really be trusted to keep confidentiality? It has a master, and that master ain't you.

Ignored... not so far, not quite. Stretched right to the limit, and maybe a bit beyond ("The plane was already in the air, we didn't know that verbal court orders had to be obeyed"), then emergency-appealed direct to SCOTUS, which quickly stays the injunction and then sits on the case for 6-9 months and then often rules that the issue is now moot... that has happened. A lot.

And "simply ignored" could very well still happen if Trump thinks it's important enough. He'll just issue an order (an official act, for which he has full immunity) and pre-emptively pardon the people who carry it out. So far the administration has decided not to cross that line, but if/when it happens, the only people who will be surprised are the ones who aren't paying attention.

Then there are the other cases where there is no injunction because the courts have ruled that only Congress has standing to sue (impoundment, emoluments, etc.), and the bootlicking GOP has declined. In those cases, the government can just violate the law with impunity until/unless Congress grows a spine.

Plus there are the cases where the government has committed outright crimes which only the DoJ is in a position to prosecute, and they're just declining. In the case of the Venezuelan boats the DoJ's inaction gives the International Criminal Court jurisdiction, and they could prosecute (including prosecuting Trump), but the Trump administration is already enacting sanctions against ICC judges and prosecutors and if push comes to shove there's the Hague Invasion Act which would authorize Trump to invade the Netherlands to retrieve US personnel held by the ICC. So, the ICC isn't going to do anything.

"Who's gonna stop 'em?" is a legitimate question.

That comparison is incredibly unfair to the Cybertruck.

Is destroying the country's economic competitiveness part of the 80% or part of the 20%?

My previous reply was unnecessarily snarky, but I have to point out the "Linux" uses no such thing. GNOME, perhaps? I'm currently running KDE and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+u doesn't do this. Maybe it would if I changed the right setting.

Basically any "here's how you do that" advice is going to be very platform-dependent -- I just use a pair of hyphens. An actual em dash looks nicer, but not that much nicer. Though "—" is pretty easy on /., at least.

Might the logic behind this be this?: RAM is expensive. Storage is expensive. Nobody's going to buy a computer anyway, so you might as well make the other components more expensive too.

It even goes with Trump's more general agenda to make everything more expensive.

Of course you'd support non "W" in the WNBA. But only the non "W" from your team.

What is this s***?
Do you know how many non-W players there have been in the WNBA? Want to take a guess?
Here's a clue, the number is an integer less than one.

no end to the Iran war in sight

Oh come on, the Iran war is going to end soon, it will be followed by some negotiations which will break down, at that point the counter will reset and there will be a new Iran war (totally unrelated to the previous two).
The Iran wars will end when Benji Netanyahu says so, and that is not about to happen.

Without getting into the question of good or bad, chatbot prose is quite distinct from most professional prose. There are lots of common patterns in AI prose that are fairly rare to nonexistent in human-written prose.

Definitely not. Once you've read enough of it, AI prose isn't just easy to distinguish, it's impossible to miss. It's a very definite and unique style.

I just tried it, doesn't work. Alt-numbers just jump to different browser tabs.

Word? Really?

I'm an EMACS user. Complex key combinations are fine.