it's pirates, ye scurvy-ridden pox-bucket! yarr!

it was cool to watch in vr, a novelty. i haven't watched any sequel. i'm not sure, maybe i did watch avatar 2, but don't remember a single thing about it.

my sister absolutely loved it. the magical forest, the creatures and all that. she has a hippie vibe, and that part wasn't bad. she had watched it in an imax theater but had me download it and drove 70km to my place to go through the whole thing again with the headset, in one sitting, while i cooked some sauerkraut. she was delighted. horses for courses.

there is ofc a learning process involved. time and effort spent in mastering any new tool or technique will slow you down initially but might prove to be a worthy investment in the long run. this is typical for any form of automation.

however your particular domain might not be the best suited, or one to benefit the most. you describe a system which seems highly specialized where you already have intricate knowledge and long established procedures. that's not where generators excel, you might think of them more as hyper-sophisticated search engines rather than specialists: they're most productive in more generic contexts with bigger problem spaces, and in that category they are better at providing isolated smallish solutions rather than assuring the consistence of the whole. iow, if you already know very well what the solution for a particular problem is and already have answers for it then generators' contribution will be less relevant, unless there is also menial involved work they can do for you. current coding generators seem to be replacing or assisting entry level programming positions more than anything. in that they're quite good.

Tried to use Gemini to just hack my way through using a scientific Python package recently. In the end ended up almost all being worthless as a requirement couldn't be installed working at all (yay Assimulo) and no amount of AI was helping, had to scrap multiple days worth of relying partially on AI and just macguyver a different way around getting the results I wanted, if I hadn't had AI at all I might've started there and ended up going faster.

I'm sure this is all worth trillions of dollars or whatever spend we're up to now.

according to the anglosaxon model which is not shared by the whole world. at this point i find it prudent to note that no, the english speaking world is not the whole world.

sheesh, karen, it was a figure of speech :-)

you'll have to excuse me but i'm not impressed by your obtuse self-righteousness. that mindset is devastating an entire country and bringing about world war episode 3. if your portentous brain is capable of slurping up all the insane and duplicitous western propaganda and you even revel in that despicable hypocrisy you might aswell do something about it. ukranian banderites will probably welcome you, i hear they only beat their own "conscripts" to pulp. good luck, and don't wait for me. oh, and don't wait for your "democratic" leaders either, they will be busy partying in their bunkers, laughing their asses off. sucker.

really? doesn't vex me at all. abstaining from buying such shit just takes a handful of braincells and nobody ever forced me to do so. that these products thrive just speaks of the geographic concentration of suckers in the world.

who would ever steal and resell publicly available content on the internet? What kind of low down, worthless, property stealing scum would have such a business model???

true, thanks for the correction.

indeed. but not because of deterrence. ukraine had the weapons but not the launch codes, and nobody, neither the us, nor eu nor russia wanted them to have them. had they kept them the situation would not exist because there would not have been an independent ukraine to begin with, they had no choice.

true. and because the goal was just to keep the war going in the hopes russia collapsed somehow. not happening. realizing that the us has indeed held back but nato/eu hasn't hardly anything left to give. they would like to! it has been a huge sink, wonder weapon after wonder weapon. chewing through all that was one of russia's goals, and it's nearing completion.

also true except that has nothing to do with political systems, unless you're defending the idea that "good guys" should have them and "bad guys" should not. that distinction is rather artificial, and totally irrelevant in geopolitics.

well, if you take on a country that has nukes ... what are you thinking? btw, the nukes are still there but russia won't probably need them unless they see nukes flying towards them. they have better options now.

smaller, yes, but as a matter of fact the russian army was in a quite sorry state and far less trained in 2022 as the ukranian army, which had been propped up by nato for 10 years. part of the problem, actually. things have changed, though, little is left of those early ukranian troops and russia did its homework. the situation on the ground is quite eloquent. stalemate, you say. yeah, sure.

it indeed did. all it had to do was to stay neutral, which had worked fine for more than 2 decades. but they chose to play the game suggested by their western "friends".

they can do as they wish. they do seem eager to play the game, though. it wouldn't end well either, and they would also find out that staying neutral was the better and more sane idea.

erm ... the us and nato have been trying to beat russia for nearly 4 years now. spoiler: it isn't going well. europe in this context is just a rabid chihuahua digging its own grave, and denmark is irrelevant.

quite impressive results: get your country wrecked, losing probably a 40% of it, over a million casualties, several million people fleeing the country (most not to ever return), bankruptcy and nearly all energy infrastructure and industry wiped out, and the grim prospect of ceasing to exist as a viable nation state.

was playing the nato game worth it? i can imagine a lot of other actions that would have led to very different outcomes.

hiding is a strong word here ...

this is actually the point nobody is speaking about. is scrolling down for something you are actively looking for really so fucking hard? we've had roughly 30 years to teach the population some basic information era literacy and all we've done is competing for that tiny "valuable space" in their tiny screens and minds, for who is most efficient at keeping people dumb and recourseless, for who comes up with the cheapest tricks to get immediate attention. well, here are some surprising old news: google has always had the upper hand in this race because they created, provide and run the entire freaking thing, and now they're doubling down with ai both because they have the tech and fucking own the space. who would have thought, right?

probably the only instances where i have focused on the first results ever have been in quick lookups for a dictionary definition, where there is little competition. it is obvious that in any other case the first results will be from someone trying to sell me a bridge and who has outbidded some other bridge seller or is exploiting the ranking system, so are not necessarily the most interesting, and scrolling down will more often than not pay off. nowadays i tend to ignore those ai summaries altogether for the simple fact that they never cite sources, information without a reasonable idea about the source is pretty worthless to me, possibly even suspect, no matter how convenient it appears to be. so, yeah, i can see why ai summary slop is a concerning development: because we have colectively gone out of our way to keep people dumb in the golden era of information. the irony.

if we had fomented this simple and basic insight to the general public, 99% (made up number) of those "recipe sites" would have never had such a job in the first place (the vast majority of them are just copycats or crawlers themselves, anyway), the web would be a much nicer place and none of this would be a problem.

that's a valid argument (apart from the "stealing" bit), although google does get a lot of flak for this. now, how about instead of using it just to periodically extract money from the big evil corp so everything stays the same we actually address the issue? why don't we educate people on how to use this tool instead of preying on their ignorance? why do we even allow monopolies in the information space? why, in the era of information, aren't search engines for public information a public service instead of rabid marketplaces for the highest bidders or the sleaziest exploiters to fight for?