If likes and boosts are overrated, then is there a way to find others' posts about a topic or to get more replies to my posts?

I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

Ha ha, Linux already has..

# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'

.. d'oh! Never mind.

And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?

Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.

But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)

Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at copyediting than an average human, but I haven't kept up so I'm ignorant of their performance. (All my "AI" experience is that I used Claude twice to, it turned out, fix some typos in some RoR config initializers.) But whether an AI service is as good at copyediting as a human or not, it's that user's choice and, as long as they sign off on the work and really take responsibility for it (declare the words to be their opinion), then I've got no problem with them doing that, whether it uses LLMs or Markov chains or human slaves or Searle's Chinese Room.

The words will be judged by their quality, not provenance.

That said...

Here's a similar story where I'd probably come to the opposite conclusion(!), despite the clown in it pretty much doing what I preach above, though he was using the AI service to do a lot more than copyedit. Behold this 3M expert witness cross-examination (134 page PDF) in the Watson Grinding case. It's slow going at first, but eventually you'll be laughing and cringing like in a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fuck. I don't know.

Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.

Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.

If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.

Has nothing to do with "crappy upstream channels".

a) the traffic on the cable does not know if it goes up or down, but the router does. So you manage that 90% of the bandwidth is used for downstream, and only 10% for upstream
b) downstream can be cashed, upstream is pretty individual depending on the sender: and can not be cashed

This gets mitigated by glass fiber greatly: as you can sent in both directions without any data loss.

And what would there be wrong?

The fibre from the router to the ISP is 10 - 100 faster than the wifi.

It is even faster than ethernet, as my (old) Macs only have 10GBit ethernet, or my cables are not suited for more, no idea.

Building/crafting a new telescope takes ages.
And usually they are planned ahead with a different purpose / different instruments / capabilities.

It is not so that the current Swift can be replaced swiftly from garage garbage parts.

many wealthy people have pet / vanity /fashionable projects.

Most are not profitable and funded by other efforts

They have newspapers,magazines,ranches,rain forests,animal shelters, hospices,hospitals,schools,parks,trusts,charities,etc,etc

Elon buying twitter is just another one of these.

Complaining about the rich is a story as old as time.
Sucessful hunter knows the "spot"
Fishermen know the right rig to catch the big ones
The "King" sleeps on a pile of gold

I'd say you are switching and that the nuclear turn off should have been delayed so that the reliance on natural gas during the changeover was lessened compared to what it currently is.

That is because you forgot the timeline. And do not know the basics about German nukes.

The government voted explicitly into office to exit nuclear energy was: 1998, Schroeder, Tritin, Kuehnast etc.. The exit was planned to be finished 2008 or something: by replacing all nukes with Solar and Wind. And in parallel: exit from coal, as well.
Again: that government was voted explicitly into office to exit Nuclear power, and make Germany the leader in the green revolution to speed step into a CO2 free future.

And then came Merkel: and torpedoed both the nuclear exit and the shift to solar an wind - same time.

I have no idea what this arguments are supposed to mean: so that the reliance on natural gas during the changeover was lessened compared to what it currently is.
That is simply factual wrong. There is no "new reliance" on nat gas. Nat gas supports the coal exit where we could not - because of Merkels politics change - install solar and wind in the original planned amounts.

The topics are interwoven, as they all feed into the same grid: But they are completely separate topics. The nuclear exist has nothing to with gas.

The Norwegian and American gas which Germany is using now could be beneficially delivered to the new Hungarian government instead, allowing them to switch off their reliance on gas. It does not work that way. It is just a market. The one who orders first, and pays the price: gets it. There is no political mastermind behind the scene orchestrating how resources are distributed in Europe.

Back to the nukes:
- all nukes would never have been allowed to be build under modern construction rules
- all were at tectonically fault lines
- most of them much to close to majour populated zones
- if something like Chernobyl or Fukushima had happened in Germany: we would be a 3rd world country now. Half the population or more displaced in to save zones
- the nukes contributed top about 22% to the power grid. At a time when the total power production was much much lower than it is now.
- they were all strictly base load plants, with no real way to load follow. Completely useless in a world were we do not need base load anymore (as today), because wind and solar is always over producing over the base load level. Base load in Germany is in WINTER (when the base load is the highest) 40% of peak. So what are we going to do with the nukes at night when the wind is pushing 50% of peak into the grid? Sure, we cut of half of the wind power so we can keep the precious nukes running. Because: we can not ramp them down at night and ramp them up in the morning. Our nukes were not like the French. They were CHEAP. Another reason to get rid of them.
- we do not know where to put the waste, every place we tried turned out to be unsuited, and thanks to Merkel, we have significant more waste than we would have.
- all nukes were far far beyond their design limits
- there litteraly thousands of little accidents the operators were required to report to the authorities: but they did not
- no one in the population trusted them
- Greifswald nearly exploded a few weeks after the reunion of Germany, and then got permanently shut down
- Mr. Kohl in person, threatened future Ph.D.'s that they would never receive their Ph.D if they published certain research results regarding nuclear waste. For example that dissolving waste in glas blocks and depositing them in salt mines does not work, because of the crystal water stored in the salts, and the radiation breaking the salt's crystals structure. Which leads to salty acids, attacking the glass and leaking out the waste.
- the plant in Biblis for example has 5 million people in a roughly 50km circle around it, and that is one of the plants with the most nuclear incidents that were put under the carpet

People like you - with your knowledge, not your attitude - only know about the post Fukushima Merkel exit from Nukes. Sorry: her fucking decision to keep them running nearly lead to a civil war in Germany. And if she had not back pedaled more or less instantly after Fukushima, we would have had civil war!

On top of that, thanks to Chernobyl, there are significant regions in south Germany still today where mushroom harvesting is forbidden, and hunted game is considered unsafe for human consumption. It has to be double and tripple checked before it is getting a stamp which allows it to be eaten: by the hunter only. It is forbidden to sell them to restaurants.

Many people know that.
Please, get a clue:
Non Germans are absolutely not qualified to have any damn opinion about Germany's nuclear exit: because you know nothing except "oh, Merkel panicked because the Ph.D. in Physics suddenly was scared about radiation".
She was scared that we have civil unrest, general strike, possible civil war, if she did not back pedal to the decision Schroeder, Kuehnast, Tritin - the Greens and Reds we voted into office to EXIT Nuclear power - made before her terms.

What do you think how the population felt? We worked hard for 50 years to get a government set up that leads us:
a) out of the nuclear disaster state Germany was in
b) into the green future we now have missed for 20 years

And then comes Merkel and reverts both?

The only thing Merkel - arguable - managed good were the various refugee crisises.

and SchrÃder considered for treatment as a traitor.
Why? He only became a business in the gas industry. Unfortunately working for a Russian company - who cares? At that time Putin was all the new Angle in Europe. He probably still is in that job, no idea. Schroeder is not a traitor. He did not do anything bad for Germany.
He simply was pissed off that Merkel canceled his life legacy, the two points a) and b) mentioned above.

Regarding nat gas:
Nat Gas in Germany is important for house hold heating in winter. And now we switch rapidly to heat pumps. So: we need more electricity. The increase in gas usage in electricity has not really anything to do with the nuclear exit. They replace coal plants. We had some harsher than usual winters recently.
We successfully exited nukes, now we are exiting coal. And as interims solution, also because of lack of grid scale batteries; we use gas.
A grid that used to be 20% nukes and 80% CO2, with minimal hydro power, is now:
60% renewables and 40% CO2. We reduced our CO2 output by 50% and that while total power production got increased.

While this is all interlocked, one would need a computer game, and play all three scenarios.
1) Early exit and rapid transformation to renewables.
2) The mediocre managed exit and slow transformation until roughly 2023.
3) The non exit and fast transformation to renewables. And exit afterwards. (Would never had happend, we had bombed the nukes)
And all three scenarios with and without the Ukraine war, so we have six scenarios.

Point is: we do not want nukes, we do not want coal, we do not want gas: in that order. We got rid of the greatest evil the fastest. Despite Merkels delays.

If someone is a traitor, knowingly or not: it is Merkel, because it is she who gifted all high tech to China: Transrapid, Wind power, Solar, battery tech. And Wind is the only one left in that regard, where Germany is still big. Well, China has its own success stories unrelated to that. So it is only her fault that we lost the industries, not that China gained them.

Finally regarding nukes: when the Ukraine war broke out, we had still 2 or 3 running. With a mediocre 3% or 4% or electricity contribution to the grid. And the gas problem was house hold heating and not a gas plant running out of gas. Except for one, they were about to shut down soon. That shut down was delayed about 3 or 4 months. I just googled it: it was 3 plants.
The only serious question was: would/should we extend exceptionally the lifetime of the last one?
Decision was no.
i) because all preparations to shut it down were already made
ii) it was - as planned - out of fuel
iii) fuel usually was sourced from: Russia
iv) finding alternatives which could provide fuel rods seemed not realistic
v) the short extension, was ending end of April, mid spring, it was clear afterwards was not much use for it

I really do not get what the nuke misinformation is about.
  - A democratic voted government, made the laws to exit.
  - We worked 50 years to get such a government set up.
  - Because the population wanted the exit

We voted explicitly for the nuke exit. That was the main platform point in the election.

It seems people hate democracy if its results do not fit to their world view??

Germany is not your country: it is our responsibility to run it. So why come from the outside all the time and point at something "seemingly wrong", which you have no clue about?

Some idiot a few days ago claimed "German visitors to the game sin USA were surprised to see that the US has yellow school buses with Air Con". And tried to conclude that German buses have no air con. Fact is: American buses are dirty Diesel buses. That is surprising. And most German regions have no school buses. The kids take a normal bus. With Air Con. And primary school visiting school kids: walk to school. There are only school buses in rare cases, e.g. in the mountains. Germany is different. Does not make any sense to compare one thing that works well (cough cough) in your country, with something that seems different on first glance in Germany.

Which areas in UK has irradiated mushrooms, no one can eat?

Wind industry is going good in Germany.

Solar (and also chips) suffered from many bad decisions. But not just politics, also unions. You can not "create jobs" by forcing a company to "create more jobs than they need". Sooner or later, they simply pull the plug (Infinion etc.). Solar I do not know what failed. We have the raw materials, the industry to make them, the universities to improve them, but nearly no production anymore.

Germany is #4 in production of wind turbines after China, Denmark and the USA: .
4: Germany - ~5% to 7% - Nordex, Enercon, Siemens Energy

I did not address this topic.

Obviously it is a no brainer, who would disagree with that?

The north produces move power than the south.
Or more precisely, the south needs power, and the north has surplus.

I believe that a) Germany gets about 25% of it's electricity still from natural gas
Probably more.

You should have
* at least doubled North South internal inter-connectivity

Yes, working on that. Since decades. So no idea what you argue about. And in another decade: it is finished.

* connected to Scottish and Norwegian wind and pumped storage in ways that bypass Sweden (though going through Denmark is probably fine)
That involves quite a few partners who have to work together. You can check the interconnects on Wikipedia.

* build more PV, wind and storage than you did (even though what you did so far is great)
It is Merkels fault that this broke down.

Problem is that Germany is split up into federal states. And also has a lot of grid operators and power companies.

And: the farmers do not really like it if one wants to pull a line of their fields.

So, it can not be done with a snip of a finger that an offshore wind park gets a high voltage transport grid connection down to Munich. There are literally hundreds of parties involved to get it planned, the land rights secured and finally done.

A Gemini search about "renewable contribution" to electricity in Germany shows this:

So since 3 years, we are consistently around 60% production of electricity by renewables.

Germany is not under the top 10 yet, but we are working on it.

You probably have a point there, but then it would probably more CSU, or?

Well, I do not pay attention, as soon as I have stuff settled, I am back in Thailand.

It is mostly Kohls fault how Germany went downhill (CDU), and later Merkel (CDU).

Fun fact: we are still one of the leading industrial nations. But the society: is a complete mess.