Funny you should mention that McKinsey published a paper a few months back concluding that GenAI will take over most of the jobs in America because it was good at doing what McKinsey Associates do. Missed by the authors is that the job of a McKinsey associate is to confidently spout nonsense all day long and that’s actually exactly what chatgpt is programmed to do.

American Psycho (Sam Altman) and his chorus have been hyping AI and the rest of the world’s reaction has ranged from “these guys seem smart and chatgpt is impressive so what do I know?” to “isn’t this guy a bitcoin bro?”

I feel like customer support is one place where AI may actually be used going forward because companies don’t really care if their customers get support. The only wrinkle is that if companies get held to promises the AI makes (there’s that Canada Air incident from last year where the AI offered a refund and the company tried to walk it back).

Naw if they’re publicly bashing it they’ve already dumped on all the downside risk onto their customers and now they’re net short.

Game of Life has cool emergent properties that are a lot more interesting and fun to play with than LLMs. LLMs also have emergent properties like, for instance, failing classification due to the manipulation of individual image pixels.

I suspect Intuit fired those workers for other reasons (free file) and are using AI as an excuse because to admit that free-file is an existential threat to their business is to admit that their company has no long term business prospects.

This is the same middlebrow dismissal that AI advocates have been using for years.

“It’s just a stochastic parrot.” “How do you know that you aren’t just a stochastic parrot?”

Well we do know. There are experts on human cognition. They have been studying it for decades. We may not know enough about it to know how to make a computer do it. But we certainly know enough about it to know when a computer chatbot is not doing it.

The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.

My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.

NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.

Honestly this seems like a way to back-door inject another $800 million into the failing starship program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ

Their new CEO is a McKinsey consultant so this is pretty much guaranteed.

Last recall was also a real recall: to rivet the slipping gas pedal cover down.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.

That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.

If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don’t want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even “expires” the book after so many loans, or “blacks out” or “embargoes” lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).

This is depressing as hell and a statement about the time we live in and the corporate overlords who control our lives.

Jimmy McGee made a great video about it last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoGm8c523M

I mean we’re sitting here on the lemmyverse having a conversation…

But yeah creators should upload to peertube but they won’t get any meaningful viewership there. The only way to break the network affect stranglehold google/youtube has over video content on the internet is making sure that if you do produce that content it’s available via other channels.

Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, [email protected]

“Self driving cars will make the roads safer. They won’t be drunk or tired or make a mistake.”

Self driving cars start killing people.

“Yeah but how do they compare to the average human driver?”

Goal post moving.

Look up “interurban railways”. Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!

When I first started using DDG I would use the bang to get me back into google very often. Now whenever I use a browser or device (mis)configured to use google I feel like a guy who accidentally launched and tried to use IE8.

I switched from Alta Vista at Google in the early 2000s because the Alta Vista index was stale and full of spam. Google search tools were comparatively primitive (av let you do things like word stem search) but the results were really good.