With respect (or disrespect) to LLMs: Nearly all AI gets its training data in unethical ways. It’s results are unreliable and require careful validation.

There are other types of specialized AI that can do other kinds of tasks well. It is good at certain kinds of medical diagnosis (in combination with human doctors). It can solve some problems that involve lots of complex iteration, like how to fold proteins, create new molecules, or assemble structures. There are a lot of potential uses.

Yeah, it makes me happy that he doesn’t care and doesn’t have to. He’s living life on his own terms and seems to be having a great time of it.

Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don’t really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.

I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.

One of the very few times I’ve gotten goosebumps was from the last bit of dialog in the first Terminator movie. Sarah Connor is sitting in her jeep at a gas station with her German Shepherd. Sarah: What did he just say? Gas Station Attendant: He said there’s a storm coming. Sarah (looking off into the distance): I know.

Denali loves to cuddle. If his humans are busy, he always has his trusty koala.

I’m sure he wouldn’t mind more excitement in his life, but he seems happy. We adore him and he adores us.

In modern America this is not a hypothetical situation.

I think it helps to clarify that we are talking about the current US Progressive movement and not just the abstract definitions of the terms. US Progressives have non-economic goals (restoring and expanding civil rights), but they generally agree that society should take care of everyone, not just the rich. That means providing at least food, housing, and health care without regard to income. There are a lot of different ideas about how that could be done. Everything from a Basic Living Stipend within a largely capitalist economy to a adopting a fully socialist, or even communist, economic system.

Vitamix blenders truly are in a class by themselves. As far as I know, they’re the only blenders that include cooling fans to keep the motor from overheating. And if you do somehow manage to overload it, the thing automatically shuts off until it has cooled down to the point where it’s safe to run again. They’re virtually impossible to damage, short of active vandalism.

Their motto really should be “Fuck the worst case scenario.”

I’ve been using Aegis for several years now without any problems. It replaced the Google Authenticator seamlessly.

CVS will synchronize your prescriptions if you ask. I suspect other large pharmacies will also.

I’m in my mid-60’s, although I haven’t entirely accepted that yet. My recovery rate hasn’t changed much, if any, but I do get more minor injuries than I used to. My joints are not as forgiving as they were 40 years ago.

Honestly, my answer is zero. It’s a rare day when I click on one.

I particularly dislike talking videos. I would always prefer to read instead of hearing someone talk.

Epubor Ultimate is the only solution I know of that was updated to handle Amazon’s change from earlier this year. It’s a commercial package, but worth the money. It took them a couple of months to work around the last changes, but they did it. I expect they will continue to do that as needed going forward.

Our tax dollars are being spent on corruption, parades, and “cool” special operations.

These are all valid questions and I think a lot of good ways to think about them have been presented.

I suspect that the reason a lot of people are grappling with this right now has to do with the bizarre social and political environment of the moment. When large portions of the population have chosen to ignore objective reality, and make up their own, you can’t help but wonder if it’s all just arbitrary. However, there is an answer to that, and the answer is no, it is not. Within our perceptual reality, however it exists, things do behave in consistent ways and can be observed independently of belief. Those who attempt to ignore that do ultimately fail.

Our lack of knowledge about the underlying nature of our reality does not change the way it behaves for all of us.

This triggered me. :-}

Meshtastic uses end-to-end encryption, without any central authority. There are circumstances under which that encryption can be compromised.

The strongest thing Meshtastic has going for it right now is obscurity. No one is likely to be looking at it, to say nothing of tracking and decrypting it. You can pretty much guarantee that your cell is being identified if you attend any kind of protest. There’s also a good chance that all of its voice and digital traffic is being intercepted and analyzed. Until and unless Meshtastic becomes far more common, it provides a good alternative.

This is the perfect time for LLM-based AI. We are already dealing with a significant population that accepts provable lies as facts, doesn’t believe in science. and has no concept of what hypocrisy means. The gross factual errors and invented facts of current AI couldn’t possibly fit in better.

That’s the beauty of modern corporate capitalism. The upper tiers of management are shielded from any responsibility by their subordinates. Their subordinates then have a strong incentive to shift the responsibility elsewhere so it doesn’t fall on them. Paying someone else to take the responsibility does not actually benefit the company, except may be in the short-term, but it does benefit the people who get to make the decisions about it.

And if the service provider really screws up, and loses too many contracts, they either sell out to another company just like themselves, make further profit, and go back to doing what they were doing, or they shut down, form a new company, and go back to what they were doing.

The only people who can be hurt by all of this are the regular employees, who lose their jobs as part of the cycle, and, occasionally, the shareholders, who are never adequately represented by the board. It’s a prefect system where bad decisions only affect those who have no part in them.

“The Cloud” just means “someone else’s sever”. A lot of people who should know better just don’t get that.

It’s entertaining to take almost any internal memo or external press release and substitute “someone else’s server” every time “the cloud” appears. They all suddenly look insane.