• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

help-circle







  • I don’t know the source, so it’s hard for me to comment but logically the problem as stated is plausible. i.e. legacy debt preventing the move to more efficient methods.

    However, the conclusion i.e. therefore replace humans with humanoid robots does not. And then tacking on unionization is just a different subject altogether. You can staff some aspects of a factory with robots and the human’s work shifts from production to maintenance. I’ve talked to automation people and robots can be very problematic and something “advanced” I would imagine much more so.

    Although not recent, some referred to the robots as “Bob” blind one-arm builders. If very well calibrated and designed for a specific task, they can be ok, except when they go wrong. To think some “AI” driven general purpose robot is going to substantially replace human labor any time soon… I very seriously doubt that. Especially with that kook as leadership.


  • In my understanding, derivatives amplify the problems and risks. Underlying that are the money people who push on these systems as hard as they can and exploit every angle. Along the lines of pushing the boundaries, the practice of brokers “loaning” shares seems like another place that’s bound to cause issues at its limits. I really wish the govt would step in and impose much stricter regulation. I’d like to trust that buying stock is investing in a company rather than feeling like the stock market is a school of small fish swimming with sharks who cheat as much as they believe they can get away with. If the focus was on dividends vs growth, I think we’d be better off. Maybe I am wrong but that’s how I see it.

    I think of it like network security. Anything you do not explicitly disallow will be used, tried, and used in ways you probably didn’t think of. It isn’t a matter of expecting people to do the right (or legal) thing, most will but it’s a surety that some will not. That’s normal and why security is a process and systems have to adapt over time in response.



  • The great thing about the stock market compared to other investments like crypto is that stocks are based on the inherent value of the business they represent. Stocks are based on financial fundamentals. You can believe in those investments because they are based on something real and not simply rampant speculation. For example.

    Tesla. Worth more than most of the rest of the car market combined because… reasons?

    Paypal. Lost 80% of its value starting in July 2021 over a year and never recovered because of terrible problems? Huge losses? Nope, because it “only” grew at 8-9%.

    2008 US housing rated as “AAA” investment i.e. “good as cash” based on actual trash.


  • Calling LLMs, “AI” is one of the most genius marketing moves I have ever seen. It’s also the reason for the problems you mention.

    I am guessing that a lot of people are just thinking, “Well AI is just not that smart… yet! It will learn more and get smarter and then, ah ha! Skynet!” It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what LLMs are doing. It may be a partial emulation of intelligence. Like humans, it uses its prior memory and experiences (data) to guess what an answer to a new question would look like. But unlike human intelligence, it doesn’t have any idea what it is saying, actually means.





  • SEO is of itself is not all bad. Content creators need to do certain things, which do little directly for the consumer, but help the algo understand what the content is and how the owner would prefer it be seen. For example, something simple like the title attribute of a web page tells the search engine how it should label the content in the search results. That’s SEO and generaly a good thing for everyone.

    As you say, the “please like, subscribe, comment and say a prayer to the algo” annoyance is just what we have to accept for free content on these platforms. It’s the cost of anyone being able to upload video to YT.

    Where it goes wrong imho, is filling the world with essentially meaningless machine produced content to aid in the rankings. This isn’t new with AI btw. People have been using article “spinning” or outsourced garbage content creation for years or decades to do the same and potentially even better than what AI does. In the old days building thousands of links from garbage content to your content in order to have the algo see the links as “votes” for the supposed quality of the content. Those of us who ran forums saw this all the time.




  • "But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to special counsel Jack Smith’s effort to bring Trump to trial this year. "

    I hate it when the media does this. It makes it read as if Jack Smith is the one with the issue. Jack Smith represents “the people” i.e. US citizens. I suggest:

    “But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to US voters who may use the trial results to determine how they will vote. Trump is accused of attempting to disenfranchise voters by inspiring a mob of his supporters to invade the capitol on January 6, 2021, attempting to hang Vice President Pence on the gallows they constructed and delay the vote count. While this type of trial will always take time to run its course, the court has now introduced additional delay in order to determine if the US has a president or a king but will likely result in no trial before the election.”


  • “The decisions by Alabama Fertility Services and Mobile Infirmary come a day after the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system said in a statement that it was pausing IVF treatments so it could evaluate whether its patients or doctors could face criminal charges or punitive damages.”

    So it is stopping IVF in this state and will have untold repercussions based on the ruling “Unborn children are ‘children’” which has potentially complicated and unpredictable outcomes. You are entitled to your opinion of course but I think you are quite wrong about this being overblown. It is huge for many.

    "More than 9 million babies have been born using assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization. "

    “A cycle of in vitro fertilization can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000”

    For people currently using IVF, this is probably a very stressful time.