No, it's a function of nukes. Combined with a population who were too busy watching TV to want to fight wars.

Democracies have never had a problem with war. It's just a matter of psyching up the Normies to demand to go and die in the trenches, which was easy in an era where government controlled the media. Normies love war because it gives their life meaning for a while.

But major powers can't fight each other when it results in the complete destruction of both sides with nukes. Unless democracy gives them a government so suicidal that it's quite willing to see itself destroyed or actively wants to see it destroyed.

Corporations, of course, don't give a damn about whether America or Russia gets nuked so long as they make a profit out of it.

"Skynet thought it could send Terminators into the past to save itself, but MechaHitler had other ideas."

We started watching a Terminator movie recently and it was so bad we didn't even finish. Wikipedia claimed it was such a flop that it killed the franchise.

Cameron should really let it stay dead at this point. Unless he's going to write a movie about how UBI is just a plot to keep the masses docile until Gates and co can release the Terminators to wipe out everyone who isn't economically productive.

Youkay's "right wing" "Conservative" government passed this law.

Youkay's "left wing" "Labour" party wanted the law to be even more oppressive and now they're the government.

Two cheeks of the same ass.

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

It is pretty hard not to respond to the pure BS that anti-EV types spout. I know it rubs you the wrong way, but the alternative is to let people who don't know what they're talking about dominate public perceptions.

I wouldn't claim EVs are for everyone, but for many of us they are extremely convenient and economical to run. The corner cases where ICE is clearly more convenient are not a concern for everyone, and not a concern for a multi-car household considering making one of their cars an EV. We have an EV and a plug-in hybrid that runs as an EV probably 80% of the time. We hit the gas station with the plug-in about once every six weeks.

Not necessary. I could clearly hear Gene Wilder's voice as I read it.

I heard an economist pose this question once. Why do companies have employees at all? Why not use contractors? Then you could hire just as much labor as you need, when you need it, then not pay for labor when you didn't need it.

His reason was the costs involved with finding contractors then negotiating agreements with them. I think there are other reasons, but for sure that's part of it.

But I think technology is pushing us into an intermediate position between the semi-permanent, often lifelong employment of a generation ago, and a world of contracting for everything. I think this is evidenced by a pattern I have seen where companies who are currently successful lay people off. It's not just in the tech world, this is happening in the service industry too.

When technology allows you to monitor the financial performance and cost of every department in an enterprise down to a fare-thee-well, it's easy to identify people you don't need so much in the upcoming quarters and let them go. Then with Internet hiring and automated application screening it's easy to hire those positions back in a year.

Now there's a lot of holes in this rosy (for management) scenario. Automated application screening is dog shit, for example. But you can do it, and you will find people; probably not the *best* people, but then you'll never know, in fact *nobody* will ever know. People will never get to know their jobs well, but again you won't ever know what you're missing. Most of all you will never have anything resembling loyalty from the people you hire; young people these days look at every job as transient. But you can't *measure* loyalty and in most cases, job competence with any precision. But you can track costs down to the penny.

In this case this wasn't about AI underperforming what was promised, but AI performance being exaggerated to cover the company's tracks as it offshored jobs to India. The intent was to use AI as an excuse to let Australian workers go, then to quietly replace them with Indian ones.

I don't think AI promises are "empty", but there is a lot of irrational enthusiasm out there getting ahead of the technology. I think for sure there are plenty of technical failures arising from technlogical hubris and naivite. And I think more instances where the technology is blamed for company failures or unpopular policies -- that practice goes back to the very early era of "computerizing" things like invoicing, so I don't see why this round of technological change would be any different.

But for sure, AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Past forms of automation haven't ended employment; they were just ways of increasing worker productivity. Companies still hired workers until the next marginal dollar spent wouldn't bring in a marginal dollar of revenue. But this time may be different. AI is replacing human thinking. It may be mediocre at thinking, but so are most humans. It may be an opportunity for companies to leverage a small number of humans with advanced cognitive skills, but I think for many companies the siren call of mediocre but really cheap will be too hard to resist.

The, uh, $400-ish cost of buying two new copies of Windows 11 Pro which are only needed because Microsoft decided to refuse to run on perfectly good older hardware?

We have two Windows 10 PCs which run TurboTax (ours and the mother-in-law's). They run Windows 10 fine, their performance is OK, there's no reason they couldn't continue to run Windows.

Except Microsoft says they can't because Muh TPM.

So our Windows 11 upgrade is going to cost about $2,000 to buy two new PCs. Running Windows 11 Pro just so we can reliably turn off the AI crap.

And yes, we have Linux machines too but those two run Windows because they need to run some Windows software which may or may not work in Wine.

Hopefully these will be the last Windows PCs we ever buy.

Having spent way too much time with AI over the last 6 months trying to live in the future, I'm thinking a new trend is going to be people thinking that average human beings who might have otherwise been there friends are going to be considered terribly boring, needy and inadequate.

That is, most people won't bother with friendships at all and get all they need from AI. Many people will decide that besides having children, what do you need really need another human for anyway?

I was recently in Berlin and we hired a tour guide. The guy was knowledgeable, and friendly, but I just couldn't help being ashamed of thinking, this guy is just an underpowered LLM fine-tuned on Berlin. I felt super bad about those thoughts, but I'm sure there are a lot of people in the future who will think that about everyone.

I think this gets to the old debate about language learning vs acquisition. If you learn the gender of the noun âoe MÃdchenâ, that will prevent you from making errors, which is a good thing. But the language acquisition approach doesnâ(TM)t worry about you making mistakes. If youâ(TM)re exposed enough to the word being used correctly, âoedie MÃdchenâ eventually just sounds wrong. You will have acquired the gender of the noun without technically learning it. You donâ(TM)t even have to understand that nouns have gender.

It sounds great, but there is no way youâ(TM)re going to acquire enough German this way playing a game a few minutes a day to have a functional level of German in a short time, say for an upcoming trip. The company isnâ(TM)t as up front about this as they should be, but common sense should tell you that.

Duolingo is a way of putting time youâ(TM)re spending on useless phone activities like playing Candy Crush towards something useful. After say two years spending fifteen minutes a day on Duolingo French, youâ(TM)ll be able to read things like the train schedules in France, get the gist of simple newspaper articles, understand people who speak slowly and distinctly about things like directions to tourist sites. In other words a useful amount of French. Youâ(TM)ll have a leg up (I suppose) on more intensive ways of learning French.

But the idea you will reach B2 proficiency with Duolingo seems far fetched to me, given that Iâ(TM)m working on B1 and doubt I can pass the A2 exam. Youâ(TM)ll have covered the material by the end of the course, sure, but at this point itâ(TM)s pretty clear to me that actually mastering it requires actually communicating with fluent French speakers.

Which is fine. Nobody is stopping you from using more effective ways of learning. Duolingoâ(TM)s job, and its economic incentive, is to keep you engaged. This is why course content quality is important, and building courses out of AI slop is counterproductive. As a game, Duolingo isnâ(TM)t that much fun that youâ(TM)d play it even if the content is bad.

It is literally a summarization model. Its context window is the text to summarize. It was literally trained on being given text as a context, and summaries as outputs.

Alfalfa and Spanky had the he-man woman-hater's club. We have these two atrocities.
bleah.