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Comment This is NOT government control. It's much worse. (Score 2) 113

This is a scheme to permit a gang of billionaires to get control of yet another opinion shaping machine at a 50% discount by using taxpayer dollars to buy half the company ownership with NONVOTING SHARES.

If it were government control there's a small chance of getting control of the government back out of the hands of these griftocrats.

Comment Re:THe perfect being the enemy of the good (Score 1) 54

It is unrealistic to expect perfection however does anyone really doubt that GPT-4 will be less biased and more accurate than human medical personnel?

The question I am asking is "Is GPT-4 more or less accurate now then my current Primary Care Physician at; answering my medical questions with answers tailored to her experience with me as a patient and as a person?".

That answer is no.

Currently I can choose my PCP. It looks like In the very near future I won't be able to know whether my PCP works for a company that considers patient communication a lesser priority in her workflow and forces her to use GPT-4 or work elsewhere..

My recent experience with internet searches has convinced me that these large language models are pissing in the well of technical communications that they and we humans are drinking from. As their use becomes more widespread more and more of the sites that search engines scan will have been generated by GPT-4 clones and trying to find trustworthy results on the internet will be like trying to find distinctive vocals in a world of auto-tuned recordings.

Comment Re:Make banks pay cash for coins without hassle (Score 1) 203

... you have to count those quarters and put them in rolls before they will take those quarters out of the rolls, run them through a coin counting machine ...

I thought they just weighed the rolls instead.

I'll admit I hadn't considered that possibility since I was told they had a coin counting machine. Even so, if they can weigh rolls, they can weigh piles of unwrapped coins as long as all the coins in the pile are the same.

Comment Make banks pay cash for coins without hassle (Score 5, Insightful) 203

Let's say you've been (for years) throwing your quarters in a bucket for later use and have accumulated 1000 bucks worth. If your credit union is like mine, you have to count those quarters and put them in rolls before they will take those quarters out of the rolls, run them through a coin counting machine, If you want to spend those quarters for groceries, Coinstar wants to charge you over a hundred dollars to accept your quarters. If you want to take them to a casino and gamble with them in a "quarter machine" the casino will limit them amount they will take, run through their counting machine, and convert to a paper ticket to use in their machine. If the organization that runs the banks thinks banks need more quarters, it should tell the banks to make it less costly in time or labor to exchange those quarters for other currency or deposit them.

Comment Re:Expected Values (Score 1) 103

I agree that 8 deaths sounds extremely low. And one of those 8 had a 50% chance of having caught the virus BEFORE he started at Amazon. He started showing symptoms 5 days after he started and the median incubation period is 5 days. On the other hand, The source of the 8 deaths figure is an unofficial tally by concerned employees. Amazon isn't releasing any numbers and I suspect that the actual number is much higher than 8 but still not higher than would be expected among a demographically matched group of American residents.

Comment Re:Expected Values (Score 4, Interesting) 103

From their financial filings, Amazon had just over 800,000 employees last year and it's probably much higher now given that more people are shopping online. .

Aren't you assuming ALL of Amazon's employees work in warehouses? The best figure I got (well actually the only figure which I got by asking Google) for the number of Amazon Fulfillment employees is 250,000 globally.

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