It is the new antivaxx. People who know a little more than the average non-techie person based ofc on mostly secondhand sources amp up the scare factor and get positive feedback in terms of clicks & attention and -- if they graduate to grifting -- ads. Yeah it is all a con stochastic parrots biggest bubble since tulips scorch the planet yadda. Meanwhile materials scientists using it to make better solar panels, plasma physicists using it to enable fusion, medical science unlocking the proteome for personal designer therapies.

People should spend their energy learning how the tools work, and how to use them well.

Your LLM agent and its ancillary vectorDB will remember everything for you. I suggest selfhosting and not using a corporate secondbrain.

This may come across as tongue in cheek but I am deadpan serious.

If I had mod points I would upvote this. Please do yourself a favor and use LibreWolf. It is literally just Mozilla with the adware/telemetry ripped out, uBlock0 preinstalled and good privacy-preserving defaults while maintaining usability. In other words it is what people who donate money and code to Mozilla are trying to help create, namely, a non-commercial open source browser for users by users.

My only complaint is that they will not shut up and take my money

Well, when you're filling the 50-gallon fuel tank in your 7 mpg truck, those per-gallon prices all get whacked with a nasty multiplier. That 20-cent difference costs you an additional $10.

But, all the more reason I love paying $0.05 per kWh for my "fuel".

There are a lot of very smart technologists in China. They've done some amazing things. But I don't understand the obsession that young people in America have about talking up a country that's run by a regime that's a one-party system and a leader who won't step down, and where they're literally using slave labor on some ethnic minorities. And they're also building up a military to invade their neighbor (Taiwan). I realize they claim that territory as theirs, but it's de-facto a separate country. Why all the pro-China stuff? Is it just that it's a communist party that runs it, and Gen Z hates capitalism?

The same happens in Spanish. Many of the Latin America dialects are far closer to how a Spaniard of, say, 1700 sounded than how a Spaniard of today sounds. I understand this is a pretty common phenomenon; colonies tend to preserve the language more carefully, while people in the original country feel more free to let it evolve. Its surprising how well this holds up even when the colonies are subject to more immigration and contact with other languages.

It's not universal, of course. People are complicated.

If you'd like to find a middle ground between the two, try Rust.

Er... you missed the error and the joke. Note the "colleague".

Almost certainly this is correct. There was another vehicle in the same lot that had its back window smashed at the same time. Also we were attending a week long event in Houston, and we found out later that 5 other vehicles in nearby lots had been broken into in the same manner the day before, and there'd also been a theft of a vehicle in the same area on that day.

Well, I wouldn't rob banks or steal, but that's because I'm an idealist and I want to live in a society where we work together for mutual advantage. But I'm also enough of a realist to know that we can't rely on people thinking like me to get rid of crime.

Exactly and we should really PEG the money supply to installed generating capacity as well. That way it can easily expand (or shrink) with the economy and not be so easily tampered with.

Their argument is that the full retail value of the iPhone is counted as part of the US/China trade deficit. I don't think that's correct.

I don't think that's correct. When you buy that phone you pay Apple, not Foxconn, and Applet doesn't send the full amount to China.

Do you have a citation for your assertion that the full retail price is considered as the imported amount?

TIL: English used to have "plumming" to indicate water pipes.

Then some eggheads at Oxford decided that the Latin had a 'b' so English should have a 'b' and only low-brow morons didn't know that so the OED was changed.

So today we still have 'plumbing' because of some dipshits in the 17th Century.

"Trust the Experts".

If they thought there was a good chance they'd get caught, they'd be less likely to commit the crime. This is criminology 101. Right now they absolutely know they won't get caught. A lot of that is because police know that prosecutors won't prosecute certain petty crimes, so the police won't arrest them. Criminals aren't very bright, but word gets around quickly that you can do this kind of stuff and get away with it, and then they do it. We know from evidence that if you enforce (and prosecute) laws, that drops the incidence of people breaking those laws considerably. And then that lower crime rate makes the regular non-criminal feel safer and be more willing to live in a city, and those people bring prosperity, money, and jobs to the community, and that'll get you more tax money to help the people who are in this situation.