People don't read a lot of things that they agree to, especially if it's 20,000 words in a postage stamp-sized text box on the new toy they just turned on. However, anybody who's not an idiot realizes that most everything in an agreement that they haven't read is against their interests, and plans accordingly. I personally always look for binding arbitration agreements and make sure to opt out of those whenever possible.

Oddly enough, the Anthropic TOS and privacy policy actually aren't all that obtuse and can be skimmed in a few minutes. They make it clear that they'll be looking for problems with what you upload and what kinds of problems those might be. Like I said, you can easily avoid all that by using a paper notebook for your diary.

If you look at Anthropic's terms of service and privacy policy, it clearly states that they can look at your content in order to enforce their usage policy. You have to agree to this when you set up an account or use their service. Given that this is an AI company, you can bet your content will be screened for violations more efficiently than if humans were involved at every step.

If she really didn't mean for anyone else to view it, she would have scribbled it down in a notebook instead of uploading into a cloud owned and policed by strangers and their robots.

It's a paper copy of underground utility records and a backhoe.

The criminals are those that make off with billions in crypto heist, ransomware, or blatant Trump corruptions; not people hiding in the dark to steal your purse at knife point (does that even still happen ?). And a tiny solar LED with a motion detector is enough to get you to find your keys.

Probably the next code that it outputs will be:

My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

The conversation only seems unnatural because they didn't use the right avatar.

If you choose the "Max Headroom" avatar, then everything will look and feel exactly as you would expect. Moreover, the dystopian vibe he gives off will be a perfect fit with the current state of the world.

I'm like you, the reference *is* Windows Explorer, out of Win2K. After that they started adding tons of garbage (the ribbon !!!). Fav function was Ctrl-+ to optimize columns widths. But I digress, the folder view panel of Dolphin, combined with disabled folders in the main panel does pretty much the same things. And things like having the Konsole underneath is fantastically productive. The fact the it is highly customizable is a big plus, for instance you can add your own menus to the right-click with a moderate amount of digging. No, I'm not going back to Windows after 25 years !

I'm typing this on the 2010 laptop I use daily. I just disable all animations in KDE advanced settings. Then it is snappy and always responds instantly. I have no problem doing raw image edition, even video edition.

Dolphin is pretty good. And colleagues are always amazed you can just F4 to get a console in the same dir as the file you are editing. It can even work as a full fledged programming project editor, although that is a beast to configure properly and IMHO not really its purpose.

I started on KDE with gentoo in around 2001 but some things in Gentoo I never understood (USE variables ?). I started using Kubuntu in 2006 on a tower PC, then successfully cloned the disk to a laptop in 2010, then upgraded said laptop to Neon, then a few years later 'downgraded' it back to Kubuntu (because some things [drivers?] in Neon were just too old; that was a beast to do without losing the OS nor the data). I'm still typing this on the 'same' OS I installed in 2006 !
What I like about KDE is the ability to customize.

So, if you ask the various chatbots who you should vote for for the midterms, what do they answer ?

So, then when do we vote and elect this high IQ president ?!?

Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

C++ is just as much of a sieve as C, only more obtuse.

"Object models" are an anti-feature.