What I observe is that computers gained the ability to say "maybe", as you say, but the vast majority of humans still view computers as infallible processors of information. Most people have learned the idea of "garbage in / garbage out" so they understand that if you put the wrong information into a computer, it'll produce the wrong output. But very few people understand that even after being trained on completely correct information, an LLM will often generate incorrect output. And the people pushing AI aren't doing a very good job of educating the masses. Companies like Google just plop an AI-generated response at the top of your search results as the de-facto answer to your query. Like all other societal changes, it will take *years* for this information to gradually be accepted by the majority of the public. Remember when cell phones became ubiquitous and we enduring a good 10 years of people taking phone calls in movie theatres until most people started silencing their phones? That's how long it'll take the public to adapt to the dangers of AI.

I work in a factory where the general laborers make a couple bucks above minimum wage, but we also have skilled trades doing some manufacturing work, such as CNC milling. Those skilled trades make about twice the hourly rate of the general laborer, and it takes about 2 years of extra school, and the math you do in the college courses isn't any more complicated than high school math. Anyone who graduated high school could do it. And skilled trade education here (Ontario, Canada) is so subsidized that your entire out-of-pocket expense is going to be less than $1000, and you have options where you can keep working during your schooling so you won't starve to death. And we're always trying to hire the skilled trades.

So why don't these general laborers see the writing on the wall and double their income in two years? Some people just lack all motivation, and aren't thinking past their plans for Saturday. One supervisor said to me, "look, most of these guys, if you gave them a dollar, would spend it in a vending machine two minutes later." Another supervisor said to me, "one of the guys came up to me and complained about the new pension plan..." This was a plan similar to a 401k where you put in up to 3% of your pay and the company matches that 100%, and it was completely voluntary. The supervisor said, "I told him this was like you give me a dollar and I give you back two dollars, and he said 'no, this is like I give you a dollar and you give me an apple tree. I don't want an apple tree. If I join, the company is taking my money, and if I don't join, they're stealing those matching dollars from me."

It's hard for me to relate to people with those kind of problems.

I think it's about removing PVC from a mixed waste stream, turning it into something valuable enough to sell, and then you also have a PVC-free waste stream which makes it easier to recycle (or just burn) because it doesn't have toxic chlorine in it (the C in PVC).

Through most of my life that has been true. Examples include: the right tends to be religious where the left tends to be secular, and the climate deniers are mostly on the right. We started to see some cracks in that with anti-vax stuff because the original anti-vax people were mostly upper-middle class liberal women in the Seattle area... kind of modern hippies. Then with COVID that switched sides and everyone liberal was suddenly pro-vax and conservatives were anti-vax (reality still on the side of liberals at that point). But the masking was weird. I dug into a lot of the supposed "follow the science" studies showing that masks were effective, and I can tell you that these claims, particularly when it comes to cloth masks, were overstated. N95 masks? Absolutely. Surgical masks? Probably. Cloth masks? Not so much. But pointing this out got you branded anti-masker by the left. But it's not like the right had gained a handle on reality at this point.

But now the left has gone to absolute crazy town. A liberal will support equality for women (excellent, I'm on board) and will actively criticize Christian religions for oppression of women (that's fair, even though there's been a lot of progress there) but here's the thing... the left is politically aligned with Muslim groups so they won't publicly criticize the Muslim religion for their abhorrent treatment of women. In fact a prominent women's rights campaigner from Iran was protested when she went to speak at a university in the UK, not just by the Iranian students' association, but by the LGBTQ group on campus (in solidarity). And then there's the assertion by the left that it's fair to have biological males who went through male puberty competing in women's sports. That's as anti-science and anti-reality as you can get. Finally, just look at the 1619 project, which is almost completely a work of fiction. Even black historians have said it's simply not true. We have documentary evidence in the form of personal letters and such which contradicts that narrative.

So no, liberals can no longer claim that reality has a liberal bias. The left has gone so far left that the rest of us can't see them anymore. Which makes them pretty similar to the right in my opinion. Reality doesn't want anything to do with crazy.

94 billion is a lot. It's still in the top 10 of US exports by category and check out the other top exports by category. With the exception of the top category (crude oil, etc.) all of it is stuff that falls into the description I gave above. And the reason for oil exports to be so high is a quirk of geology. The US is the main producer of "light/sweet" crude which has the benefit of being very easy to refine, so it gets sold on the world market at high profit. The US imports "heavy/sour" crude, from the middle east, Canada and Venezuela and refines that stuff because it's cheap and because the US petroleum industry is one of the few in the world with the expertise required to refine it, and because much of the existing infrastructure was already built to refine that stuff.

You're exactly right. This also has to do with tech in general. Since the late 90's it has relied on cheap capital. Think Google, Amazon, Uber, etc. These companies funded growth by borrowing money with very low (nearly zero) interest rates for decades. Around the time of the pandemic the interest rates started to rise. There was a temporary bump in demand for tech during the first couple years of the pandemic, but then demand fell back down. Tech companies were left with bloated staff counts and increasingly expensive borrowing costs. Every tech company realized it needed to switch from a growth mindset into a profitable mindset. Monetization tactics increased, and staff counts were cut. A major component of the reason Twitter got sold to Musk was because of these very facts. The owners knew Twitter had to start being profitable, but they didn't have the stomach to do it themselves, so they sold it and let Musk do it. But it had to happen either way. That cheap capital isn't returning. It was a demographic blip caused by such a large generation (the boomers) in the peak of their retirement savings years flooding the capital market with money and hunting for any reasonable return. That reality is gone now.

I've been on here a long time, and the slashdot crowd is full of people from across the political spectrum, and even people who don't fit neatly into any of the boxes. Any given story might only attract a particular segment of that population who actually cares about it, which gives the impression of it leaning one way or the other, and some stories attract the bots and extra-national troll farms, but the long-time users are quite varied in their opinions.

For anyone who thinks the US doesn't manufacture anything... the largest US export segment is actually aerospace parts, which are expensive and high quality. In fact that's what the US generally manufactures for export: things that require a high degree of skill, education, and importantly stuff that relies on a trusted supply chain. Think pharmaceuticals, where you very much care about the pedigree of the ingredients that go into them. The same with aircraft parts... you want to make sure they're not made out of recycled pop cans. In our rush to bash the US for "not making anything" we should keep in mind what the US actually does make, and why the world likes to buy those things from the US in particular.

That's interesting. For as long as I've been in the industry, programmers and IT people have tended to be libertarian, not socialist, though the GPL group has always had that scent of communism.

There are a few professions where locking yourself away in a closet at home and focusing for a whole day are productive (programming comes to mind) but the vast majority of work-from-homers are doing essentially administrative and support tasks, and need to be responsive all day. We had enough stories of what these people were really doing while at home... running errands, shopping, going through the drive thru, etc. And collecting a pay cheque for it. You can only be caught red handed so many times.

It seems to me that the information like this belongs in training data, not in a prompt. Certainly it requires a very large context window.

I guess I did have one weird story from a Hertz dealer. They were attached to a Dodge dealership in a town we were passing through on vacation, and I had called ahead to a mechanic to get some emergency service done. We wanted to book another van for the night so we could make our plans for the evening. The Hertz outlet said they had no vans available, and even after telling them my sob story about being on vacation they said there was no way... they just didn't have one to rent.

I decide to go online to one of those travelocity-type sites, and I search for vans for rent in the city, and it comes up with this same Hertz outlet, and it says they have a van available and it lets me book one. I go to pickup the van, and everything goes normally... they give me the keys, etc. While I'm filling out paperwork, a guy comes in behind the desk, calls someone on a phone, and says, "oh, yeah... thanks for that loaner van. We had an internet order come in, and you can't turn those down." He was apparently talking to the Dodge dealership they were attached to, and had borrowed a loaner van from them.

I thought, "Wow, you won't turn down an internet order, but you didn't lift a finger to help out a family in need while they were on vacation? Nice." Live and learn.

I mostly just use Enterprise. If you need it they'll pick you up from the mechanic or your house for no extra charge. Rates are competitive. Never had a problem with extra or invisible charges, etc. Very professional. But I'm not someone who is destructive with my rental cars so I've honestly never had a problem with any of the big companies, including Hertz.

Almost anything an executive says is either to raise their share price, or to suppress wages. I don't blame them... that's their job. But keep that in mind when you listen to what they have to say. Telling employees that your skills won't be worth anything a few decades from now is just "be thankful you have any job". Do keep learning, but don't undervalue your experience. Experienced employees are paid the most for a reason.

It's just odd that this is on Slashdot. It's a simple public infrastructure engineering problem, like the kind we have all the time.