Deterministic Siri, or any voice assistant, is useful. AI wibbly thing may or may not be depending on the task.

For me Siri has been a way to send and read messages, to control smart devices in the house (bulbs, sockets etc.), play music in the car, navigate and set alarms/timers. Within the last couple of years it also became a way to run shortcuts and control my car. All of these are deterministic tasks - I'm completely happy learning set phrases that make them work, and I truly hope they don't drop this level of certainty in favour of AI 'deduction' all the time. They need to improve it certainly, but at its heart these commands remain deterministic.


The freestyle AI wibbly bit I don't dismiss, but am much more cautious about. I was researching solar panels and had a quite long and 'detailed' conversation with an AI assistant about them, quite informative. But you always have to remember that what it's doing is reading out other people's articles and search results, then paraphrasing them to sound conversational. In itself it doesn't know, and if you treat the information accordingly then it's good to get rough to medium level impressions. If had to sacrifice one for the other though - I'd pick improving the deterministic side every time.

How very postmodern of you.

Then again, I'm going to venture a guess that your kind of people are those who denigrate law & order generally, and wonder why we even have borders, man.

You've overlooked the obligatory Microsoft- or Windows-bashing.

Remember when iot was 'Winblows' or 'WIndoze'? And those responses to questions about software that did-not-exist in the FOSS universe, as if berating you for doing things that could not be done on Linux (BCD being the red-headed stepchild of FOSS at the time) was useful.

Sure felt good, though. For them. I lost interest when my Novell answers were greeted with 'NT Server roools!' drivel. You can imagine the catcalls for Token-Ring help.

Sorry - mistake. Have driven an EV since 2018, in the interests of accuracy. It was a 2014 EV that I bought second hand in 2018.

I mean - I live just out to the west of London, have driven an EV since 2014, do the commuting distance and times you're describing and the use case is absolutely perfect for an EV. I'd be surprised if they're doing 100 each way and then 50 when at home on the same day, but even if they are that's doable. Charge up overnight on cheap rates - all good.

Have saved hugely by doing this.

THis is true. You also get a better understanding for AI's limitations, familiarity of where to be skeptical, and a feel for when a context is losing its mind. I like to put it this way: nobody who can't outthink an AI should be using an AI for anything important.

Gross expansion of federal power over constitutionally-protected power of the states.

Obamacare ITSELF wasn't the problem; it wasn't even a terrible idea (as many democrats at the time pointed out, it was basically the same program Romney (a republican) had established in Massachusetts previously).

There would have been absolutely nothing wrong with 50 different states implementing exactly the same program. That would have been fine.

No, the problem was that there is NO CONSTITUTIONAL power of the federal government to dictate health care insurance. None. This was the GROSS overreach, if that's not too subtle a point for you to comprehend.

In fact, there's that pesky 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"

It hurtss uss when our echo chamber is broken open. It BURNS! It BURNS!

FTL drives are stupid and dumb. From there on, interstellar Sci-Fi is all stupid and dumb, and you either come for the story, or you come for the lulz. 'Believable' is something i define as 'willing to suspend disbelief...

But I mostly go for the popcorn. So long as the flick isn't dependent on gore and woke fantasy I'm probably ok.

BTW, you gotta go see EPIC. It is.

Concerts are too expensive for me.

I've ripped my CDs in several formats. And held in several different spaces, including local.

Buying more CDs at yard sales etc. is my filling in the library. Of course desirable music is harder and harder to find, but I had a substantial library before streaming was possible.

But lots of us do not want to bother with ripping media to be enable it for our portable use, with the device of our choice.

Perhaps what Spotify has figured out is that I, for one, do not like what they *want* me to like. I let DJ X choose sometimes, and the selections are bizarre. They are selling me either what they have, of what they can sell cheap. I wonder of the Beatles catalog gets more revenue per play than today's new cute saccharin.

It wouldn't be news if you looked at their terms of service -- which you should. The ToS explicitly say they use a combination of automated systems, human review, and reports to identify and investigate violations of their usage terms, including violence, abuse, fraud, impersonation, disinformation, foreign influence campaigns , abusive sexual content, and academic dishonesty. This includes "anonymous" sessions that are saved for a minimum of 30 days. You have no expectation of privacy from the provider's compliance teams.

This is *absolutely* standard among the major online players. So why not use a local AI workstation with a couple of big-ass GPU cards in it to run the campaign? That's what they *should* have done. But the major online players like ChatGPT and Claude are much better at realistic content generation than the widely available local models you can run.

What they should have done is design and run the compaign on a local AI workstation, and used the local workstation to generate prompts they could feed into burner accounts on public services like ChatGPT and Claude. But they got lazy and ran the *whole* operation in ChatGPT, right in plain fiew of the OpenAI compliance teams the ToS they evidently didn't read would have told them were there. They even did *performance reviews* in the same account.

Remember folks, these "spooks" are just mid-level paper-pushers in an opaque communist bureacuracy. You can never discount inertia in such an environment. Because this was something new, they might even have had trouble getting the purchase of some high end GPUs approved.

It's already there for iOS. On iOS: Settings->->Personal information then Date of birth and Age Range for Apps.

For family, it's Settings->Family->->Apple Account->'Age range for apps'

I don't hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won't fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn't be let anywhere near power.

Personally, I see Trump as a symptom, no much cause.

In the same sense Bush II was the result of Clinton, and Obama was the result of Bush II, Trump I was the normal backlash against Obama's overreach. Think about what it means that Trump - a pretty poor president the FIRST time - was selected a SECOND time by a majority of Americans?
Biden's admin was seen as so grossly partisan, so sclerotic that every single demographic except white women swung rightward.

(Some of us might suggest that the vote was ultimately cultural, not political; an instinctive revulsion at the Left's very Gramsci-an post-covid victorylap/overreach into even redefining reality - what is a woman, indeed?)

The result is militant ossification on the left in turn. The centrists have no voice. I'm not sure there are many actual centrists left.

Corporate media is no longer an oppositional 4th estate; they've picked a side. (They're oppositional NOW because their side is out of power. That's contextual not fundamental.) I *much* prefer a media that tears apart everything a president does than the craven lickspittles running cover for the wealthy and powerful.

I saw an anti-ICE post the other day "Eisenhower deported 1.3 million illegal immigrants with only 750 agents"
Yes that's because in 1950, the statement "Illegals should be deported" would rank up there with "The sun rises in the East" and "Water is wet" as so obvious NOBODY would have disagreed.

Yet - many of the tactics Trump's floating today about countering the Supremes' ruling against his tariff were first employed by Mr Obama. His administration had one of the lowest Supreme Court win rates for a modern presidency (~50%) - the lowest since Zachary Taylor with a notably high number of 9-0 losses, totaling nearly 50 over his two terms.