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Comment Re:Priorities (Score 2) 102

It is important that money is saved in order to pay for Jeff's wedding cake.

They're not saving money. They're retasking office workers who make $100+ per hour to do work they usually pay a lot less for.

OTOH, if it keeps customers from having bad experiences because the system is overwhelmed, it may be a good use of those expensive workers.

Comment Re: My answer (Score 1) 102

Nobody is being asked to work for free. They are being asked to help out in the warehouse instead of their normal job duties.

That is definitely not what the word 'volunteer' means and it is used many times.

That is absolutely what the word 'volunteer' means in this context. "a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task." ("freely" in this instance is intended to mean "without coercion", not "without compensation". Think "free speech" not "free beer".)

Nah. These are salaried workers being asked to do something during their normal work hours. It's basically not possible to avoid paying them.

Comment Re: My answer (Score 1) 102

I would not put it past Amazon to levy the expectation that they should do an additional number of warehouse hours in addition to their normal salaried office hours. Thus, "volunteering."

Weekdays 10 am to 6 pm. That's normal work hours. Unless they're being forced to use vacation time, they're being paid.

Comment Re: My answer (Score 1) 102

So they are getting 30-50/hour to work in the warehouse? Id be pissed if I was there doing the same job as them for $14.

More likely 100-200/hour, more if they're software engineers or similar highly-paid office workers. $30/hour is only $60k/year. There's no way Amazon white-collar workers in NYC are making that little.

Comment intelligence is not the prerequisite to survival (Score -1) 55

Are they really looking for intelligence in these LLMs or are they missing something else that slows down their progress? Is it intelligence, that we are trying to get out of LLMs? If so, I think they can be easily at least as 'intelligent' as anyone, they certainly have more information than any one person does. Maybe what they are looking for and not finding just cannot be found that way, that's because it is not intelligence they are looking for but some form of organic animal like behavior? In that case they will be looking for a while, not until we have robots everywhere that are more than a camera on a car, something that can touch, taste, smell, feel pain, hunger, consume to sustain itself, will the new level of 'intelligence' appear.

Comment Serious note, using crayons (Score 1) 44

I didn't think AI could use crayons...

There's very likely enough child- an child-like drawing around to make a decent training set for an AI that could fool people into thinking a child did it.

--

Yeah, I know you were trying to slam Rubio, but I'm redirecting this thread back to something a bit more technical.

Comment More seriously (Score 1) 57

Ask your LLM to write a paper in the style of an English-language paper from a major journal in your field on your topic from the years 2010-2020.

Change the years to fit your particular situation.

Be sure to have a human check the paper and its references for content/accuracy and do a good human copy-edit of it.

Comment Re:Is this a surprise? (Score 1) 28

It's not that AI "knows" anything. It's just a big statistical web programmed with mass amounts of data

This just raises the question of what it means to "know". The LLMs clearly have a large and fairly comprehensive model of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them. If they didn't, they couldn't produce output that makes sense in the context of the models we have of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them.

Comment Re: Time to resurrect the old meme... (Score 1) 247

The dollar rose like a rocket from 10/24 to 1/25. Then it reversed and went back to right where it was before the sudden rise.

That has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I was talking about Trump's cluelessness what is needed to retain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency which is at best weakly related to its valuation relative to other currencies.

It was most likely driven by hedge funds speculating that Trump would replace Power and dramatically lower interest rates. That didn't happen and the trade reversed.

Only if hedge fund managers don't understand how the Fed chairmanship works. Trump can't replace Powell until February 2026, when Powell's term expires. Not unless Trump can make the case that he needs to be removed for cause, which would require evidence of misconduct, not just policy disagreement.

Comment Re:Time to resurrect the old meme... (Score 4, Insightful) 247

Just to add some insight:

Trump, in a Truth Social post, said: “We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy.”

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapnews.com%2Farticle%2Ftru...

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

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