If they overpower the humanity trying to stop them from doing those things, yes.

I'm sure that serving you a lot of ads is the point of the excessive length of internet recipes, but there's another reason, too. A simple list of ingredients, or a list of instructions (like how to build Ikea furniture) cannot be copyrighted. I think many of these overly verbose recipe authors really do want to make it appear that their own takes on the recipes are distinct and innovative, and that helps them secure their own content from being scraped wholesale. But of course, AI just says, "fuck it, I can summarize," and it's pretty hard to prove it was your recipe it summarized..

This looks pretty close to what the rail boom of the late 1860s and early 1870s looked like. Some corporations and investors then did some pretty incestuous stuff of a similar. The resulting bubble pop was devastating to the US economy. But it is notable that even as that bubble popped, the overall amount of rail continued to grow, with almost every major metric (amount of track laid down, number of passenger-miles traveled per a month, number of locomotives, number of overall stations, etc.) barely showing blips as they continued to climb.

That's really not true. There are many companies, such as Costco, that have tremendous stock returns and that also, by all accounts, treat their employees and customers very humanely and well.

MBAs = enshittification.

I encourage all kids and college students I speak with to start their own businesses. I've found more and more over the years that starting businesses (perhaps outside of food services) is just incredibly far from most people's minds. If you are a business owner you are going to have to put in a lot of sweat equity, you may not make much money for many years, and you may fail entirely. But, if you succeed, you get to control your own destiny in a way that many people, even highly paid people, cannot. You also get to make decisions like deliberately avoiding enshittification of your products and treating your customers and employees in a way that you feel is just.

This almost seems to be convincing us that the absolute worst statements about Russian culture today are accurate. Invade another country, continue that invasion with warcrimes and drafting of young men to be sent as cannon fodder, barely a whimper. But interfere with a videogame platform, and now we have a protest. Pretty despicable priorities. On the other hand, this may be overly negative; this protest itself seems small, and it may be that people expect less pushback or jailing of protesters about this sort of thing than those protesting the invasion of Ukraine.

The US of AI in x-ray imaging did grow the demand for radiologists That's accurate. That doesn't that AI will necessarily grow jobs in general, or even if it does that AI creating more jobs will not cause enough disruptions that it will take time to shakeout. It is possible for example that a lot of jobs which are being lost to AI now will be temporary as corporations realize more the limits of the technology. It is also possible that what we're seeing now in terms of job losses will become more extreme as the technology improves even further. Predicting what is going to happen here is genuinely very difficult.

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

This is VERY different between institutions and levels of institution and majors. I went to a top 20 national university. I had one adjunct professor in 4 years (an English PhD student who taught a small 10-person freshman seminar).

I never had a teacher who was hard to understand. My Calc 3 teacher was German, but that was it. Every single computer science professor I had was native American or 100% fluent and clear in English.

My freshman 101 comp sci class had maybe 60 people, and that was the largest class I ever took. Multiple undergrad professors held parties at their homes at the end of the semester for their students. 20+ years later I am still in regular contact with 3 or 4 professors.

My experience in graduate school was identical. My wife went to a small private liberals arts school and her experience was perhaps even more extreme than mine. She never even had a 60 person class!

This all came with a price tag that has gotten worse since then, of course..

My sister, on the other hand, went to a non-flagship public and her experience was wildly different. I'm not sure she really ever had personal interaction with a professor. It was very much what you said--learn from the textbooks, pass the exam, that's it.

Everything is gambling now.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

Bingo.
I asked a friend who started enthusiastically using AI for coding, used it happily for various business bits of writing, summaries, etc.

So I asked him if he had to give up one tool: "AI" (all of them) or "The spreadsheet", he thought for about 10 seconds and said, "AI" for sure: you're in and out of Excel all day long.

That was me, too. Excel was absolutely essential to my productivity as a data-slinger, managing real-word data into and back out of largish SQL databases. The ability to just refresh a pivot table from SQL was an automatic one-click updated report, with no code.

I could do a whole bunch of massaging of data from plain text files, notes, cut-and-paste from other applications - or I could do several Excel formulas and maybe a short macro, and process tens of thousands of records into the big database.

It was about far more than "modelling" it was a swiss army knife of data massaging, reformatting, and above all, data-cleaning.

And, yeah, I've tried to get the same work done in Libre Calc, and it's not even half-way there. It would be great if somebody could pour some real millions into Libre and take away Excel's lunch, but nobody is even talking about it.

Scale matters. And how serious an issue does depend on percentage, not just absolute levels. Moreover, percentage is especially important when one is considering issues of prioritization, where I explicitly compared it to golf. So far, you've doubled down on insulting people rather than making any argument involving sources. It might also occur to you that you are apparently assuming that everyone you disagree must have some dishonest agenda. But if you bothered to actually read my comment with a minimum of good faith understanding, you would not that the comment explicitly notes specific problems from AI data centers, which should suggest to you that the agenda you apparently want to impose on the comment is not accurate. Now, it would be appreciated if you could actually attempt to respond with something resembling reasoning and sources and less insults. But I do appreciate from our prior interactions that is apparently difficult for you to do, so have a good day.

There appear to be two interrelated issues with your sources. (Although thank you for giving sources, which was much more than the person you were replying to did.) First, there's a substantial issue with how representative these environmentalists are from the general movement. The ability to point to specific people doesn't really say much about the movement as a whole (although I will grant there's a decent fraction of the environmental movement which really does seem stuck in a 1970s sort of "degrowth" or "antigrowth" attitude). But you seem to also confuse sources saying "Hey, this is creating a serious problem" and not wanting to have that thing at all. The Science.org article for example is about the actual fact that steel production really does contribute seriously to climate change, but then much of the article is about the effort to make steel manufacturing more environmentally friendly. So the article is not about getting rid of steel manufacturing but about making it work better. Others in your list are not about getting rid of things, but moderation. To use the very last example, large scale car use really is creating a lot of problems. But one can recognize that and favor more moderation in terms of car use without getting rid of cars as a whole.

Narcc, why are you incapable of polite discussion with people you disagree with? Would it hurt you so much to some day, maybe try to do people the courtesy of responding to what they have with some detailed arguments or reasoning rather than insults?