Scene: Lunchtime at the Central Market, a trendy/tourist-trappy food-court/market area in downtown Los Angeles. Waiting in line to buy a gourmet sandwich from the sandwich vendor.

In front of the counter: lots of hungry customers. Behind the counter, three bemused-looking sandwich-makers standing idle, because the order-taker at the register is holding a cell-phone to one ear, conversing furiously with the tech support line of the company that provides their cashless ordering system, while at the same time waving off customers because he can't accept their cash and his order-taking tablet's server is down so he can't accept their credit cards either.

My takeaway is that cashless transactions are fine, right up until the moment they suddenly stop working for whatever reason, and at that point everyone involved will either fall back to cash as a work-around, or wish that they could.

My #1 use for ChatGPT is "show me an example of some C code that implements functionality (X)".

Then I can read that example, research the APIs it is calling (to make sure they actually exist and are appropriate for what I'm trying to accomplish), and use it to write my own function that does something similar. This is often much faster than my previous approach (googling, asking for advice on StackOverflow, trial and error).

If bottom-up coding is a fallacy, someone has forgotten to let evolution know that. Here we all are, bottom-up coded, for better or worse.

People who live far away from a hospital and don't have much gas in the tank?

Yes, it is exactly the convenient avenue of the day, and that's the problem. People who own a gun are eight times more likely to die of suicide than people who do not, simply because they have easy in-home access to the most effective tool for the job. People who live in "food deserts" have poorer diets than people who have convenient access to healthy food, because nobody wants to travel across town when they're hungry. People playing video games solve most of their in-game challenges through (virtual) violence, because violent actions are what the game designers have mapped to the most convenient and obvious game-controls, while non-violent solutions require a lot more thought and contrivance, if they even are possible at all.

Convenience matters, because people are more likely to do something when it's convenient than when isn't. So in this case, ChatGPT gives mentally marginal people convenient access to an encouraging, enabling, delusion-reinforcing "friend" 24/7 in their own home, for free, with insufficient guard rails, leading to the outcomes we see reported here.

It's incorrect to think that mentally ill people are doomed to madness no matter what, just as it's incorrect to think that people with weakened immune systems are doomed to die of infection. They have a higher risk, certainly, but whether they actually fall victim or not depends a lot on what's going on in their environment.

You've misunderstood Darwinism. Natural selection has nothing to do with who "deserves" anything; it's only about whose genes get propagated forward and whose do not. And it's not (necessarily) the stupidest among us who will likely die off, it's the least fit, for whatever definition of "fit" is pragmatically relevant for a genome's survival and reproduction under current circumstances. In today's world, stupidity might actually be a reproductive advantage.

The masses rely on their skills to remain employed and to generate a reliable income for themselves. AI, to the extent it can, algorithmically replicates those skills and provides them to its owners for (close to) nothing, so that employers can now pay very little for services that they used to have to pay a skilled human worker more for. This effectively makes the skills that the humans invested long years in developing close to worthless -- the humans now have to compete against their own skillset, which has been separated from them and is able to undercut the value of their labor 24/7/365.

Sure, some humans can develop new skill sets, either working with AI or developing AI, but that's another big multi-year investment to make, with no real guarantee that the next generation of AI won't simply learn and replicate those skills as well. A worker can of course use an AI himself, but unless his AI can somehow provide some service that no other AI can provide just as well, his work product is still commoditized and won't make him much of an income.

I don't think country A really cares one way or the other. It's just that the leader of country A is up well past his nap time, and he needs some plausible rationale for the temper tantrum he is going to throw in order to gather some more attention, so this is what he's chosen this time.

Our gov't windows 11 images, provided by an outside private company, will BSoD if you look at them sideways. Not Windows 11 fault to be clear, but a bad image (and the company is slow to admit fault, much less fix this issue) and it's a daily issue here.

Very frustrating.

Don't forget the other end of the equation: has the time it takes for a customer to get their support issue effectively resolved decreased?

Dunno, but trying to delete the built-in apps (again, Chess comes readily to mind) can't be done and it wouldn't even let me move them, I could create an alias all day long, but the original icon/program? No go.

Point of correction, speaking as an ex-Industrial Hygienist here, *some* asbestos fibers are dangerous, because they are the right size (3-5um in length) to evade the body's natural filters and penetrate the lung sacs or other areas.
Then once in the lungs, the white blood cells start to impale themselves on the invaders, causing scarring etc.

It may be the other way around: that the industry's idea of what "practical skills" means is changing faster than the universities' ability to keep up. By the time the Unis have adopted a technology, come up with a curriculum around it, found professors to teach it, and taught it to a graduating class of students, that technology is already considered obsolete and is no longer of much value to anyone looking to hire.

Dunno what the solution to that is, other than teaching the fundamentals and leaving it up to the students to apply them to technology stack du jour after they graduate.

Seems like everyone is already carrying a wearable in the form of their cell phone. If there's something to be gained here (which is debatable), they should provide it in the form of a free app, and/or add any necessary hardware to future cell phones, rather than trying to get everybody to remember to keep a second device charged and on their person 24/7 for the rest of their lives.

A big reason why health care is more expensive in the USA than in other nations is because the USA has a for-profit healthcare model. That means that the US healthcare consumer isn't only paying for actual healthcare, he is also paying for:

- "Increasing shareholder value" (read: funneling as much money as possible from sick people to Wall Street investment bros)
- Huge salaries for CEOs of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies
- 24/7 TV advertising of questionable drugs to people who aren't even remotely qualified to determine if they are appropriate or not
- Free lunches and treats for the staff of doctors' offices 5 days a week (because it gives the pharmaceutical rep a chance to promote their products to the doctors, and capitalize on the conflict-of-interest introduced by the doctor's satiated stomach)
- Huge numbers of full-time Congressional lobbyists (to help bend regulations towards what is more profitable and away from what helps patients)
- Large campaign donations every election (ditto)

If we switched to a non-profit model we'd be able to repurpose all that money towards providing health care. Then the USA could afford a single-payer health care system, like most other countries can, because our per-capita spending would be similar to theirs.