1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

"Ah so you are an academic that knows nothing anyways". Nice way to totally expose yourself as completely clueless. And you cannot even read. Funny how that goes.

Well, basically every other engineering field has been dragged to maturity by idiots like this one creating really large catastrophes because they understand nothing. I guess it is time that software had one of those.

You are deep in delusion. Good luck, you are going to need it.

The vast majority of the software industry is acting even more stupid than usual. But a big shake-up was overdue anyways.

I do not get that, at all. Basic risk management is part of life, at least for me. It is automatic.

It is like tons of people cannot actually think. Almost if they are a different species.

Well, one of my two banks has an app as 2nd factor and the other I have a hard-token for. But for this story to make sense, it sounds like Bank of America allows username and password. Or maybe email as not-really-2nd-factor and the agent gets access to the email as well. Or something like that.

I get that banks do not want users to use LLMs. Some of their customers will get hit really badly before this becomes regular enough it will not be in the news anymore. Some of those hit will blame the bank. And the one thing banks really dislike is bad press.

Probably not. Would be nice though. Well, not that I use Google search anymore, but the others probably have the same situation.

Looks like basically nobody using AI can make it pay for itself. If they are honest.

Yes. That was what I tried at the beginning of the craze. Stuff you can easily look up (but should usually not need to look up), LLMs can do (mostly), but in the engineering I do I often run into things you cannot look up. Total failure and sometimes hallucinations on top. Since then, I occasionally check back, but nothing has changed really. Simple, well-known things LLMs can usually do, things that require actual insight LLMs cannot do. No change there. The illusion has gotten a bit better, but that is it.

Ah, no. Not even remotely. You are pushing a fallacy here, the "fallacy of experience" (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fantsstyle.medium.com%2Fthe-logical-fallacy-of-experience-1367653709f0). For some simple examples that may be within your grasp: You do not have to do hard drugs to be able to know doing them is not a good experience. Your also do not have to participate in a pyramid scheme to understand it is a scam and there is nothing to be gained. You may want to look up "cognitive surrender", to find out that using LLMs is actually pretty dangerous to you. You may want to look up the negative experiences actually good coders make with LLMs.

That said, I have used LLMs "productively", namely in research showing how utterly limited it is. This research is initiated by me and done by students in thesis work. And just last week I got (again) a few nice examples of failures from current frontier (!) models. Will probably make a good paper eventually. For the time being, I will stay away from using LLMs, too dangerous and no actual benefit to my work. My work is mostly insight-based, something LLMs cannot do, even if they can by now fake it well enough to impress people that are not that smart.

You guys do know that there's a process in motion right now to make this debate meaningless and redefine "planet" again? As it stands, the current definition of planet you're arguing over doesn't include any "exoplants". It's actually weird, solar-system centric definition that clearly has no future. They're looking to define clearing its own orbit as 10^23 kg.

If you haven't read the interview, in it she relates a story where her young daughter's teacher asked her to write three things that made her child special. Apparently she is such an awful mother that she couldn't do that, and turned to AI for assistance. The AI shat out some generic Hallmark style platitudes, and she was delighted.

People like her want to dehumanize all of us to that level.