$500K buys a lot of Kool-Aid.

If you measure Bloat in lines of code, yes. But if you measure Bloat in the amount of time and effort needed to maintain and extend, maybe not. Not that AI has achieved that goal yet, but it wouldn't hurt for us to all start using the right metric, so we'll know a good thing when we see it.

I remember around 2010 there were some helpful suggestions from Russia that the US should plug the BP oil spill in the Gulf using nuclear bombs. It seems they've done so a few times.

Fair enough but if you're going to argue that there's so few trans kids that it's not worth making a political issue of it, please remember that that argument cuts both ways.

Since we're speaking in generalizations, I'll take a shot: Republicans tend to say things like "the guy's got issues but he gets things done," and Democrats tend to say things like the GGP post, "I have faith in SpaceX. They have a CEO [sic], a woman, who is decent"

When you're investing millions in a multi-billion dollar company, or looking for a political leader for the world's largest economy, there are pros and cons to both these ways of thinking, to say the least.

As president he's obligated to implement the programs established and funded by congressional mandate. The president doesn't get to decide what laws to implement and what ones to ignore, whether it's a newly-established department or an existing one. So he's overstepping his constitutional authority. The GOP-led congress could resolve this simply by voting for the abolition of the department and/or its programs (indeed they could have done so with a Democrat in the white house and they'd have been obligated to implement). But they never have, and still don't take that vote. You might want to ask why.

The DOE doesn't write history or control what is taught.

These are pretty big changes they're making in the government, it's natural for citizens to have serious questions and concerns. It's really on the politicians and their affiliated media outlets to make it crystal clear what they're trying to do and what we can expect. It sounds like you haven't been offered that explanation. Why do you suppose that might be? Does it not bother you?

It's only the thought that the "other party" could do things that makes you consider whether this is legit?

I'm old enough to remember when they came out with these new gadgets, eventually cheap enough that most students could have one, and they fit in your pocket. They could perform all the arithmetic that you were likely to see in primary school. Further iterations of the calculator and home computer software could do algebra, symbolic reasoning, numerical methods, etc.

There were different policies about whether you could use them in class, use them on tests, etc. There was much hand wringing. And yet math education moved on, because studying math is not about rote calculation, it's about developing reasoning skills. Calculators (and Matlab etc) offloaded the rote tasks.

Of course math education techniques had to change, because if you just hand a student a page of long division problems (primary school), or algebraic simplification problems (high school), or diffeqs (college), and let them use their phones, they can find the answers without learning much.

Now we have LLMS which can search for relevant information and write prose, among other things. They are here to stay, so hopefully soon educators will stop the hand wringing, will do some hard thinking about what's really important in education, and will adjust the way we teach and test students accordingly.

If there are specific artists seeing their specific works being copied and resold in this way, they should absolutely feel free to sue. There are laws and precedents for exactly this. There is no shortage of lawyers with experience in this area.

To make a blanket claim that anything produced by any AI which has been trained by looking at extensive collections of work by humans must be banned up front... that's a tougher sell.

Whose definition would that be?

That's how we all understood it, until that line was blurred in Williams v Gaye a few years ago.

In my experience the business analyst will not fire you for telling them what they want makes no sense, and may even be grateful in their way, as long as you
1. figure things out and tell them what does make sense, even though you're not the business analyst
2. make sure that nobody else in your hierarchy or theirs discovers how the analyst lacks understanding
AI may be able to achieve #1 reasonably soon, at least for a lot of situations. #2 depends on how the bosses deploy it. An AI session is an excellent paper trail for managers to study if they're interested.

That's a rather specific stat you're alluding to there, the total number of hurricanes of any type making landfall in Florida. Not the same as "storm risk," is it? Fortunately the industry actuarial models are more sophisticated, as their business depends on good risk estimates. What's your source BTW?

Just a few examples of trends that affect storm risk:
- 11 major hurricanes affecting Florida since 2000, of which 4 in the last 3 years. Compare to other 25-year periods on the list, which goes back before 1900. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
- Sea level has been on the rise for decades, and the rise is accelerating. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclimatecenter.fsu.edu%2F...
- Rising gulf water temperatures in the past century
- Wetland loss

Agreed. That's an example of decision-making influenced by denial of the very real looming problem. Decisions that put an enormous amount of money into some groups' pockets (e.g. developers and certain politicians) while leaving other groups (especially the public) holding the risks. The continued claims by you and others that there "isn't increased risk of storms" in Florida only adds to that problem, and helps to ensure that the public continues to hold onto those risks until the bottom drops out.

Taking your own description as granted, I don't see how it has "nothing to do with climate."

Fraudulent inspections and climate change together compound risk. It sounds like people in Florida were able to get away with substandard home inspections for a while, but now that there's substantially increased risk of storms that test the limits of building codes, the risk has become too much to bear and insurers are being scared off.

There are many examples in the climate change "fearmongering" literature of risks compounding and crossing a disaster threshold. Here's another: two neighboring countries don't get along too well, then we have a major regional famine due to climate change. A major war breaks out. You may be right to say the war happened because the countries had issues already, but you'd be wrong to say the war has "nothing to do with climate."

More to come.

According to TFS what he said was

which is not at all the same as TFH, "People Don't Like Making Music"

It's true that a lot of people don't love practicing, and that for a lot of musicians the majority of your music time, especially early on, is spent practicing.

My feeling then and now is that this is not necessarily radical, but Stallman's notion that any commercial development of non-free software, for any purpose, is inherently immoral is what was radical, and I understand why many good developers and good people have been reluctant to consider it.

No. But the sum of an infinite number of rational numbers can converge to an irrational one, e.g. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...