I infer the argument is that Slashdot editors are too fucking stupid to know that Mark is a man's name. It tracks.

I switched to Bing long ago - but only on phones.

It usually works OK, or at least well enough - the once exception I found was any kind of coding question, where Google was just better at funding out of the way stuff that was relevant.

But these days, if Bing fails in that regard, you can just use AI and it will often find those kinds of resources to draw from.

Of course, what happens in the future as technology advances if people stop contributing to places like StackOverflow and the sources AI uses to provide answers dry up... I don't think AI will work very well in a world where no-one knows anything.

... is the hiring of people with fucking pathetic skills. Now the question is did this spy try to emulate a clueless uneducated US citizen with an inflated ego and a padded CV, or was he really incompetent. Because the second does not sound like professional spycraft to me at all, but the first one would just be an attempt to fit in.

Incidentally, I do not think anybody noticed anything except his email being on that list....

Agree to that.

Indeed. Probably one of the largest cults in history ...

A) Number of container ships from China now higher than May of 2023 or 2024 (using a rolling 15 day window).

B) The ships are reportedly not as full but that's because China is washing products through other countries to avoid the tariffs (transshipments).

I do wish people would pause for even a moment to try and figure out the real situation before posting outright lies. But Slashdot gonna Slashdot I suppose. Good thing I'm here to fix people's erroneous reporting.

I don't get the complaints about using FedFaceID by default for travelers.

It has benefits - travelers don't have to dig out IDs, the faceID scan is quicker than the ID check was so you can get people through security faster (although really they are usually rate limited more by the luggage scanning that comes after).

If you don't want your face scanned you can opt out really easily and they just check the ID (my wife tried this recently to check) with no other impact.

Avoiding a facial scan there just makes so little sense to be though when airports have probably some of the greatest numbers of security cameras around, they have a million cameras recording your face the entire time you are in the airport so who cares about one more at the security line?

Personally I'd rather they leave the system as-is.

Including the remark that the markup may make things unsellable and make the situation even worse. Tariffs are ecconomically massively problematic. Anybody with basic (but real) knowledge how trade works knows this.

At that rate they could also simply wait until the bot-net operators die of old age...

Obviously, this stuff is still not taken seriously at all.

There are actually numbers from sociology on this: About 10-15% of all people are "independent thinkers", which essentially means they do fact-checking by themselves. And about 20% (including the independent thinkers) can be convinced by rational argument, which essentially means they can fact check when being prompted to do it. No idea whether there is any connection to introverts or not.

I disagree that LLMs become an "intelligence multiplier". LLMs can only find very shallow things with any reasonable degree of reliability. Hence they can aid in looking up stuff, but for actual acts of intelligence, i.e. generating insight when that insight is new, they are worthless or counter-productive.

The difference is, I think, people that use AI with restraint and only as a minor tool and those that fawn over it and are under the delusion that LLMs are actually intelligent, for example. For the latter, I propose the term "AIND-user" (Artifically Intelligent Naturally Dumb user).

Indeed. Although the general idea will not work for the rich. Rich people and businesses are not audited at random, but are subjected to it regularly, for the very rich every year. At least that is how it is done in Europe.

I am not sure it has ever been any other way. The difference is that today, actual fact-checking is easier and faster than it has ever been. But most people still do not do it. The wole idea to not fact-check but instead use "belief" is completely alien to me and I can only observe this bizarre behaviour from the outside and accept that it seem to be how most people stumble through life.

Hence I think we are not post-truth. We are in an age were we finally realize that the average person understands nothing, regardless of how much information and education is available to them. In a sense, we find that the the Enlightenment has failed because too many people are too fucking dumb.

I disagree. Simpler hardware migh have done it as well (tablets), but Internet access is a very significant advantage in education.

I interviewed a candidate last week. The interview before me, Coworker A, was running late and for some reason spent almost ten minutes of my slot regaling the candidate with how A used an LLM to refactor and comment Python, compete with sound effects ("I told it that it gave me this code, and that I wanted more comments, and 'boop' comments popped out.") My coworkers think highly of A, but that damaged his reputation with me for wasting two others' time with a largely off-topic brag.

Two days later, I saw an email from the person who wrote the original Python, remarking that the only change the LLM made to the actual Python code was to check for an overflow condition that was already handled slightly earlier in the code -- making A's story even less impressive.