At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.

I’d rather see solar and wind power though.

Reddit has some cool communities that don’t quite exist elsewhere, and even though I’ve found old-school forums for some of them, the vibe is different (usually older people who are often retired and can’t envision not having money or free time).

I used to pay a sub to Reddit but stopped back when they shafted Apollo. I wonder how things might have gone had Reddit focused on its community rather than the sad process of enshitificafion.

I don’t use Amazon anymore. I don’t live in the US so maybe that makes it easier.

My wife and I purchased a new Japanese car last year. Nobody makes small cars anymore, except maybe Suzuki with the Swift? Our small cheap car is bigger than we had anticipated. Good car though.

When I get in some of the newer SUVs it feels like driving a boat.

I haven’t used windows in years except when my mother asks me to help her out occasionally, and I don’t miss it at all.

Yes — I’d say your impression of the situation is right.

I see your library of Alexandria and raise you the Tower of Babel, which as we all know, came crashing down… I wonder for how long society will let the AI companies build their massive edifices.

Edit: upon checking my bible stories, ‘crashing down’ is not quite the right description of what happened with the Tower, but that’s not really the main point.

This is sad. Good on the shopkeeper for cancelling the orders.

It’s also astounding that the quest for information to subsume is so relentless that AI companies are now after niche books about little old NZ.

(Forgive the old news article — it’s just to stir discussion.)

It’s a nice idea. I think the general population doesn’t care enough to make it a political cause, sadly.

At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.

Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.

All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.

I hope the retired racers find good homes. They make sweet pets. Some are a bit funny in the head though, as their upbringing is so unnatural.

I’m not surprised by this news at all.

You make interesting points about self-inspection. I don’t trust it. The leaky homes situation from the ‘90s shows that people will cut corners when they think they can.

In an ideal world, housing costs would be more predictable so that ordinary people can plan around them and get on with their lives. We purchased in the last few years and are not badly off, but could have done without the $100k haircut in our bank equity. Sure, doesn’t affect us too much, but makes renovations harder.

Embarrassing for BMW.

Yes — I think if I were to teach a large undergraduate class tomorrow I would go with a combination of handwritten exams and, for homework assignments, critical analyses of the most obscure examples of whatever is being studied possible so that AI has no idea what you’re even on about (in my field, ask it to analyse music; it’s hopeless). Multiple choice is fine for stuff that can be rote learned.

The gold standard would be to make each student do an oral defense of their work. Hand-written exams are good too. Both of these approaches are time-consuming to mark, though.

Assessment design can require students to perform analysis of rare and obscure source material, so that there are no published materials for AI to draw on (which can make it struggle). Similarly, asking for a good bibliography that lists the sources used in the text and formats it correctly would show up the hallucinatory tendencies of AI, I think — though I haven’t tried the latest models.

I can’t be the only one who actively tries to reduce the number of subscriptions I have. It’s terrible for the monthly budget. Gamepass lasted only a few months for me before I decided that I didn’t get sufficient value out of it. Something about paying monthly to retain access to a game that I can otherwise buy rubbed me the wrong way.

I haven’t posted on Reddit since they killed third-party apps. Funny thing is, I was a paid subscriber for years before they did that.

Here to be the change I want to see in the world. Go Lemmy.