I agree. I share my use cases mostly to put the critical thinking behind them on display. I’m sure the crowd here is very savvy. But in the general public I agree that many if not most people would be completely seduced by the obsequious & confident tone of the robot. It can do so many things that it becomes tempting to rely on it. You wish it worked better than it did, and if you let yourself get lazy, you can easily slip into trusting it too much.

deleted by creator

As time goes by I’m finding a place for AI.

1. I use it for information searches, but only in cases where I know the information exists and there is an actual answer. Like history questions or asking for nuanced definitions of words and concepts.

2. I use it to manipulate documents. I have a personal pet peeve about the format of most recipes for example. Recipes always list the ingredient amounts in a table at the top, but then down in the steps they just say “add the salt” or “mix in the flour.” Then I have to look up at the chart and find the amount of salt/flour, and then I lose my place in the steps and have to find it again. I just have AI throw out the chart and integrate the amounts into the steps: “mix in 2 cups of flour”. I can have it shorten the instructions too and break them into easier to read bullet points. I also ask it to make ingredient substitutions and other modifications. The other day I gave it a bread recipe and asked it to introduce a cold-proofing step and reformat everything the way I like. It did great.

3. Learning interactively. When I need to absorb a new skill or topic I sometimes do it conversationally with AI. Yes I can find articles and videos but then I am stuck with the information they lay out and the pace and order in which they do it. With AI you can stop and ask clarifying questions, or have it skip over the parts you already know. I find this is way faster than laborious googling. However only trust it for very straightforward topics. Like “explain the different kinds of welding and what they are for.” I wouldn’t trust it for more nuanced topics where perspective and opinion come into it. And I’ve leaned that it isn’t great at topics where there isn’t enough information out there. Like very niche questions about the meta of a certain video game that’s only been out a month.

4. Speech to text and summarization. AI records all my Zoom meetings for work and gives summaries of what was discussed and next steps. This is always better than nothing. I’m also impressed with how it seems to understand how to discard idle chit chat and only record actual work content. At most it says “the meeting began with coworkers exchanging details from their respective weekends.”

This kind of hard-and-fast summarization and manipulation of factual text is much easier with AI. Doing my job for me? No. Hovering over my entire computer? No. Writing my emails for me? Fuck off.

The takeaway is that specific tools I can go to when I need them, for point-specific needs, is all I want. I don’t need or what a hovering AI around all the time, and I don’t want whatever tripe Dell can come up with when I can get the best latest models direct from the leading players.

6.15% of the US population live in food deserts. So this is real and significant but at the same time we need to stop talking about one serving of vegetables a day as an exorbitant, logistically impossible thing categorically.

In 2017, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that 39.5 million people or 12.8% of the population were living in low-income and low-access areas.[8] Of this number, 19 million people live in “food deserts”,

From Wikipedia

Hmm I didn’t see a commitment to respond with force. Just a statement of what is “right,” as if Trump gives one shit about that. Fail.

This is a good video on the topic - 2 years old so not just based on this week’s hubbub.

https://youtu.be/sxRdKRORYoA

Only country that ever burned down the White House? We won’t forget you! ;)

Dirty little secret: advertising drives very little of what we know as capitalism. It’s honestly just kind of a drain hole in capitalism, out of which flows billions of dollars into the void.

Couldn’t a gut bacterium influence serotonin production in the brain, too? It doesn’t specify here which it does.

I have wondered a lot whether we could enshrine laws that would protect us from corruption like we’ve seen. Executive overreach in general is a problem but there are also smaller things like the fact that Trump filmed a fucking canned food advertisement on the Resolute Desk that seem like they should be eliminate-able.

It just doesn’t seem like we actually have laws anymore. The Supreme Court has declared presidents untouchable. And the way demographics are shifting, it’s harder and harder for Republicants to control Congress, but the electoral college favors red states, so Republicants WANT an overpowered president.

We could probably get them to agree to presidential controls during a Dem presidents’ administration, but could we get to a constitutional amendment or something they couldn’t just undo later when it suits them? I doubt it.

We are in a death match with an implacable foe who wants nothing more than our total destruction. There is no negotiating or agreeing our way out of this: the only thing we can do is win.

They’re not enforceable, binding laws anyway. It’s a bunch of corporate CYA. They want to be able to tell a judge someday that they did everything they could to inform you of their business practices and get you to agree to use their product responsibly. The company’s chance of facing a court action is much higher than a user’s chance of being held to whatever they agreed by checking a box.

Putting the “mildly” back in mildly infuriating.

You don’t control geopolitics but you do control your own outlook. If you can’t accept a someday threat but continue living today, then you are losing the battle before you even know if you have to fight. Yes, losing the ability to get through the day is overreacting, even in light of the threat potential. I could give you 6 other things to worry yourself into paralysis about if I wanted to. But you control your own outlook.

There is very public evidence. A former national security advisor Alexander Lebed claimed that 100 nuclear suitcase bombs had been “lost track of” on the TV program 60 minutes. That’s not very hard evidence, but it’s certainly worrying. And I don’t know what kind of hard evidence you could reasonably hope to get over such a damning and embarrassing state of affairs. Is Russia going to issue a report documenting how they lost 100 portable nukes? Doubtful.

Just when you’re celebrating the collapse of your enemy, you realize that all their armaments are hitting the secondary or black markets, going into who-knows-whose hands. Same thing happened with the breakup of the USSR. Nukes were “lost.”

Not only does it need to become possible, it needs to become more effective than other treatments like crowns and implants. I think it’s going to be a long time, and even then will only be applicable in limited cases for a long time, and will be really expensive.

Mark Twain, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Josephine Baker, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Stuart Davis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Beauford Delaney, Kay Sage, Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, Alexander Archipenko, and Edmonia Lewis all did it before it was cool.

“If I did it, here’s how I would do it”

By OJ Simpson the CCP

It will eventually get heaped on there no doubt.

Check the wind first.