I have never intentionally put words in your mouth. The best I can figure after rereading our entire thread is that you’re jumping around on different points but giving no clues in the conversation you’re doing that. As in, I’m responding to one of your points, but you’re providing a rebuttal for a completely different point of your own.

In this conversation I’ve been trying to restate what I’m seeing as your interpretation in an attempt to confirm we’re communicating, but then I get another response indicating we’re not communicating.

There’s two possibilities I see as to whats happening here:

• your thesis and points are not logically consistent

OR

• we are simply not able to communicate effectively with one another today

For the purposes of civility, I’m not going to make a judgment one which one these it is. I’ll let you give your downvote button a rest and simply bow out talking more with you today. Maybe in the future we’ll have better luck with one another.

Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle

I never said that and the quality of a ford truck is irrelevant to the assembly worker who lost their job due to automation.

You need to back up because you have gone down a tangent alone.

I agree we’re down a tangent, but I’m following the logic of your responses. This is a response to your original thesis: “AI robots can be utter shit”. Then you introduced the ford example for automation, which isn’t shit for assembly.

Which point to you want to back up to that would change our conversation path?

The notion that people won’t eat sawdust bread is demonstrably false with many historical examples proving you wrong.

I’m glad you saw those. I specifically chose sawdust in my example because of those events in history. Those support what I’m talking about. When the adulteration of the food became bad enough, people stopped eating it.

Your stipulation about zero flour is a moving goalpost and a strawman fyi

My “zero flour” comment is a response to your original thesis where you said: “quality of service can drop indefinitely.”

It can’t be indefinitely. There’s a point where people will stop consuming it when it gets bad enough.

And yet youtube is still the dominant video host.

Youtube hasn’t descended to being unusable yet.

You’re missing the point entirely. If instead of luxuries you look through the lens of necessities perhaps you’ll see. Like replace cookies with bread and try tell me people will choose to starve first. Like obviously not.

I think you’re missing the point. If we substitute bread in the example I gave and they’re putting sawdust in it, then yes people will not buy bread made with zero flour, but instead made with sawdust. Yes, people will stop buying bread in that situation because they would die anyway because the bread doesn’t produce nutritional value.

Ask a ford employee 30 years ago about robot automation. Like this is not a new thing in the 2020s. The rich have a playbook for this.

Now you’re speaking against your original point. Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle. If anything it has increased it. A robot can have assembly tolerances much tighter than a human. Where is the lowering of quality from a robot making the vehicle that your original thesis demands?

AI robots can be utter shit and they will still be leaps and bounds more efficient than the task specific automation that has been replacing human workers for decades.

I disagree with this, and we already have live examples today that are good analogs. Youtube is being flooded with AI generated slop. AI generated scripts, read by AI generated voices, over top of AI generated images.

I never seek these out, and actively avoid them when I can tell what they are before clicking on them. In that first 2 seconds of AI generated voice, I can tell this is slop and stop watching it seeking a human generated video instead.

As long as the rich maintain their monopolies quality of service can drop indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if AI robots suck ass when no human employed company can compete and every other option is just as ass.

It can’t. At some point the quality of the product drops to a level it is no longer a product. Lets say we’re in your theoretical dystopian future where the monopoly exists for cookies. There is no other place to buy cookies except from the monopoly. You posit that quality can drop indefinitely as there is zero alternative sources for cookies. So lets say the monopoly cookie brand was deciding to substitute some of the wheat flower with sawdust as a cost saving measure with the consequence being yet lower quality cookies. At a tiny fraction of sawdust you may notice it, but the sawdust cookie may still be better than no cookie. The monopoly continues to increase the sawdust content until the cookie contains zero wheat flour and is entirely substituted with sawdust. I believe even you would concede you would no longer buy the sawdust cookies at this point. Further, you would have stopped buying them earlier when the sawdust content became so high that the cookie was inedible to you even though it contained some wheat flour at that point.

This same thing will apply to Youtube. If the only thing left to watch on youtube is AI slop because no human creators exist, then there is no point in watching youtube anymore.

The point here, is that even with a monopoly on a product, as soon as the quality drops below a certain threshold (and this point is different for every consumer), the product stops being a product to them.

Not defending Musk, but the point of humanoid robots is to perform a job currently done by a human worker without modifying the process or tools. Dedicated robot arms are fantastic for factory work, but the jobs they do have to specifically be designed to be done by a robot arm.

As an example, you can’t put a robot arm at a human workspace and have it open a plastic bag, put an item inside it, and pick up a tape gun seal it with tape. For a robot arm to do that, the entire workspace, and extra robots would have to be added and programmed to accomplish the same task.

xAI must not have been getting enough investor interest and rather than admit it’s a stinker, he’s shackling spaceX with it.

This is the same thing Musk did saddling Tesla (and Tesla public shareholders) with the debt of the failed company Solar City run by his cousin.

CBS News contributor

This surprised me that back 5 to 20 years ago a CBS new contributor was involved with Epstein. This is especially surprising to me because I’d never heard of this doctor before and I used to watch a lot of CBS news.

His recent appointment as a CBS contributor

…oh after the MAGA capture of CBS. That tracks. Carry on. No wonder I’ve never heard of him. I stopped watching/trusting CBS after the MAGA capture.

Under which rock does he live?

Under the rock where reading comprehension exists apparently.

Where he was prompting for “What is 2+2?” to the LLMs, the accuracy of the answer was immaterial. At that step he was comparing two systems and simply needed a static question to give both system to compare the internal processes to determine why they arrived at different outputs (or a what appeared to be race condition/infinite loop for one) when the result should be identical to both irrespective of how right or wrong the answer is to the prompt. The LLM answer from the LLM could have been “ham sandwich” and it still would have served his purposes.

“Give me a meme and a message board on which to post it, and I shall move the world”

-Archimedes

The policy includes new details stating that unless a user opts out, Starlink data may be used “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models” and could be shared with the company’s service providers and “third-party collaborators,” without providing further details.

Its still shitty of Musk and Starlink to even approach user data they’re paying for to train AI, but for those that have no other choice for connectivity, I wanted to call out the opt-out exists.

Yes, colonoscopy prep sucks. I had to drink 4 liters of fluid, wait 6 hours, and do it all over again. I lined up 10 glasses and drained one every 12 minutes for 2 hours.

There’s also a version of the prep that is only 2 liters. Its more concentrated, but I can do that easier for me than the 4 liters.

Another vote for getting colonoscopy screening. I had two precancerous polyps they found. Confusingly, precancerous doesn’t mean they are cancer, but rather the type of polyps that turn into cancer. Both were removed during the procedure. With that there’s no more actions or risk needed except a followup colonoscopy in 3 years. If they found no polyps its a followup in 10 years.

Also if its a colonoscopy screening, and because of the ACA, the entire procedure is covered by insurance as its a wellness screening. If they are doing a colonoscopy because you’re reporting problems, then its a “diagnostics” colonoscopy and you can get charged for it. The price tag on mine was slightly over $2500, but was 100% covered because it was a screening. Get your colonoscopy before you have problems and spend your $2500 on something else you want in your life!

Call today and get an appointment for this. When I called the soonest appointment was about 5 months out. Call today to get yours booked.

We lost a family member to colon cancer. She was 34 years old.

Don’t put this off. Get it done, people.

Also this gem: “In October 2021, he posted a political cartoon criticizing Omar’s security spending.”

He criticizes her security spending, then acts out showing exactly why she should be spending even more on her security.

“I don’t recognize your authority to impose these controls over me.” There you go: “I don’t recognize your authority.” That’s the masked-up mentality, as bluntly put as can be.

Here’s the oath of office for Pierce County Washington where Swank is the sheriff. Presumably he took this oath when he took the position of sheriff:

“I, (state name), do solemnly swear that I am a Citizen of the United States and a resident and registered voter of Pierce County; that I will support the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Washington, and the Charter and Ordinances of Pierce County; and will faithfully, impartially, and honestly perform the duties of the office of (insert title of office), as such duties are prescribed by law, so help me God.”

source

Bold is mine. Doesn’t this mean the sheriff is admitting he will violate his oath of office?

Mesh back haul can get some distance connecting some communities aa well.

I don’t think community driven mesh networks are a realistically sized solution for the entire continental connectivity .

Ideally, to me, that would multinational orgnization building common infrastruture for the collective benefit.

Certainly that would be best for the many nations of the continent. However, that hasn’t happened and high speed internet as a basic utility has been commonplace as a utility in huge parts of the world already for decades. So without the ideal of a coalition of NGOs, are the under served nations on the African continent just supposed to go without instead of the tech companies building the infrastructure, and maintaining the ownership that comes with that, to bring these services as is detailed in the article?

So WISPs and 5G networks address “last mile” access. According to the article Google and Facebook are building undersea cables which don’t compete with last mile services, and in fact can help them as the existing backhaul circuits become saturated from continued new WISP and 5G users being added.

I think its fantastic that there are community built efforts to bring people online. However, it sounds like these are small pockets of efforts instead of national or continental efforts. If the WISPs or 5G service area are only in pockets, is it fair that millions of people should go without access to the internet just because they don’t live in one of the areas served by those existing community efforts?

What is the alternative to existing giant companies investing in the infrastructure? And why hasn’t that alternative already addressed this issue before the tech companies arrived?

Even retail gas stations have to pay upfront before operating to have their underground tanks dug up and removed in case they go out of business. Why isn’t this standard for petroleum extraction? If nothing else, the public government would benefit from investing those prepayments until the oil company successfully completes their properly secured inactive well and that money is returned to them.

As long as you’re doing your own whole disk encryption, you have a valid path to still be secure. However, if you’re running an unencrypted disk, you’re much more likely to lose your data to a non-state actor.

A pocket computer that can call.

I held that same mindset for years in the prior generation of technology. I had a Sharp Zaurus and later a Nokia n700 for pocket Linux computing. It took a large amount of effort to make them useful devices. Most people simply don’t have the time or ability to do that for themselves and products like iOS and Android deliver what they’re looking for right out of the box.

I hope it succeeds, but history hasn’t been kind to others that tried.