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I’m an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I’m writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.
Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it’s make or break in others.
On the contrary, it will raise the floor of required credentials. When everyone has a HS education, an undergrad degree is needed to stand out. Now that a bachelors is the de facto education level, a masters degree is necessary. If it gets easier to get a MS degree, we’ll be requiring a PhD for entry level positions.
Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.
I’m shocked that the free market healthcare isn’t serving the needs of the population at large. This requires a fundamental change to the way we do things. I think we can all agree it’s time to create a special non-profit category for any existing for-profit healthcare or pharma company doing business in the US. They’re clearly constrained by over taxation and things like this wouldn’t happen if they were unburdened.
/s
Huh, I guess I’ve just adapted with the enshitification arc. It aways seems pretty clear when the publications are not specialized that the “reviews” are really just generated or copy/paste lists of devices with affiliate links - and are essentially just paid advertising (though paid by vendors and not manufacturers in this case). I will agree that it’s infuriating to have to sift through the ever-growing AI generated content to find something which has novel information.
T-mos general coverage outside of city centers and interstates is trash (they’re all pretty bad, but Tmo is very binary). I’d get it over xfinity, but it’s not even offered in my major university town due to coverage limitations. And it’s not like there aren’t big pipes nearby - the university consumes more than 100TB of data traffic a day; their Netflix traffic alone was so large just 3 years ago that they were on the edge of getting a co-located Netflix rack on campus.
And, ime, a lot of corporations are serving content through third party (or at least non-native) servers, which means that any blocker which touches any of those servers breaks content completely. I’ve experienced major Travel, banking, and retail sites which simply don’t work unless most blacklisted sites are allowed. That means either turning blocking off for that main site entirely, or spending an hour testing every one of their 30 off-site connections to see which ones break. I don’t have that kind of bullshit time, and the rest of my family don’t have the patience or skill to do that troubleshooting. PiHole turned out to be multiple hours a week of frustration so I gave up - I already have a full time job and full slate of hobbies. In-browser blockers are, at least, easier to toggle on and off.
Just to be clear, generally stock buy backs are not to increase revenue or dividends, but to increase the stock price by creating a false scarcity. Potential dividend increases from corporate stock ownership are a shell game as the corporation received the dividend and it is simply added to the cash on hand and book value.
Nearly all growth in stocks is capital based. Every corporation wants to increase revenue and profits because that forms the basis for valuation. Yes, there are young companies who are “forward looking” and trading on factors based on revenue and not net income, but most of the market is based on a net income multiplier (which varies by industry).
As much pressure as the boomers (and soon GenXers) will place on revenue, it will never be enough to support the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. Rather, they will be selling capital to fund their retirements. This will lead to long term stagnation of stock prices (in the best scenario) or a collapse of market value as retirees try to sell their stock for the next 9 month round-the-world cruise. This is a negative feedback loop, too, as the more people sell, the lower the value of their stock, requiring they sell even more shares to get to a fixed value in cash. I think of this as just one more Fuck You (added to the collapse of public health and public retirement subsidies) the boomers will be handing Millennials and GenZ. Actually, I thought you might catch a break with housing, as the value of housing as they all move into retirement homes would drop with the glut of units coming to market. Alas, corporations have found they can buy those units and rent them back at exorbitant rates, so they’ll be tag teaming the boomers in fucking over the youth of today.
I’m assuming you’re being facetious. If not…well, you’re on the cutting edge of MBA learning.
There are still some things that just don’t get into books, or drawings, or written content. It’s one of the drawbacks humans have - we keep some things out our brains that just never make it to paper. I say this as someone who has encountered conditions in the field that have no literature on the effect. In the niches and corners of any practical field there are just a few people who do certain types of work, and some of them never write down their experiences. It’s frustrating as a human doing the work, but it would not necessarily be so to a ML assistant unless there is a new ability to understand and identify where solutions don’t exist and go perform expansive research to extend the knowledge. More importantly, it needs the operators holding the purse to approve that expenditure, trusting that the ML output is correct and not asking it to extrapolate in lieu of testing. Will AI/ML be there in 20 years to pick up the slack and put it’s digital foot down stubbornly and point out that lives are at risk? Even as a proponent of ML/AI, I’m not convinced that kind of output is likley - or even desired by the owners and users of the technology.
I think AI/ML can reduce errors and save lives. I also think it is limited in the scope of risk assessment where there are no documented conditions on which to extrapolate failure mechanisms. Heck, humans are bad at that, too - but maybe more cautious/less confident and aware of such caution/confidence. At least for the foreseeable future.
The future is already here. This will sound like some old man yelling at clouds, but the tools available for advanced structural design (automatic environmental loading, finite element modeling) are used by young engineers as magical black boxes which spit out answers. That’s little different than 30 years ago when the generation before me would complain that calculators, unlike sliderules, were so disconnected from the problem that you could put in two numbers, hit the wrong operation, and get a non-sensical answer but believe it to be correct because the calculator told you so.
This evolution is no different, it’s just that the process of design (wither programming or structures or medical evaluation) will be further along before someone realizes that everything that’s being offered is utter shit. I’m actually excited about the prospect of AI/ML, but it still needs to be handled like a tool. Modern machinery can do amazing things faster, and with higher precision, than hand tools - but when things go sideways they can also destroy things much quicker and with far greater damage.
I sat in a room of probably 400 engineers last spring and they all laughed and jeered when the presenter asked if AI could replace them. With the right framework and dataset, ML almost certainly could replace about 2/3 of the people there; I know the work they do (I’m one of them) and the bulk of my time is spent recreating documentation using 2-3 computer programs to facilitate calculations and looking up and applying manufacturer’s data to the situation. Mine is an industry of high repeatability and the human judgement part is, at most, 10% of the job.
Here’s the real problem. The people who will be fully automatable are those with less than 10 years experience. They’re the ones doing the day to day layout and design, and their work is monitored, guided, and checked by an experienced senior engineer to catch their mistakes. Replacing all of those people with AI will save a ton of money, right up until all of the senior engineers retire. In a system which maximizes corporate/partner profit, that will come at the expense of training the future senior engineers until, at some point, there won’t be any (/enough), and yet there will still be a substantial fraction of oversight that will be needed. Unfortunately, ML is based on human learning and replacing the “learning” stage of human practitioner with machines is going to eventually create a gap in qualified human oversight. That may not matter too much for marketing art departments, but for structural engineers it’s going to result in a safety or reliability issue for society as a whole. And since failures in my profession only occur in marginal situations (high loads - wind, snow, rain, mass gatherings) my suspicion is that it will be decades before we really find out that we’ve been whistling through the graveyard.
I get it…it’s hard to say something you know is incorrect, accuracy of language going to shit and other modern problems, and I feel that. I think of it as more of a “internal lighting that illuminates the device interface.” In dealing with non-technical people on a daily basis, I find it’s much more productive to allow/ignore this sort of colloquialism unless it’s that specific thing I’m trying to fix/undo/explain. I barely even flinch now when people refer to the large box on their deck as the “CPU.” ;-)
So - honest advice. I remember magazines - some with more ads than articles. You just flip past them. It’s different now because websites know your scrolling rates and FB wants you to engage. It’s why I actually click though a couple of ads every so often. Merrill? Great shoes. Osprey? Yeah, nice backpacks. Anycubic? I’ll probably want a new resin printer some day. Sure, with 2-3 clicks I can - and do - switch to the chronological “friends” feed that is exclusively friend-posted content with some paid ads (not engagement content) to pay the bills.
As for private browsing, I hear you. But, also, your IP is part of your online fingerprint. You don’t need cookies or tracking pixels from previous sessions active for FB to know - through the aggregation data they buy (possibly even from your Internet provider) what you’re looking at.
[Disclaimer - this next bit is anecdotal, no data to support the following theory.]I had a friend who suddenly was getting a ton of MAGA and alien conspiracy ads of his FB page. He doesn’t track his outgoing IP but I suspect that he was just re-assigned an outgoing IP that has previously been used by someone else (his locality is very red, politically, though he ie not). I know for my IP I’ve had my IPv4 for at least 7 months. It’s one reason that my wife, daughter and I all get intertwined ads on what we search.
To attempt get around this, one option is a vpn. Add to that a separate private browser (it’s how I did my online Christmas shopping, and it’s kind of a pain). You’re still in danger of machine fingerprinting, but it’s usually too much hassle for just marketing to wind its way back to you.
At this point, I think the only possible solution, aside from the obvious and cheaper life without parole, is to move to a pneumatically operated guillotine. We know that any post-separation convulsions are entirely disconnected from the brain. Sure, it’s a little messy, but retribution and vengeance have their drawbacks. Just clean up the mess or stop executing people.
On a realistic note, I would not be surprised that holding his breath led to his “torture” with CO2 building up in his blood as he intentionally writhed and resulting in actual discomfort as the body reacted to the CO2 even as the lack of oxygen in the breathing mix caused him to lose consciousness. It’s his final act to make a posthumous case (real or sensational) against his executioners. I find it hard to imagine that trace CO2, in even welding N2, would be sufficient to cause a reaction unless they intentionally got a gas mix (I don’t weld with N2, but 75Ar/25CO2 is very common for MIG).
It’s not that at all. I keep tabs on several far-flung friends and relatives on FB. Zero spam. TBF, I make it a point to click on ads for things I don’t need but don’t mind seeing (rockets, 3D printers, vocal jazz stuff). Of course, I’m on IPv4 with my whole household, so if I search for hiking shoes, everyone in the house gets FB ads for hiking shoes. I got a bunch of ads for Merino Wool outerwear in mid December. My wife was kind enough to get me several base layers for Christmas. There is no good and bad, just poor internet management and hygiene (IMHO).
Across a stage? Do you really think Trump will attend a debate? Or that his followers will care either way?
No, the play here is you have to find someone that 30% of the electorate will actively vote for. You’ve already lost the anti-zionists, the envronmentalists, the Cubans, the Catholic hispanics, the student loan forgivenessers, the low-taxers, the gas-pricers, and the libertarians. EV enthusiasts are gone too, since half are listening to Musk as a demigod and the other half are mad that everyone is throwing their weight behind his charging standard and giving him patent royalty money. No, what’s left (ha!) are the milquetoast republicans and globalist democrats who you must court enough to register actual votes in actual precincts. Oh sure, there are a handful of centrist body autonomists who are mad about Roe (but weren’t preemptively angry enough to vote in Hillary) that you have in your back pocket, but there has to be enough to counter the brain-washed MAGA crowd. And the MAGA crowd may be a little less confused about whether early voting is Liberal Ballot Box Stuffing or part of the MAGA master plan to spread Patriotism and a Can of American Whoopass™ and get their votes in early this time.
There is nobody else with the name recognition or independent/middle clout - the swing voters the Ds need to win. Who are you going to put up - Kamala? Bernie? The middle/middle-right would rather stay home and sit on their hands while Trump drags out his base in the big red states. The best possible outcome is for Biden to take the economic momentum into a win and then step down and give the next generation 3+ years to forge their path. Of course, if you’re a Lefty, you don’t want Kamala either, so the only option is for the entire administration to step away and watch a true Left slate fail miserably in every swing state.
Many Linux distributions have very good user experience for beginners
I 100% agree. The issue isn’t beginners, it’s people who already know windows, and only windows. They’d be just as lost switching to OSX. Kids pick up chromebooks easily, but most adults - the ones who have 5-8 year old machines with only 8GB - are completely lost. I tried to get my mother onto LibreOffice (okay, Open Office…it’s been that long) and it lasted less than a week and one panicked old-lady newsletter deadline. She was utterly lost, and no amount of help would get her out. To be fair, she gets lost when her phone updates to the newest major OS revision.
I choose one of those niche distributions since I have advanced requirements.
I chose windows for the same reason - specialized industry where nearly all tools are written for Windows. I have $15k in software, $200k in setup and procedures, and $100-200k in training I would have to redo to switch to linux, and while that was happening I would have zero income, so double those numbers for net losses. That’s assuming I could even find perfect analogs in the linux world, which is unlikely, and that I was willing to receive and send non-standard files to all of my colleagues. I could consider Wine/Proton, but then I’d have to learn it or risk losing $2000/day plus the cost of tracking down repairs if anything (like an update) broke a critical piece of software. It simply not worth the financial risk.
5000 civilians (women who have borne children) killed is just a statistic; 2 mothers killed each hour is horrific and brutal. Love the intent, hate the headline. I’m with you, I’d prefer they not attempt to ply me with “think of the children mothers” rhetoric. This is a humanitarian disaster; it’s a shame so many humans have been immunized to destruction and empathetic grief by religion.
This is like people abandoning a stick shift and rigid frames/chasses for modern automatic/CVT and and unibody with crumple zones. The latter are complicated, expensive, and inefficient - but substantially more forgiving to the average driver who merely wants to get from A to B with the minimum amount of effort. Linux will be there for people who choose to dedicate hundreds of hours a year to the hobby of computers. For everyone else who doesn’t want to open their laptop to replace the keyboard, update their wireless card, and clean or replace the system fans and solder in a new power connector, buying a new laptop with the extra horsepower (to overcome the code creep) will offer them all those things at a price cheaper than even taking them to the corner repair shop to get the mechanical failures fixed.
Oh, it didn’t take Israel for the venture capitalists among them to want to harvest defense money. AI support has always had a contingent that intends to use it for military purposes. Same with remote vehicles. Same with robots. Same with, well, pretty much every advance in science - chemical agents, biological agents, lasers, space, nuclear power. Practically anything we create has a military use if you’re morally bankrupt or thirsty for power or money. Nearly every project starts out with “to serve mankind” as its goal.
Yeah, I saw it the other day. I would bet a lot of money that the information was already stored. In fact, if their data group didn’t already store that information (link clicks to external websites) they should all be fired. This is just a way that you can find something that you’d previously looked at on facebook (which, oddly, may be the only site on the planet with a worse search function than reddit).
Since even inadvertent or unintentional copying can be punished as infringement, any takedown should be subject to the same level of scrutiny and false claims should be awarded statutory damages matching infringement of registered works, collectible by the party who’s non-infringing work was blocked, but actionable by any party who is denied access. So if you can’t get to content due to DMCA you can sue, but you cannot recover damages or expenses - if you win, the $175k(?) per fraudulent take down is payable to the content owner. In that way, it’s recognized that an individual looking for content is injured by the takedown, but there is no financial incentive for take-down vigilantism.
I was under the impression that Digital IDs are not a picture you bring up and hand to LE - it’s a RFID token transfer that you tap to authenticate on a reader. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be LE officers who will bully people, or that people won’t be smart enough to recognize that the picture on their phone isn’t their ID, but that not how digital IDs (are supposed to) work.