blivet

They are descended from horses brought over by Europeans.

Yeah, I know they have to follow their script, so I just play along. And honestly, it’s not as if I’ve never made a stupid mistake before, like accidentally leaving something unplugged.

causes you to mistreat the people who love you

I’ve told my wife that she doesn’t have to spend time with me if I end up with dementia and I start behaving that way. Both of my parents were more or less all there well into their 90s, but you never know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Japan

My old land line was almost the same number as an entertainment venue whose number spelled TICKETS. People would sometimes dial 1 instead of 4 (corresponding to the letter I), and get me. Usually on weekend mornings, grr, but fortunately it didn’t happen too often.

They don’t care about factuality, and in fact have no ability to “know” if they are correct. And they don’t “care”

I suspect that most people think (maybe not even consciously) that these models answer questions by retrieving data and then writing a response which incorporates that data, rather than just generating text that may or may not contain actual facts.

It really bears repeating over and over that all these so-called AI systems do is take a prompt and output text in response to it that reads as if a human wrote it.

Same. I find that even that many is a significant distraction.

Yeah, I have an extremely unusual name. From what I can tell there are at most three other people in the world with the same name as me, and none of them lives here in the US.

Leaving aside the fun of being hassled for having a weird name when I was a kid, as an adult I am very careful about what I put online, since there is no way to hide it. If it’s in English and connected with my name, it unquestionably concerns me.

Yeah, I try to buy stuff from brick and mortar stores. I figure that even if it’s a big box store at least there are actual employees working there who live in my area.

But I can’t even find the kind of underwear I like at any physical store near me. Even online, Amazon seems to be the only place that stocks it.

The same goes for the style of jacket that I prefer. I’ve spent months looking everywhere, and the only place where I’ve found even an approximation of what I want is Amazon.

I’ve noticed that even in big box stores nowadays the selection is pretty limited. You’ll see a wall of racks full of the same item. I don’t know if it’s supply chain issues or if they’ve just decided that it’s not worth the trouble of trying to stock a variety of items that only appeal to a relatively small number of people.

I suppose the idea is that it’s possible that someone has written several books in the past, and wants to sell them on Amazon now.

In retrospect it’s amazing how the nicotine addiction causes you to accept hocking up giant wads of brownish-black phlegm every morning as entirely normal.

What is the proof that thurstyark’s uncle did not have COVID?

I think “asshole” is a pretty common type.

I watched the first season when it first aired way back in the 90s, and I’ve seen random episodes here and there since. I recently decided to watch the whole series, and I had forgotten that a lot of the writing is just not my kind of humor, which is why I lost interest back when it was new. Even so, there was enough good stuff for me to keep watching, but I’m in S5 right now, and I’ve definitely noticed a drop off in quality.

Yeah, it’s actually kind of impressive how they’ve retained all of the negative aspects of organized religion and none of the positive ones.

I read the entire manual that came with the Macintosh LC that my wife and I bought in 1990.

I used to have an orange Handspring Visor PIM, which ran the Palm OS. If I’m remembering correctly the original team that developed the Palm Pilot left to start Handspring. My friend topped me by buying the phone module for hers. It seemed almost breathtakingly futuristic at the time.

This sort of package used to be much easier to open when I was growing up back in the 60s and 70s. I don’t know why, but packaging has gotten significantly worse since then.

I’ve noticed it in myself lately. I’ll compose a reply to an email and halfway through realize that the information I’m asking for is right there in the original email, or I’ll start writing a reply to an online comment and realize that I have gotten the writer’s point completely backwards. At least I catch myself, but it’s really weird.

I think part of it is that I’ve come to the conclusion that most people are so stupid and lazy that my default is to assume that they don’t know what they’re talking about, or won’t give me the information I need without special prompting on my part.

I don’t doubt that he and his various partners had sex at some point, but his children were all conceived via IVF.