/uj

The “money spent on survival” is the standard deduction and deductions in general. Deductions are viewed as if you never made that money in the first place. Whether standard deduction should be larger is another question.

Overrated, such wasted potential.

Abused miners on Mars rebelling against their overlords? Could parallel with any US labor movement of 20th century, labor strikes, even revolutions. Instead, all of that is thrown out a quarter of a way through the first book and we get a generic battle royale / hunger games.

Even in the game itself, the MC is saved by deus ex machina twice or thrice, has absurd luck, does very stupid things, and magically resolves conflicts by making long nonsensical speeches.

Do you mean any AI, or text-generating LLMs?

I am fairly certain Cornell built BirdNET / Merlin Bird ID song identification using recordings in the public domain or with permissive licenses.

Same goes for iNaturalist and Seek using volunteer-submitted and identified photos.

So it’s possible to built domain-specific models with fewer ethical issues, but the push is for bullshit generators, unfortunately.

From what I remember ftom modding and just playing games from a while ago, often there is “level geometry” (which can be subdivided into parts if needed), for example, ground and hills in Fallout, city block in GTA; and then there is “decor”, repeated assets, such as trees, fences, pipes, obstacles, etc. This asset repetition is particularly noticeable in Fallout 3/NV, and somewhat in Stalker (mostly on abandoned cars)

On a more serious note, Some Assembly Required by Neil Shubin has a lot of fascinating stuff like this about evolution.

pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs

Works for smartphone manufactuters though

The article says “…had professors assess whether responses might mislead or confuse students.”

professors flagged AI responses as pedagogically harmful only 3.5% of the time, compared to 12% for peer-written answers.

Which makes me think that real people came to some conclusion, sometimes biased or wrong, but AI could have produced inconclusive inflated perhaps-maybe-sometimes text (which it would be good at) 96.5% of the time. Response not being harmful doesn’t mean it’s good.

Don’t worry, we’ll blame teachers for this too. Or make them responsible for controlling it in some ridiculous way.

What specifically about Cleveland? Can’t think of anything unusual compared to other midwest cities

Bellevue, WA. Very eerie and felt like a simulation.

New Orleans felt just sketchy throughout.

And then there are fun ones (mostly in Ohio)

• Random suburban road through the mixed woods / fields that suddenly slows down to 25MPH, with very neat lawns, clean buildings, but barely any people (usually there is a cop waiting for speeders).
• Some side road between an interstate and suburban development goes down into a valley to some creepy Lovecraftian old town
• In a middle of farm fields, a network of roads, clearly prepared for a residential development, but never finished, but they lead to a large patch of woods (yes, in middle of a farm field), and inside of it is a branch of a local university.

IMO the strangest thing about Buffalo is how haphazardly placed everything is. New updated public area, new hotel, office tower - and a dirt lot (not even parking) in between them. New apartment buildings next to abandoned colonial home with “jazz club” sign. Main street feels like a service road once you leave downtown (abandoned buildings, mechanics, garages, and storage for a few miles)

Isaac Asimov’s future of angry men yelling at uncooperative robots is almost here.

Because a lot of current “AI” is a solution in search of a problem, being shoved into every product and hyped up as the next revolution, at a great expense. Even without the obvious environmental and financial impact, it is a huge nuisance. So people are upset and annoyed by it.

You could ask the same about pop-up ads, invasive apps, spammers, scammers, mandated age verification, Amazon’s treatmeant of employees, and so on. No one would defend bad choices made by powerful people.

XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.

Thanks! That looks close to what I imagined. Temperature between -15-10C with smaller than normal seasonal variation.

Longyearbyen has a polar tundra climate tempered by the North Atlantic Current

IIRC (from others, never installed it) McDonald’s app is also obnoxious, requiring permissions and refusing to run on custom ROMs and rooted devices. It was once used alongside some common banking apps as a metric of “how close to Google Android is this ROM”.

Satan’s Accounting Program? Stop All Production?

Black Mirror’s Striking Vipers episode. Initially made me uncomfortable, but then prompts questions about virtual/online interactions and where to draw the line. Building (virtual) things in an online game together with a (adult) friend is OK. (Virtually) harming or killing your (adult) friend in online game is OK. Is having (virtual) sex with your (adult) friend in online game OK?

AFAIK internet access was very siloed in the 90s - AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the like, which weren’t quite ISPs, since they allowed access only to their own services and networks. Then, in 2000s, these companies evolved and ISPs started providing access to the WWW, whick you could call “deshittifying” internet access.

EVE Online (applies to MMOs in general I think). I played it a long time ago with a few friends, but that is it. If I could describe it, it’s opposite of interesting. You can sort of play it solo, but it gets boring and/or grindy fast. Unless you buy in-game money for real money. Dying means losing a ship and all implants, all of which cost money (time).

For “full experience”, apparently you gotta join a corp, and participate in space turf wars. Then it could turn into a second job. And I have a job already. And TBH I am not a very social person.