Cool. Understood. Thank you.

My first thought when I saw this pic was “Are they talking to their computers in the future? GenAI ‘interface’?” That would truly replace CLI for many of the most complex tasks.

I’ve been using Linux since around 1998. Back then it was fair to say that the command line was occasionally needed. I personally prefer the command line because it is much more powerful, and I can do so much more with it. Shockingly, I do not use Arch. (I’m on Gentoo.)

But, I also maintain an Xubuntu computer for my wife. I haven’t needed the command line for it ever that I can recall. I log in occasionally and it pops up a GUI prompt for me to install updates. GUI updater comes up, and a GUI sudo dialog elevates my permissions. Everything is updated through GUI. Everything my wife needs to do (including occasionally adding or updating a wifi connection) is done through the GUI.

(Don’t get me started on their stupid mix of snaps and debs, though. That is a huge pet peeve.)

Re: command line - have you ever seen a person try to move a bunch of 1 type of file from one dir to another in MS Windows Explorer file manager? Best case scenario, they know to ctrl-click to select several non-sequential files. Worst case, they drag and drop each file individually. In the command line, just do ‘cp *jpg …/destination-dir/’.

I was shocked to find HFCS (and a bunch of other sh*t) in SOY SAUCE in the USA! WTF?

Sorry, but if you look at real soy sauce in Asia, it has like 4 ingredients - water, soy, maybe some alcohol (from the fermentation?), and 1 or 2 that I forget. USA soy sauce (that I looked at) has like 10 ingredients.

Looking at labels (on Amazon) now, Kikkoman seems to use the traditional recipe - no HFCS. But, La Choy soy sauce does have HFCS in it.

Just as a sort of tangent to this - it used to be normal (apparently all over the world) for people to wake up after a few hours, get up and do stuff for a while, then go back to bed. Basically, there were 2 sleep periods each night.

BBC has a rather long and overly detailed article about it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

Maybe all of us waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 is a remnant of that?

Any idea what causes the air quality to change so drastically? The aircon / heater not circulating air? Doors closed and no one going in or out?

Just curious if there are other ways to remedy the situation without opening a window in the (soon to be) middle of winter.

I don’t disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)

I’m going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith’s. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China’s factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world’s factories were on our side.

CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We’ll see how that goes.

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should “differentiate” for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying “AI won’t replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don’t.”

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can’t afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

I think “interactive clipart” is a great description. You are, I believe, totally correct that (at least for now) GenAI can’t do what professionals can do, but it can do better than many / most non-professionals. I can’t do art to save my life, and I don’t have the money to pay pros to make the mundane, boring everyday things that I need (like simple, uncluttered pictures for vocabulary cards). GenAI solves that problem for me.

Similarly, teachers used to try to rewrite complex texts for students at lower reading levels (such as English Learners). That took time and some expertise. Now, GenAI does it prolly many tens of thousands of times a day for teachers all over the USA.

I think, at least for the moment, that middle / lower level is where GenAI is currently most helpful - exactly the places that, in earlier times, were happy with clipart.

Am I correct in seeing this as the company is claiming that courts of law cannot require them to transfer control of an account from one user to a different user? This despite the fact that doing so has been fairly standard practice for years now?

Personally, I think the lawyers for The Site Previously Known As Twitter have a very weak argument. However, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so there’s also that.