I have a friend I hit up about once a year, asking if he’d like to come out on our boat for the weekend. We spend a few days together, catch up like always, and then don’t speak again until the next year.

Also, what’s funny about this is that when I come home my SO asks about his family and I have no idea because we never discuss that.

I was just talking about this with a friend today. Musk was basically on track to become a real-life Tony Stark, exactly as he’d envisioned, but he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut and ended up ruining it for himself. Money buys many things, but it doesn’t buy respect - and once you’ve lost that, it’s nearly impossible to regain. The number of young and ambitious people he let down is simply staggering. I was really rooting for him and hoping he’d turn this around but after the nazi salute I no longer do. That was the last straw for me.

I didn’t read the article but I’d bet the “why” is because it’s been on the news and people think it’s an easy way to make a quick buck. However, these people are amateurs - when it’s in the news you’re already too late.

“Blatantly copy-pasting” is not what LLMs do either.

Whenever I try to diagnose issues in my Linux computer…

Ironically as someone who has now idea how to operate Linux, ChatGPT feels like a personal tech support person for me. It walks me through the necessary steps to solve most issues I’ve had so far. The fact that I can just take a picture of my terminal window and have it read it and tell me what to do next is incredibly helpful. Now, I’m under no illusion that what it tells me to do is the best way to do it but it makes quite the difference when the alternative is to just stare at the screen with zero clue where to even begin.

But those same people have no issue with others expanding their own knowledge by reading books written by someone else and then using that knowledge to make a profit. They don’t apply the same standards to humans that they do for AI.

I personally find AI is better than me in most fields except ones I know well. So maybe it’s only 80-90% there, but it’s there in like every single field whereas I am in like 1-2

I generally agree with your points here. The issue, though, is that you only notice an LLM’s shortcomings when discussing a topic you deeply understand. When you’re less familiar with the subject, it might seem like the LLM is performing better - but that’s only because you can’t detect its mistakes. It’s similar to the Toupee Fallacy: it’s obvious when an LLM is blatantly wrong, but there are also times when it’s confidently bullshitting you, yet doing it so well that the errors fly under your radar.

I agree with your reasoning but I still do run an adblocker. There are only 3 things in my life (that I can think of) where what I think is right and what I actually do don’t align: adblocking, piracy and eating meat.

Doesn’t mean I want to spend all day everyday reading about it. I have other interests.

Agree. Blocking / keyword based filtering is quite blunt tool. I’d much rather tell AI what I don’t want to see and have it analyze the content for me.

That’s the thing - consuming anything even remotely resembling a healthy news diet requires actively avoiding most of it. Unfiltered news consumption means getting firehosed with information to the point of paralysis and depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a hermit living in the woods knows the latest about Trump and Musk. There’s no way to avoid hearing about them and who ever suggests you can clearly haven’t even tried.

Not everyone wants to spend their entire day reading about the politics of a country they don’t even live in. Have you considered that some people prefer getting their news once a day from a proper news outlet, and then spending the rest of their day focused on topics they’re actually interested in? That’s not “sticking your head in the sand,” it’s having healthy boundaries.

Lemmy doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm, yet our feeds are just as bad - if not worse. If your daily interest revolves around reading about U.S. politics, this might not be obvious to you, but for the rest of us, it’s painfully clear. And before you suggest “just avoid political communities” or “stick to your subscription feed,” let me assure you that doesn’t work. It’s not just political communities - it’s everywhere. I can’t even read articles about space without people injecting their opinions on the CEO of a certain rocket company. Even communities like microblogmemes are beyond salvation. If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.

My point is that the algorithm itself isn’t the sole issue. Algorithms can actually be helpful, provided you invest even minimal effort into training them. YouTube doesn’t bombard me with politics because it knows I’m not interested. Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here. If we measure the quality of social media by counting the “regrettable minutes” we’ve spent there, Lemmy would rank at the absolute bottom. Even Twitter doesn’t irritate me as consistently as Lemmy does. I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.

Probably so, but that still doesn’t justify it in my view. There are better ways to handle this. For example, they could inform the customer that the issue needs to be addressed before they proceed, offer to mask the control panel themselves for an extra charge, or simply ask if the customer really wants them to paint over it - which they almost certainly don’t.

Doing subpar work under a “not my job” mentality isn’t just unprofessional - it displays poor character.

As a contractor who takes pride in my work, seeing things like this baffles me - and honestly, it’s not that uncommon either. I just don’t get it. Even if they somehow manage to get the client to pay for this, there’s no way they’ll be hired again. Meanwhile, about half of my clients are repeat customers. No wonder it’s so easy to stand out when the bar is this low.

Why? Because you don’t like them?

How about we just let people choose rather than having the government choose for us?

No, I’m not talking about a law. If I did I would’ve said so.

Yeah, I just don’t know how society would go about enforcing this. I feel like there should be some kind of “This We Were Wrong About” tab or a way to look up individual journalists and see their track record. That way, if someone makes big claims, you could check whether they have a history of doing so and what their success rate has been.

It would work both ways too - if someone frequently makes bold predictions but has been right many times before, maybe their views should carry more weight.

As certain unpopular person once said: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”

I might not agree with the perfect part but in general I think that it’s a good advice. Who am I to tell other people how to live their lives when I don’t even know how to live mine.

I don’t think it’s that. LLM’s very much are actual AI. Most people just take that term to mean something more than that when it actually doesn’t. A simple chess engine is an AI as well.