JohnFen

> Most carry they $40 credit card style key

Isn't it two for $40?

Which is still crazytown pricing. They should be about $5, even allowing for a reasonable profit margin for Tesla.

But I was not saying that Tesla key replacements were on the expensive side of the scale. I'm saying that the entire pricing scale is insane. That Tesla keys tend toward the less expensive side of that scale in no way means that they're reasonably priced.

I get that you can use a phone app for "free", but I can't be the only one for whom that solution is a nonstarter regardless of price.

> But eventually more colleagues started to open up and tell me they did not want a better email. They did not mind the directness, odd expressions, and unnecessary exclamation marks that had permeated my past emails; in fact, they wanted them, because they belong to a person they have met.

This is how I feel as well. I strongly prefer the human-written emails, complete with "imperfections", over machine-generated polish. Communications being too polished has become a red flag to me that I may not be hearing from a human[1].

Personally, it isn't a matter of the emails not sounding like a person I know. I feel this way with communications from people I don't actually know well too. It's about the person not talking like a real person. In this day and age, I need to know if I'm talking with a person or a machine.

[1] Unless they are formal communications or sales pitches, where that style of writing is expected -- but those sorts of communications are ones that I automatically deprioritize anyway. I suspect that's part of the issue -- the tone and style of the communication is a signal for what type of communication it is, and AI-polished emails often signal that they are not important emails by their style.

> It's $40 for two new key cards or $175 for a new key fob

The scale starts at crazytown prices and just gets increasingly insane from there.

I get the impression he selected 90% because 100-10=90.

But that's wrong. If the doom scenario is 10% likely, that in no way implies that the utopian scenario would be 90% likely. They're both at the extreme edges of the bell curve, so should at least have the same made-up odds as each other.

The reason I pointed out the over-the-top BS nature of the 90% figure is because it indicates that the essay is a propaganda piece and should be treated as such, rather than any kind of serious think piece.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that claims that an AGI is possible and coming are accurate, then where does the author get that "90% chance" from? It seems just as made up as claims that there's a 10% chance it will cause human extinction.

Both figures are totally fictitious and have no bearing on reality whatsoever. They tell us about the hopes and fears of those people citing them, but aren't otherwise informative or useful.

It's absolutely annoying and makes me think less of businesses that ask. However, I just say "no" and they drop the issue. It's not that big of a deal, it's just another in the growing list of annoying things about restaurants.

If that's the price of a crime-free society, then I don't want a crime-free society.

Although I don't think that's the choice anyway. A crime-free society will simply not happen.

I never give donations at checkout. I do my charitable giving directly, I don't want a middleman.

What makes me less likely to return is the number of questions I get when I'm just trying to engage in a simple exchange for goods or services. More than one, and I definitely think less of the business. No questions definitely makes me think more positively of the business.

I rather thought I was the only one (within a rounding error), but perhaps not.

Since "justice" doesn't appear to be the priority anymore and Trump loves to rename stuff, he should rename it to the "Department of Retribution".

Saying that people who don't share your opinion are "selfish" is a personal attack. You're attacking the person's character rather than their position. You aren't even actually making a case (or bothering to explain) why you think they're selfish. You're simply asserting it as if it were fact.

> You have presented no real counterargument. You have not presented an alternate future.

Counterargument to what? A future that is an alternate to what? None of these things have anything to do with the point I'm making here.

You seem to be wanting to engage in a discussion about something other than what I brought up, and accuse me not engaging in that discussion. I confess, I am not. It's not relevant to my point.

How many of those postings are real, though?

Wool is indispensable, in my opinion, but you still want some sort of shell to maximize water shedding.

What I've settled on after years of experimentation (not saying it's the best, but the best for me so far) is wool clothing with a light, breathable water-resistant shirt and overpants, covered with a water-impervious poncho. I don't care about the breathability of the poncho. I gave up on pack covers long ago and switched to pack liners. In my case, I just use a large contractor's garbage bag for that. It's heavier, but the ruggedness is worth the weight for me and what's inside will stay dry even if I fall into a lake or something.

Usually, my feet get the wettest in rain, and is the most miserable body part to be wet, so wool socks (with sock liners to prevent blisters) and waterproofed boots are mandatory. Wool socks dry very quickly. I haven't got a great solution to keep the insides of the footwear dry (shoes/boots don't dry quickly without a boot drier and you have to be shoeless while drying them), but gaiters really help a lot.

I didn't start, and wasn't, debating the future of the tech at all.

My point is simple: nobody can know with certainty what the future of the tech will look like or how it will end up being used. Everybody is speculating. That some speculate differently than others doesn't imply any sort of personality defect with them.

I'd take it further and assert that when a person must resort to personal attacks rather than debating the point (whatever that point may be), the implication is that the attacker's position weak.

Different level of "liable".

Yes, you are, in the end, responsible for your own taxes the filings. If a mistake was made and you owe additional taxes, you have to pay them as well as any penalties, etc. But if you used a CPA, you have the option to sue to recover any loss they caused you through negligence.

Huh? Who said anything about LLMs going away?

The habit in my social circle is to preclear phone calls. Usually, a call comes out of a text exchange because the text exchange is becoming an impediment, but if that's not the case, then a phone call happens after the text "Can I call?" is answered.

I think that's a great compromise.

The actual reason for this is because a phone call out of the blue is interpreted as an emergency in progress, so the "preclear" is just letting people know it's not.

I know several people who live doing things like this. There are some things they all have in common that are interesting.

The main thing they all have in common is that none of them have a single source of income. Ultimately, the zine author isn't living just off their zines (even if the zine is the main thing). They also likely have three or four other things going on, and they probably all interface with each other to support the person. Maybe one thing makes profitable use of the output of, or waste product of, another, for instance. Maybe the different things tickle the same artistic bone, or use the same skills or equipment. Maybe they are economically different enough so that when times are weak for one, they're strong for another. That sort of thing.

As a concrete example, I have a friend who publishes zines, but also sells merch (some made by others on commission) that uses artwork from the zines, sells small paintings in local indie music stores, coffee shops, book stores, etc. and does commission work.

In straight business terms, it's really just the concepts of diversification and synergy applied in a way that seems unusual. That it seems unusual is interesting to me, because it's not, really. It's very old-school.

You speak as if the future of this tech is settled fact, but it isn't. All anyone has is speculation. Someone doesn't have to have some sort of personality defect in order to speculate differently than someone else.

> If you write and your stuff goes into LLM's, that's the best gift you can give to humanity.

That's your opinion, and there's nothing wrong with that.

However, there are a lot of people who have a very different opinion, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The messages it sends are of the weakness and degeneracy of the state.

The sort of person who is capable of mass murder won't be moved by things like this.

This isn't software. I needed to develop a mechanism to handle playing cards in an accurate and detailed way. After some testing of the minimum implementation, it became clear that the mechanism I had imagined was fundamentally too unreliable for use, so (using the lessons learned from the exploration) I developed a mechanism based on an entirely different principle.

I have abandoned ideas during the investigatory phase because it turned out they weren't feasible, but I don't think that counts. The whole purpose of the investigatory phase is to determine if the idea is feasible.

Once begun, I can't remember ever abandoning a task because I realized it wouldn't work. I've certainly abandoned tasks for other reasons, though.

> Maybe they are using the prompts and responses for training doesn't want these to influence future model behavior?

This is my assumption. I can't think of any other sensible explanation.

Depends on what sort of intelligence you're talking about. Trump is a con man, and is very adept at manipulating certain types of people. Outside of that, though, he's clearly an idiot.

That would be awesome. To this day, every time I have to use an on-screen keyboard, I dearly miss the days when phones had physical ones.

I wouldn't trust any genAI system (that is available to me, anyway) to go anywhere near critical things, or anywhere near very personal information such as finances or health. I know I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Maybe there are enough people who feel similarly that it limits the size of the market for such a thing.

This is me, too. I find IDEs to be generally a pain in the butt, so stopped using them (except at work, where using Visual Studio is basically required) many years back.

The terminal (or, honestly, multiple terminal sessions) is a much better solution for me.

This could be great for people like me. I won't buy a car that's too new because I don't want a "connected car". But if the cell deprecation means that there's a bunch of cars that are physically unable to connect, and are less desirable to most people because of that, I may be able to get a newer car, cheaper, than I was expecting.

Technically true, but unlikely to be a real issue unless you're presenting the ID to a police officer or other official that legally requires it. If it's a sticker, then it's easy to remove it prior to presenting the ID. In my state, only permanent alterations are illegal. Putting a sticker on your driver's license is allowed, but officials can remove it (The ID is state property, after all, not yours.)

The best solution is to tell businesses that want to scan your ID to go take a hike and take your business elsewhere. But if that's not a realistic option, I'd have no qualms about using a sticker like this temporarily. Attach it before entering the establishment, remove it when you leave.

That said, many establishments that scan IDs aren't scanning just the bar code. They're taking a photo of the entirety of the front and back of the card. These stickers are less effective at protecting against that.

If you're in the US, you can skip the registration. The warranty applies even if you don't register it. They try to convince you to "register" so they can fill out their marketing database.