Visual Basic is a whole steaming pile of crap and you would always have been better learning to use non-corporate, non-proprietary languages and development stacks than wasting your time on that. And calling Office "the number one productivity desktop publishing software" only shows that you have fully drunk the Kool-Aid. More 'office productivity' has probably been lost to Microsoft Word than any other text-processing software on the planet.

2. Calling LLMs 'AI' is part of the grifting hype that has been wildly prevalent in the US corporate space. It's very natural and also very good that there is now backlash to and scepticism around all of the hype that is has been generated over the last 5 or so years

This is all (Microsoft) junk and so I wonder if you actually benefitted from this 'piracy'. And of course, it's well known that MS turned a blind eye to such 'piracy' in lesser developed countries, as they knew that they were gaining a future paying customer base.

> Chat rules : no sycophancy or over-agreeableness

(But even with that rule it's still necessary to be discerning about the responses you get and to push back against points made, or words used)

We have got very far from Cicero's coining of the word 'intelligentia' (from inter legere, a 'reading between' and hence discernment) when people talk about 'intelligence' as a commodity

People have been decrying the 'cheapening' of the word intelligence for over a century now, going back to Psychology's adoption of the word and coining of nonsenses like "Intelligence Quotient". "Artificial Intelligence" is just the latest degradation of the original humanistic meaning, and now people aren't ever bothering to prepend 'artificial' to their idiotic use of the word

Technology is what has always precipitated political change

Maybe for those who are younger and who mostly know of Jobs posthumously but Jobs was a highly polarising figure through the 80s, 90s and 2000s and there were many ppl who would never buy any Apple product because of the Jobs personality behind it (including when Jobs wasn't actually in charge; it was still a company built in his "Walled Garden + Salesman Hype" image)

> With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?

> (paulkrugman.substack.com)

Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs

Perhaps the submission title could be changed just to reflect this seemingly odd paucity of town names in S. Lebanon only on Apple Maps?

I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.

This is really poor form, and against the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No, because I don't believe in income tax or capital gains tax. I do believe in government taxes but they should be made on land holdings (Georgism) and on corporate activities, not on individuals' financial status (their earnings & capital).

How can you say this (and seem to believe it)?

The Government is answerable to the public and should serve the public. But conflating the government with the public is simply bizarre, to my way of thinking.

Governments should be transparent as much as possible, yes. But that doesn't mean being necessarily transparent with sensitive information that they know about members of the public. Only with your (bizarre to me) conflation of the public with the government would this make any sense.