Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.

Living and doing business overseas is as a US citizen is a high risk endeavor.

A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.

The thing I'm curious about is whether the GDPR / DSB complaints are likely to have any result. Is that likely to just result in some cost of business fines and TikTok goes on with life? Or could those complaints bring about substantial repercussions?

The dismay is from not needing to speculate, wonder or theorize about why he did this pardon. It's a quid pro quo pardon for helping the Trump family make billions of dollars in under a year using the office of the president. The corruption is entirely flagrant and open.

Yeah, it's a forum of smart people, but none of those smarts are oriented to dealing with this kind of problem. There's a system but it's non-functional, laws but they're ignored, the tools are raw political and social power. It's going to take a while to figure out what to say and do about the slide from normal, functioning democracy into semi-theocratic banana republic.

Similar for a lot of other parts. Market anywhere between 6th and City Hall has been grimy for a long time. The Tenderloin, I'm assuming, has been the way it is for a century (since it derives its name from police getting higher pay for patrolling it). That stuff is all stumbling distance to the downtown core, tourists and business visitors.

The companies the admin favors are being given backdoors for every policy that's presented, and the way to become favored is to present bribes, whether they come in the form of gold plaques, lawsuit settlements, crypto investments, or stock market collusion.

If you do a Google (or other engine) search, you have to invest time pawing through the utter pile of shit that Google ads created on the web. Info that's hidden under reams of unnecessary text, potentially out of date, potentially not true; you'll need to evaluate a list of links and, probably, open multiple of them.

If you do an AI "search", you ask one question and get one answer. But the answer might a hallucination or based on incorrect info.

However, a lot of the time, you might be searching for something you already have an idea of, whether it's how to structure a script or what temperature pork is safe at; you can use your existing knowledge to assess the AI's answer. In that case the AI search is fast.

The rest of the time, you can at least tell the AI to include links to its references, and check those. Or its answer may help you construct a better Google search.

Ultimately search is a trash heap of Google's making, and I have absolute confidence in them also turning AI into a trash heap, but for now it is indeed faster for many purposes.

14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had!

I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of restraint.

AI isn't particularly provable. Worse, a lot of professors are lazy and will rely on tools that tell them something was produced with AI; and like any tool, they'll produce false positives. Just imagine being expelled for writing because you don't make spelling mistakes, and do use em-dashes, bullet points and typographic emphasis.

And it's getting worse year after year, as our society gets more isolated. Look at trends in pig butchering, for instance: a lot of these are people so incredibly lonely and unhappy that they fall into the world's most obvious scam. AI is one of the few things that actually looks like it could work, so I think realistically it doesn't matter that it's not real empathy. At the same time, Sam Altman looks like the kind of guy who could be equally effective as a startup CEO or running a butchering op in Myanmar, so I hope like hell the market fragments more.

When you click a button in Unity or Roblox or whatever to generate a new texture, the thing that gets generated comes from a model that could not have been built without using IP. But because it all got chucked into a blender and turned into an anonymous slurry -- and because AI is a politically important growth industry -- the people whose work went into the slurry will not benefit, at all. They'll never see a dime, while the companies selling the slurry will get billions. A lot of those people are the exact ones whose job will be replaced, which is extra painful when you know it was your own work that was used to replace you.

Although in a sense it's pointless to bring up because that milk is already spilt, and it ain't gonna get back into the container.