I completely agree that things have gotten a lot meaner in recent years, perhaps reflecting real life divisiveness. I’ve never encountered nothing anywhere near that toxic; I hope you’re ok

What i see is more trolls. More people who just want to argue or insult. More people who may have a point but jump right to denigrating the entire person or political affiliation or culture or country. That was one of the reasons I left Reddit but it’s here too.

But it’s also the commercial services, treating their customers worse and worse. More ads or more data collection or less service or uglier about scenarios that don’t fit their ideal

Don’t forget the office vacancy rate in downtown Chicago matches his number. So someone told him there was 28% office vacancy, and someone told him there was a “Magnificent Mile” shopping district, and he conflated it to miracle mile shopping center 28% vacant because crime

I was no athlete by any means, but yes. For organized sports I played little league and one summer of soccer. But mainly my brothers and I were very active. Our back yard was perfect for football, and we sometimes set up a short golf course. We played a lot of football with friends, basketball, etc. while I was especially bad at skating, we played neighborhood hockey. In college I played intramural football and volleyball (my roommate was from Brazil, so we kicked ass in beach volleyball).

I always thought there was a convenience thing too. You knew all your children were going to catch it, so for you want to deal with it just once, or once per kid?

Ha, I’m the opposite. I don’t care about the results, the stats, but I like watching the game. Of course it’s been a lot of years since it was reasonable to goto a game, so I no longer get do. And the last few years it’s been impossible to watch on TV, but even before that the ads were getting more frequent and intrusive. It’s just not enjoyable anymore

College hockey is the way to go! It’s still reasonable to see live, fans get excited, ads are minimal, and you need at most one streaming service if you watch on tv. It’s harder to find bars though

I like to think I’m fine with that.

The reality is I always paid, but I also earned a lot more than she did. It would not be fair for her to pay much.

Or maybe I’m old fashioned, I don’t know. I’ve never been in the hypothetical situation

Don’t listen to them: this is like bacon, best a little crispy! Perfectly done, just the way I like it.

What’s the meme again? “Yo dawg, you want some carcinogens to go with your carcinogens?”

I once read some detail about automated x-ray reading where you have similar life or death concerns. But the goal for ai was simply to highlight areas that looked suspicious, and it was still up to a human to read it.

I remember it included statistics that it resulted in both better accuracy and efficiency. More correct in less time.

Obviously there is a human tendency to just go with what was circled, so your process needs to encourage the human to look carefully

There are tv plot points about employers doing a background check, finding the wrong details, so not hiring someone. In real life I hope they would take a few steps to confirm

Have you searched for the name outside your family line? I know you said misspelling but my last name is rare because it was made up by immigration on Ellis Island: they couldn’t understand my ancestor so decided “close enough”. Same thing as a rare misspelling.

Before the internet, we knew of one unrelated person with the same last name but only because he was he was geographically close enough to be in a neighboring phone book. When someone took my Gmail (identical first initial, last name) it was a relative. Now with the internet and person search we’ve found a handful, but only a handful

No, I hope I’d have the self-confidence to own it.

• I went to school with a kid named “dick”. Not Richard or rich, but he insisted on “dick”. He was the first to joke about his name and he laughed about it. I don’t know how he truly felt but everyone loves the comedian, and even bullies couldn’t make fun of him
• I just got a new coworker with the same name as a famous comedian, and same deal. His intro speech started with “not that one”, and he can quote movie lines with the best of us. Actually I haven’t worked with him so know nothing else about him. I remember his name and that he has a good sense of humor
• my name Isn’t at all common but there’s a professor in Chicago with the same name, who has authored a bunch of text books. Does it count that I sometimes joke about my “alternate life”?

I agree. Without disagreeing with how evil some of the people in charge are, this behavior is entirely explained by unreasonable quotas and lack of accountability.

Individual agents struggle to meet an impossible quota, see a huge bonus dangled in front of them, and learn there are no consequences for taking shortcuts. Clearly designed to bring out the worst in people, to reward bad behavior, yet maintain a veneer of plausible deniability by those who intentionally created the situation

Yes, drones should use ai, but just like every other use case the key criteria is where and when. AI should never make a decision to kill someone.

AI is great for navigating, summarizing status, distinguishing targets, deciding when to highlight something of interest for the operator. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to tell a drone ai to fly in the vicinity of terrorist base x and notify me when something of interest happens. It should figure out how to get there, figure out how to be discrete, figure out how to avoid attacks/collisions, and maybe coordinate with its buddies for better coverage

I also like the descriptions I’ve seen of “loyal wingman”. If a pilot flies into a combat area, his drone wingmen should be able to keep up, stay stealthy, avoid attacks, and notify on alerts. From the pilots perspective, he should just have more weapons at his disposal without worrying about carrying them all or flying the aircraft that does. …. But the pilot decides, the pilot presses the button, the pilot is accountable

Or if you’re talking personal drones. If I’m some sort of streamer, yes my drone ai ought to be able to keep me in view and try to get some good video while I do whatever I’m doing.

I alternate between saying ai can be useful and I hate it 😁

I’ve found good use for it in coding, writeups, meeting summaries, ticket summaries. It can be genuinely helpful.

The negatives are mostly people not understanding what it’s good for and not. For every hour saved when ai helps with a template or context switch or writing unit tests, I lose ten hours because some idiot just acccepted ai slop as their final output. It’s not just coding, but writing as well. AI can be a great tool to make someone more efficient but it’s only a step (or steps). At the current state it’s almost never the final product, almost never something you can accept as-is. You still have to go over it, fix it, finalize it.

And I’m especially pissed off that my company has a quota for ai use, regardless of appropriateness. wtf is that? Even when I’m working on tasks where ai can’t be helpful, I still need my minimum two ai sessions a day

I’ve been wondering this too, but out of sheer convenience. I even already have a trimmer for my beard. I like my hair short and usually describe it as “number 3|6 trimmer on the sides and back ….” And I should be able to do that.

Why do I need to use my time to find a barbershop that hasn’t shut down, go sit in a waiting room for 30-60 minutes, have to describe to someone new how I want May hair, and end up with something inconsistent anyway. I can be inconsistent on my own, thank you

Here in my part of the US road design is usually decent for protecting pedestrians, and my family has been doing a lot of walking since pandemic.

But now my youngest is in college, and he’s continued the “long walk” tradition. But the town he’s in has no sidewalks outside of campus, has roads without even a shoulder. Now he’s at much higher risk of a moment of inattentiveness by some drunk or texting college kid

But the point of this video is whether the things you have control over make a significant difference.

You can if you just want the results but the value of a video like this is going over the process and the detail, so you know how much to trust it.