Is it too cynical to be suspicious of anti-chinese rhetoric so close to the impending US protectionism changes?

The man’s an arse. He’s always been an arse. He will continue to be an arse.

I think I’m going to disagree with the accuracy statement.

Yes - AIs can be famously inaccurate. But so can web pages - even reputable ones. In fact, any single source of information is insufficient to be relied upon, if accuracy is important. And today, deliberate disinformation on the internet is massive - it’s something we don’t even know the scale of because the tools to check it may be compromised. </tinfoilhat>

It takes a lot of cross-referencing to be certain of something, and most of us don’t bother if the first answer from either method ‘feels right’.

AI does get shown off when it’s stupidly wrong, which is to be expected, but the world doesn’t care when it’s correct time and again. And each iteration gets better at self-checking facts.

I have been this week, for the first time.

I’m using Hugo to design a new website and Gemini has been useful in find the actual useful documentation that I need. Much faster and more accurate than trawling the official pages, and does a better job of providing relevent examples. It’s also really good at sensing what I’m actually asking, even if I’m clumsy at the phrasing.

And for those who continue to say AI isn’t really useful for learning - another thing I’ve been using it for. “write perl to convert a string to only container lowercase, converting any non-alpha chars to dashes” - I’ve learned how to do stuff like that over and over again, but the exact syntax falls out of my head after a few months of not doing it. AI is good at providing a quick recollect. I’ve already learned perl properly (including from paper books - yes, I first wrote perl a quarter of a century ago) - and forgotten it so many times. AI doesn’t prevent me learning, just makes it faster.

That shit is essentially a full time job. And it’s forever ongoing full time job, with 24/365 on call type job if emails are mission critical.

Totally agree. No fun being a small guy in a dugout and a rifle when the spam and malware arms race is bombing you with nukes.

No sign of that happening yet, especially with the results of a certain election in a certain country.

Maintaining perl scripts from the 90s is my ball park!

Mind, I did write some of them, and they’re still whirring away making it a pretty easy job. Perl’s lack of breaking features is its strongest strength.

deleted by creator

If this was just about the X/Twitter accounts, then X could just suspend them.

It’s a good idea. Shame no major manufacturer will adopt it and lose money selling their own proprietary packs.

I found it quite preachy, but still watchable if you don’t think about it too hard.

“Oil = bad”. “Smokers = bad”. Hopper aside, the bad guys were as shallow as you can get in character development.

Plus at 2h15m it was about 45 minutes longer than it should have been, and Kevin Costner is a polarising actor for some due to his lack of charisma.

All that said, I watched it twice. Once partly to admire Jeanne Tripplehorn’s dress, which should have got a best supporting role.

Well done!

It’s no coincidence that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had such a close relationship - they thought alike.

In Britain, Thatcher is still reviled by many for sweeping changes. Killed the coal industry without giving support to the many thousands employed there and put the North into recession, took milk away from children, depowered the unions (which were too powerful at the time, tbf) and generally put the Tory Party on the London & Banks first mantra that they’ve been on ever since.

Don’t forget the diesel cheat devices designed by VAG to pass emissions only during testing.

That decimated the diesel car industry for all manufacturers and caused a lot of people to pay a lot more “environmental” taxes for their diesel cars ever since, despite governments encouraging ownership of Diesels in the 90s and Naughties because of their greater economy.

Paywalled, but archive link worked ok for me.

“When the money isn’t disclosed, it’s not clear how much everybody is giving, who is giving it and what they are getting in return for their donations,”

When you give money with expectation of something in return, it’s not a donation. Isn’t it time we started calling it what it is?

Fun fact: the majority of people trafficked in the world are for sex purposes

What’s the source for this, please?

My own research points to the fairly reputable https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/ which estimated around 28m in modern slavery (on the low side of other estimates), and of those, 6.3m are in commercial sexual exploitation, less than a quarter.

I get that you’re trying to bring awareness or whatever

I absolutely am trying to do that - it seems to be ignored by almost everyone, something that I personally find shocking. Even when raising the figures here - usually a place full of people with more empathy than most social media, the response has been partly negative. Maybe because people don’t seem to want to acknowledge the bigger problem. I don’t get it. Perhaps the numbers are so huge it’s hard to appreciate that each one of these is a human being who’s trapped, alone and suffering.

but both comments so far read more like “not worth legalizing sex work when other slaves still exist”

That wasn’t the intention.

It can help, yes - but a large percentage of the 38 to 49 million modern day slaves still exist in otherwise fully legal businesses.

Awareness of slavery is still really low amongst many people. It’s going on everywhere, not just in the sex business and is very difficult to stop.

Thank you for your own deeply considered and valuable contribution.

Making sex work legal won’t stop slavery - plenty of modern day slaves exists today in nail salons, fast food, cleaning, factory work and so on in every city in every Western country.