Rhaedas

There is comfortable, wealthy, and the super rich. The first ones still look at money as the rest of the population, while the ultra wealthy (the top .1% or higher) use their assets for power. They don’t have to concern themselves almost all of the time on price tags for things, it’s irrelevant. It’s what their influence can allow them to do that is far more important. So yes, the richest live an expensive lifestyle, but they don’t care.

I agree with others on the middle class falsehood. You either have enough assets and income to be able to live well, or you don’t. At this point many millionaires are not that well off either because their expenses put them in the same situation the poorer people have to deal with. Maybe it’s not only one paycheck away from disaster, but they have their own buffer zone that’s not as large as they’d like in bad times. Likewise, there are “poor” people who manage their budgets well enough that they are comfortable, but because they don’t have a lot they are at the mercy of things around them so that can disappear quickly.

The rich line is where you can lose entire businesses or a house or other large material thing and the money part doesn’t phase you.

“The Future is Now!”

also:

“We went too far.”

Windows ME wasn’t a sadist. It would have to actually work to get that far. The best thing that happened to a laptop I had which came with ME installed was to put Win98 on it. Ran great after that.

He should have gone with Colossus. There was a great 1970 scifi film named that about AI and… oh no, never mind.

I could see you not reacting well to the gift and them being upset, but then it turned into something more than that. They made the mistake of doing something that you claim is well known you don’t like. You held your line and rather than let it sit for a bit insisted it had to go. Now you’re both mad/upset over a gift. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Even more so if the value of this object isn’t that much even new. Who is hurt more by this? You’re confused about their reaction but were you hurt by the act of giving, even if it was something unwanted? The core thing you should ask yourself is why it became an argument, and was it worth it? It doesn’t even matter who was right.

It speaks a lot of today’s world when so many replies were about some type of debt or replacement of assets. My gut feeling is if the rules don’t require a tangible purchase (aka Brewster’s Million) putting the bulk into something that will grow the base amount is the best option. But it depends on any debt and its interest rate, as removing that expense is usually the best move as their rate is going to be far greater than any interest you can gain.

If anything the rest of our family has taken the lesson to heart to put into place things to protect their loved ones. And like you said, they could have done even a little to help themselves before it got too far, but for some reason they procrastinate, avoid or refuse help, and even lie and say they have everything worked out.

I hope your mom’s situation changes for the better to protect her, and you. If their relationship with each other is still good (some get toxic) I would push it hard and use some guilt and hypotheticals to get him to do something official if he cares for her at all. And if not… now might be a better time to cut loose than it being forced on her.

Some places are like that, and it makes sense. Others do not, and if there isn’t some formal paper connecting the two then they don’t get the benefits or penalties of making such commitment. I have a relative that lost their home of 35+ years because when the partner passed there was no mention in a will or any document of them contributing. Suddenly it wasn’t their place to live.

One issue is that AI in its various forms makes it far easier than it had been to use such a tool without understanding what the limitations are. Garbage in, garbage out still applies, but if the user can’t tell the difference, the garbage gets spread as quality work. This had led to the term “AI slop” which has morphed into a general “I don’t like this post” label.

Another bigger issue is the origin of the data for training, which unfortunately has tainted good uses for these tools (when used within their limits, as stated before). I agree with this concern, but once LLMs and related AI became freely open to the public, that ship has sailed and even if there was a company that could even prove its AI was trained only with legitimately obtained information (which could make it more limited than the ones out there), would anyone believe them?

A related issue on training would be how the AI was trained (ignoring the problem of the source of the data). The very fact that LLMs were modeled to give proper and positive answers only leads to the conclusion that it has long moved from a research project to find AGI into a marketing ploy to give the best impression on the ignorant public to profit from. This gets into the “AI slop” area of seemingly good results to the average user when it is not, but rather than slop it’s deception.

No better testing than in production.

Some of us are old enough to remember how cats and other creatures would get killed by old car engine designs with the large open fan driven by a belt. They would sleep on that fan housing and not realize the danger when the car was started. So there have been improvements that have helped, maybe not necessarily for that reason. For what it’s worth, I’m on the side of minimizing cars for so many reasons, but it has been worse for animals in the past.

Yes, I understand that concern. If we had more people creating posts… I’m a hypocrite, I don’t have many posts myself.

I wonder what the breakdown of discussions started from users vs. bots is. While I can see your point especially from a spam pov, one purpose of this kind of bot is to pull from other sources and get a conversation going. If no one is interested, then it just falls to the bottom. I often see posts complaining that Lemmy/fediverse isn’t as active as Reddit was/is, and yet without some of this automation it would be far deader as people don’t tend to start posts as much as reply to existing one. If a particular bot/community is flooding your feed too much, that can be easily be blocked, or let the mods/admin know that it needs some adjustment.

Magnetism is “just” the ability of some elements to line up their fields so that the effects are felt beyond their electron shells. It’s much more complex than that, but magnetism is in all matter, just some more than others. For it to stop at any rate would be like changing a constant of the universe. I would imagine very quickly things would be very different and we wouldn’t be around to witness it.

Heinlein wrote about this very topic in “Job: A Comedy of Justice”.

It’s a version of the age old question on how do you keep someone from stealing your images while still being able to show it. No one can see an image without having downloaded it already. The best you can do is layer in things like watermarks to make cleaning it into a “pure” version not worth the trouble. Same with text, poison it so it’s less valuable without a lot of extra work.

LLMs can’t do math well. Add in the factor of needing to understand the question first before doing the math and it might work better than you think.

Is that why he does it? I’ll be honest, I’m starting to read it okay, just a bit slower than usual.

This timeline they’ve already been through the system and saw our broadcasts. Guess who is on the “Do Not Contact” list for the warp capable group?

As a Mbin user, appreciate him being in the right place at the right time, even if his coding wasn’t fully “ready” for the sudden task and he couldn’t continue the work himself. That he made it open source for others to take and run with made a huge difference. Glad he’s doing okay.