Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.

The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.

The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.

Academic performance is about performing well on closed book written exams covering narrow subjects. The whole system is designed for 19th century teaching and testing. Using a computer does not help with that whatsoever and may in some cases hurt (by distracting someone who should be studying).

I tutor high school kids as a volunteer (next year will be my 10th year doing so). Over that time period I have noticed a sharp decline in a lot of basic academic skills: mental arithmetic (without a calculator), spelling, grammar, handwriting. These are the very skills one needs to master to perform well on closed book exams. Your ability to research a topic or get help from Google (incl. spellcheck and grammar check in Google Docs) or ChatGPT is of no benefit whatsoever when all you’ve got is a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you.

I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.

Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.

They’re not just random examples for some people though. For some indigenous peoples these items are a foundational part of their cultural practices.

How about using birds’ discarded feathers for decorations? Discarded seashells? Pearls from clams that died naturally?

You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.

I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.

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Wow! I’ve been using the internet since 1995 and I’ve never heard of this site. Thanks! I’m actually interested in learning about mixing drinks!

You flood their market with cheap food and you put all their domestic farmers out of business.

Dumping charity on developing countries rarely works. You need to help them invest in their economy. This was shown with that micro loans paper (which won a Nobel prize).

If you want lowest possible cost then canned stuff is out. Buy beans and rice in 20 lb bags. Hard to beat that!

The temperature of boiling water depends on your altitude. Water boils at 212F (100C) Miami but only 202F (94C) in Denver. This makes a big difference when boiling eggs. It’s why specific times for boiling eggs are so unreliable for people from different altitudes.

The range matters. If you’re taking T prescribed by your doctor to get within the normal range for your gender (regardless of reason, whether you’re trans or if you have T deficiency as a cis man) then you won’t be barred from competition.

Where you cross the line is when you inject T to go above the normal range in order to build muscle and recover faster. That’s what’s considered doping and doctors can’t ethically prescribe that.

I think it’s susceptible to the same problems we have now. Elites gonna form and do their thing. Whether they’re in the party or on the board of directors, the effect is the same.

I think we’re just way too naive about systems. We expect them to work for us without putting in any effort. We should stop focusing so much on systems and start focusing on communities and cultures.

The best societies have tight-knit communities and a culture of cooperation. You can’t achieve that by passing laws or writing a new constitution or whatever. You have to get buy-in from everyone.

At the time when Oscar Pistorious was competing, there was an actual conversation around the fear that people would get their legs amputated so they could get prosthetics like he had if it would gain them a competitive advantage. No one actually knew if his prosthetic legs gave a real advantage because there was no way to do a comparison without having a real athlete go through the amputations.

If you look into the scene around body building and the extreme lengths people go to with steroids, extreme diets, dehydration and more, it doesn’t seem all that implausible that some people would transition in order to gain a competitive advantage. Heck, some people deliberately get their legs broken in order to stretch out the bones just so they can be taller (no competitive reason). That’s an extremely painful process undergone for less extreme reasons.

Right, but before he became a murderer he was an inspiration to many people.

The news of his trial hit many people like a punch in the gut. How could such an inspirational person commit such a horrible crime? It was one of the worst feelings of betrayal experienced by the public.

No, you’re putting words into my mouth. I never accused them of basic incompetence.

Women’s sports have rules that say (some variation of) “you must be a woman to join.” Men’s sports don’t have any rules like that. Women play in lower level men’s sports all the time. They just don’t make it to the top level.