But a human can synthesize all those works and transform them into something new. All the AI is doing is regurgitating stuff it has heard before. I don’t want to try to put a bot on the same level as human creativity.

As I understand it, it’s due to advances in the technology that supports biology and paleontology. When all scientists had to go on were fossils, the bone structure of dinosaurs more closely resembled giant lizards, so thats the conclusion they came to. But recent techniques, including genetic analysis on currently existing species, clearly shows the link between birds and dinosaurs. (And, in fact, alligators are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards.)

I found this article which seems to explain it well:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dinosaurs-shrank-and-became-birds/

I still like print media. My local paper is shit, though. I don’t mind paying for an online subscription to some of the major paywalled media sites, though.

If something is worth knowing, it’s worth having a journalist distill it down to the main points. I can’t stand TV news anymore, because it is all 10 seconds sound bites sandwiched in between long stretches of nothing going on.

My guess is that if they had got a local Soul Food place to cater a whole spread, and the fried chicken and watermelon was part of the rest of the stuff you just mentioned, it would have gone over better. (I bet Charlotte has a bunch of places that would have done that for them). Maybe they could even have done some research and provided the context I am just learning now, in this thread.

But I think this was planned by committee, and that committee planned it all in a half hour so they could break for lunch earlier. So they got a bunch of buckets of chicken (I hope they weren’t from KFC), and someone went to Publix and bought a bunch of watermelon to cut up, and they called it all good. And that committee had nobody on it that pointed out how bad this would look without better planning. (In other words, no black folks…)

tardigrade-playing-violin.jpg

The worst thing that ever happened to Crypto was the price rising so high. It made idiots billionaires overnight, and then these idiots thought that made them smart. Now they spend all their time going to Blockchain conferences and patting themselves on the back for being so revolutionary when in reality they just got lucky.

I’m particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.

I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a “Reddit Request” system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.

When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn’t have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.

Interesting. I will have to do some more experiments later to see where they will let me order that. Thanks for confirming it’s not just me, though. I wa suspicious that there was some sort of cheesy conspiracy going on.

Weird. I don’t see that “American Cheese” line at all. Maybe it’s a NY thing.

Where are you located? I am in the US. I downloaded and logged into the App again (just in case something changed) and I see no option to add cheese to a hamburger happy meal. I can pick a hamburger meal and “customize”, and add everything else – even a second hamburger patty if I wanted – but no cheese.

Maybe it’s just with my local McD?

I can’t use the mobile app because my kid wants a cheeseburger happy meal and it’s impossible to order on the app. Try it! It won’t let you at all.

Technically, cheeseburger happy meals are no longer on the menu because they’ve decided it has too many calories. If you go there and ask for one, of course, they will add a slice of cheese to a hamburger happy meal. But using the app to order one is a bridge too far, I guess.

When it comes down to it, though, we shouldn’t eat that crap anyway.

It’s technically not a guarantee, it is certainly possible for the entire market to take a dump at once. Over the long term – decades – it has been profitable to invest in the US stock market even counting these downturns. Like they say in all the stock prospectuses, though, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Still, I’ll take my chances with the market. At least if it goes to zero, I’ll have a lot of company at the homeless shelter.

Any investment can be seen as a “bet”, the difference comes from the conditions out of which the return comes. Does it come out of a business’s operations, or a piece of some other source of income? Then even a high-risk investment is still an investment. Even an investment in an asset which is expected to appreciate in the future is still an investment, as long as that appreciation is based on something tangible. Walt Disney bought up a lot of useless real estate in the Florida Swamp, but had a plan as to how to make the investment pay off.

A gamble will have nothing concrete backing it, it will just be down to chance. Like betting on Red at Roulette. Or going to FanDuel and betting that Pete Alonso will hit a home run in tonight’s game. Those odds are made by professional bookmakers to make the chances as close to 50/50 (minus the sports book’s vig) as they can.

Basically, a gamble is up to random chance, an investment can be backed by a business case. But there are aspects of risk to both.

Live Long and Prosper

Smishing is a phishing cybersecurity attack carried out over mobile text messaging. It’s also known as SMS phishing.

I had never heard that term before. Is it just a UKism, or am I one of today’s lucky 10,000?

V’ger has evolved

In order for an AI to pass the Turing test, it must be able to talk to someone and fool them into thinking that they are talking to a human.

So, passing the Turing Test either means the AI are getting smarter, or that humans are getting dumber.

I am so looking forward to asking Elon for his long-form birth certificate

I have that textbook in a box somewhere

It’s already damaged with all of that Nazi shit, you would be fixing it by removing it all.