Yes, all they had to do was laugh a bit and ignore it, but they just couldnt

They help make our cars unreasonably large, all in the name of inclusion. It’s another case of DEI run amuck.

We could solve global warming by shrinking our cars, our houses, our office buildings, if not for the tyranny of tall men

That’s COMPLETELY unfair! Women CAN be gun-females TOO. #notallmen

also: everyone who genuinely thinks

One of the reasons that was fun was that it was always a joke, usually presented in the negative so it’s technically true “JD Vance denies fucking a couch”. Right from the beginning, it was presented as a joke gone viral.

Were there genuine believers?

And no one ever took it seriously

Just like everything in the Trump era, that KGB agent would fail miserably because why would something so ridiculous work? The most significant lasting legacy of Maga-politics will be the death of comedy, because who would write something so extreme? No one would believe it

I thought it was just getting good.

I never actually had an account or much inclination to use it but it seemed like the first online service ubiquitous enough for local government and business notifications. In that sense, it was just starting to be a real benefit for an informed populace

However downvoting as that seemed more like a prerequisite to your posted opinion - I’ll agree that it’s fine for all the loonies to rant at each other there, but that makes the opinion “popular” …… crap, wrong community

I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.

OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)

When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up

Just like always, it depends on how you define or redefine ai. For example, what used to be called ai has been very successful in photo processing. The same thing is going to happen: some portion or incarnation of the current generative ai will be successful, but it will be dismissed similar to “it’s just machine learning, not ai”

I have a lot of hope for Apple’s approach, where they are incorporating it as tools into specific capabilities, and prioritizing privacy. While there’s no direct profit, it should help sell a lot more devices with ever higher tech specs. I also like their “private cloud” model that has a lot of potential beyond private ai

I understand you don’t appreciate where we’ve come from and how fast, can’t see the year to years changes, but the iPhone is just a little over ten years old. Do you really not see huge changes between an early iPhone and today’s?

Neither are the bean back rounds and launchers

But yeah, this was a shock for me a few years after I graduated. My school made a big deal of “Campus Security” becoming spcertified as a police force “University Police”, but the only reason they ever gave was so they could carry guns.

I’m not denying there may be a gun threat occasionally, but this was in a small university town, not near any cities. This was as safe a place as you could expect, and I’m sure almost all their calls were kids binging on new intoxicants, and kids fumbling through dating and relationships

No, but only because we subdivide what layman think of as IT into many specialties

As DevOps , I whisper to a room full of computers to do what you told them plus do what some others tell you to break what you did, then run a big hammer over it, and hand all the pieces back to you

Huh, I came to say pretty much the same thing. I’m DevOps, more or less, by I tell people I’m a programmer since that’s what I do

Given how expensive they’re getting, the fees, the ever painfully louder volume, any travel is too much.

However, when concerts weren’t as anti-fan ….

• longest trip: from Boston to Florida for a weekend
• second longest: from Boston to Buffalo
• most: 1-3 hr

It very much comes down to how you use them. Within my household, I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple cable go bad. However I’ve had third party bad from purchase, and my teens go through cables every 6-12 months.

What kind of abuse do your cables go through?

• do you pull from the hard plastic or the cable?
• are they on the floor being stepped on or with chairs rolling over them?
• when carrying are they just stuffed in your backpack or neatly rolled up in a plastic pocket or in a baggie?
• when tangled, do you just pull harder or do you untangle?

The Wikipedia article on animal consciousness has an interesting discussion

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

Of particular note as I sit here petting my dog, is the example of self-awareness in dogs. Historically dogs don’t seem to exhibit self-awareness, but we used a mirror test and dogs aren’t as visual. A sniff test, using their dominant sense, shows they are

Thanks for the fascinating rabbit hole …. Popping my head back up: it seems like no. It actually reminds me a lot of the term “artificial intelligence” where every time it’s demonstrated, the definition changes. So the question really is whether we move the goalposts or whether we just define the intended meaning poorly.

To me it looks like both terms have an implied “like a human” that has not yet been met. When an animal achieves the definition of sapient, it’s the definition that’s wrong because accepted use implies “like a human”.

And of course the real answer in both cases is to use more precise terms. That’s where things get really interesting

If an alien can travel to meet us, and we have nowhere near the technology that we could travel to them, then yes they are far beyond our level of technology.

Since the question mentioned “civilization”, these are sapient beings, not just microbes or animals of some sort. While there’s still a chance of primitive life in our solar system, sapient life pretty much implies travel from outside the solar system and we can only do that in our fiction

That makes A great movie plot but it seems awfully far fetched , even in the reality where aliens visit us