I always hear about people lamenting that they lost their boomer parents to Fox News or Facebook or whatever, but I’m a boomer parent who lost a son to Rogan. He’s always quoting absolute nonsense he heard on that show about Kamala or liberals. It’s so sad - he’s a pretty smart guy.

I’m confident you won’t regret it. I read quite a lot of SF, both older and newer. There’s a lot of classic SF that’s really good, but you have to constantly keep in mind the time it was written in because the story or the characters or the dialog is dated. There was zero of that with that book, it could have been written yesterday (the setting kind of insulates it culturally and technologically). And the sensibilities are so, so far ahead of its time.

I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it’s not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it’s told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It’s an amazing piece of work, and it’s amazing it was published when it was.

It does, but that’s invaluable too, and you get used to it pretty quickly. It let’s you see if there’s a space (dot), tab (arrow), line wrap (bent arrow), or whatever. Very useful if you deal with documents a lot.

It’s better to use sections or paragraphs formatted as starting on a new page. Using page breaks or lots of blank lines to get to get things paginated is how you end up with wonky formatting like blank pages.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

No, they replaced half of the sodium chloride with potassium chloride. It really is half salt. No one is being taken advantage of.

There are a lot of words on packaging that are unregulated, but “organic” isn’t one of them. If they use it, it has to mean what the FDA says it means, and that’s not the opposite of inorganic.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

At least it doesn’t say organic… since salt is an inorganic compound and that’d be straight up silly.

Except that, in food, “organic” just means no pesticides or synthetic chemicals were used in making it.

No fillers, just two ingredients: iodized sodium and potassium chloride.

They can’t call it a salt substitute because it still has salt. Some people are told to cut down on salt, so would be attracted to something that tastes salty but has less salt in it. I get why it’s funny, but it seems reasonable to me.

It seems like the problem goes away if you add a “the.” I had too much of the refried beans.

Agreed, and it’s sad. I mean, I work at a highly technical engineering company. Everyone has at least a BS, and this guy was probably in his 60s with 30+ years of experience. Yet here he was repeatedly farting by a woman because they had a disagreement. It shows you that age and education don’t guarantee maturity.

She wasn’t interested in suing, she just wanted him to stop farting in her doorway. I didn’t know the guy, so I started by talking to his manager, who talked to the guy. Sounds like he initially tried to deny it, but in a way that made it clear he was doing it on purpose. His boss was pretty clear that it wouldn’t be tolerated and it never happened again.

Some people are so weird and petty.

I had a female employee come to me to complain years ago. She had had a disagreement with an older male employee (thankfully not mine) some weeks prior, and since then, every time he walked by her cube, he’d pause at her doorway, fart, and then keep walking without saying anything.

She at least was aware of how absolutely ridiculous it was, but legitimately didn’t think it was something she should have to deal with. One of the stranger management issues.

Oh, that’s fine, music is subjective. I think Jimmy Hendrix was an amazing musician who could make a guitar do anyone he wanted, but I don’t enjoy a lot of what he choose to do with one. My point is issue is that it’s hard for us to understand how influential something was if we weren’t around when it came out. All the cliches started with something that did it first.

The aspect of this that really bugs me is that people never get how revolutionary something was. Like taking your example of music, people listen to songs by The Beatles or Nirvana or David Bowie and think “Their fine, but I don’t know what’s so great about them - 100 other bands sound the same.” But the thing is, at the time, no other bands sounded the same, they were just copied like crazy.

You see it with movies, too. Gone With The Wind, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Blade Runner - all really good movies in their own right, but putting them in the context of the movies of the time shows how influential they were. All highly copied afterwards.

Not coincidental, I’d guess. If you haven’t had kids, you likely haven’t realized that dealing with naked kids is just part of the job. It’s not like they’re self cleaning.

I hope you stick around - seem like a significant net positive in my opinion.

It’s such a weird slice of society that always equate nudity with sexuality, even in babies/kids. “Weird” being the kindest word I can find.