Any excuse you use to explain why you can use a slur is exactly that: an excuse.

I guess that is what I take issue with, that statement makes it sounds like any use of a slur is always wrong regardless of context and that any reason for using it is just to wiggle out of you being a bad person.

Youre right that irony doesnt stopbit being a slur, but usage absolutely matters. Unless you think its inexcusable black people using the n word with each other? Context is incredibly important.

There’s no apparent way to disable the Microsoft 365 account manager in the Start menu, and there’s no option to deactivate the constant nagging to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 subscription.

Sounds like an ad to me.

Its wild how some people’s blind hate of gen AI has got them thinking “corporate control of culture is good actually”

Where is the LLM that can reproduce specific whole copyrighted works on demand? All ive seen is reproductions of quotes of a few sentences (fair use) and hacks that can make it ocasionally vomit up random larger fragments of its training data, maybe up to a few paragraphs.

Yep, its definitely not possible that nice small businesses like universal and sony would sue without an actual case in order to try and crush competitors with costs.

Estimates for chatgpt usage per query are on the order of 20-50 Wh, which is about the same as playing a demanding game on a gaming pc for a few minutes. Local models are significantly less.

The purpose of twitter like platforms is to have people to listen to and people to listen to you, so yes vastly lower user counts is a drawback.

Have you considered that maybe other people have different priorities, needs and desires to you, and that for people coming around to your point of view you should encourage them rather than castigate them for taking too long?

hmmm I wonder if that is considered in the thousands of words of this article…

It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.

Ask your calculator what 1-(1-1e-99) is and see if it never halucinates (confidently gives an incorrect answer) still.

Saying FTL is possible is equivalent to saying effects can proceed cause, the two statements saying the same thing from different frames of reference. You can demonstrate this with the Taychon pistol paradox (you could use a gun that fired FTL bullets to shoot yourself in the past).

Wormholes could avoid this but only if the mouths of the wormholes moved away from each other at slower than the speed of light.

No, correctness is defined by usage. There is no high authority that lays down rules and you are wrong if you break them. 100 years ago you would have been considered incorrect if you asked “who am I speaking to?” rather than “To whom am I speaking?”. There wasnt a committee meeting some time in the 50s where it was decided to change the rules and depreciate cases in who/whom it just happened naturally and what is “correct” evolved.

Dictionaries themselves say that that they document how language is used rather than setting rules to follow, hence they now inculde a definition of literally as “not actually true but for emphasis”.

Further to this its not likely to result in less children being abused.

If you have the death penalty for even possessing CSAM as the parent suggests, then there is no incentive to not get into distribution or even actively abusing children and producing CSAM once you posess some. The punishment isnt any worse so why not? Its the same reason for proportionality in other crimes, we dont punish robbing a bank with life in jail as then there would be no reason for anyone who robs a bank to not just murder everyone to leave no witnessess.

This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770,[3][1] and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then.[a] However, modern linguistics has shown that idiomatic past and current usage consists of the word less with both countable nouns and uncountable nouns so that the traditional rule for the use of the word fewer stands, but not the traditional rule for the use of the word less.[3] As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, "Less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.”

“Correct” was a suggestion by someone which got over zealously picked up by grammarians despite in flying in the face of common usage. There is no acedemy of English to dictate that this rule change is the one true way of speaking and even if there was it would have about as much effect as the French one trying to suppress “le weekend”.

Whichever sounds more natural to you, because the whole countable/non-countable less/fewer is crap made up by Edwardian snobs and then repeated by school teacher gammarians too into being “proper”. To quote wiki

The comparative less is used with both countable and uncountable nouns in some informal discourse environments and in most dialects of English.[citation needed] In other informal discourse however, the use of fewer could be considered natural. Many supermarket checkout line signs, for instance, will read “10 items or less”; others, however, will use fewer in an attempt to conform to prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammarians consider this to be a case of hypercorrection as explained in Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage.[7][8] A British supermarket chain replaced its “10 items or less” notices at checkouts with “up to 10 items” to avoid the issue.[9][10] It has also been noted that it is less common to favour “At fewest ten items” over “At least ten items” – a potential inconsistency in the “rule”,[11] and a study of online usage seems to suggest that the distinction may, in fact, be semantic rather than grammatical.[8] Likewise, it would be very unusual to hear the unidiomatic “I have seen that film at fewest ten times.”[12][failed verification]

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.[13]

That seems a bit of a non-story given that its prefaced on “once the attacker has access to your work email”. Yes once they have that they can do very good spear phishing attacks using copilot, but they could easily do them without copilot too.

They went public, simple as that.

Right, but even taking Musk the mask has only slipped over the last five or so years. Before that he was often treated as a darling for pushing EVs to help fight climate change and SpaceX for reigniting people’s fascination with space. It’s only after he’s got huge amounts of wealth and exposure that its become clear to people what an awful person he is.