> almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly.
We do not live in a meritocracy, because society has no means to judge merit. We live in a society ruled by people who crammed before the tests, and who wrote the papers to agree with and flatter the teacher. Now they are the teachers (and bosses), and
1) expect to be flattered (and LLMs have been built as the ultimate flatterers),
2) feel that a good, ambitious student (or subordinate) will not question them and their work, but instead learn to conform to it, and
3) are not particularly interested in the quality of their work as such, but rather the acceptance of their work. In certain professions, such as judges, doctors, high-level lawyers and engineers, or politicians, they feel like (with good reason) that they can demand acceptance of their work, and punish those who don't accept it.
This position is what they worked so hard as young people for. They were not working to become the best at their jobs. They were working to get the most secure jobs. The most secure jobs are the ones that bad or lazy work doesn't endanger.
Silent sudo passwords are not a real problem. I wouldn't give up the slightest whiff of security over them. This is one of the things that I see that I have a minority position on, and it lowers my general opinion of humanity.
It's on brand for Ubuntu, though. They've been looking for an audience that is not me for a very long time. I sometimes worry about Debian's resistance to social pressure, though. It seems that Debian doesn't fall for marketing or corporate pressure, but they sometimes fall when they are surrounded by people who have fallen for marketing or corporate pressure.
It's not a downgrade to security for any password length:
- If it's so short that the knowledge of the length makes bruteforcing noticeably faster, the password is so short that the total length taken would be very short regardless.
- In all other cases, it removes such a small fraction of time needed (on the scale of removing one age-of-the-universe from a process that would otherwise take thousands of ages-of-the-universe) that it doesn't change any infeasible timescale to a feasible one.
So either the information isn't needed, or it won't help. So not a security decrease.
They understand English. They just don't want to stop doing what they want to do. This is a quality that they share with everyone else on the planet by definition, but they think they're more important than other people.
There are angry people playing dominance games on one hand, and on the other people who simply don't care what anybody else wants and will do what they can get away with. There's no difference in intelligence between the two, but only the first type can actually be reasoned with. The second type will only pretend to be reasonable until the person that they're intimidated by leaves the room.
Everybody says "social cues," but as you said, the people who "don't get social cues" also don't seem to "get" direct requests or orders.
I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.
Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.
There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.
Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content.
The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.
I have no idea how you've generated this principle. I'm going to ignore the noise.
1) "The victims of these policies aren't infants; they will be adults in about five minutes."
You've made no case for why adults couldn't be banned from using phones in class.
2) "They reduce the quality of life for people who rely on AAC..."
I don't know what this stands for, but if it is some sort of handicap, exceptions can be made. It's fine to ban wheelchair use in school for people who don't need wheelchairs. Even if having a wheelchair makes you stand out because everybody isn't using one.
3) "To pretend that smartphones are somehow different from that past..."
That past is very recent, and is also garbage. Chromebooks, iPods, cellphones, and "Discmans" in class is also a terrible idea. If whatever advantages that Chromebooks provide (I don't want Google in schools at all, but ignore me) are nullified by the fact that kids can bypass the security on them, get rid of them.
4) "...you have to issue laptops in order to much of the kind of relevant teaching necessary in 2026"
You definitely don't.
5) "The people who are interested in learning will learn, the others will not, that's that."
That is a good argument for not even having schools. But we have schools because we are concerned with setting up situations that can make it easier to learn, even for children who are less interested than others.
6) "Also, the Oregon ban is illegal and will be tossed out the moment that it gets to the appropriate level of judicial review - the Governor cannot make law."
The state can make policy, though, for its own schools. If this ban extended to private schools that weren't taking any money from the state, I could see this being a problem. This includes "vouchers."
If you are going to ignore 'the noise' (the actual content of my post) we don't have anything to talk about and you should not reply. Do not reply to me if you are not going to actually respond to the content of my post.
I'll reply to what I want, and I think I pulled out the actual content of your post.
The rest of it just seems to be strange pronouncements you are making about what people should and shouldn't want to do, and the motivations of the people you don't like.
> But open weights don't undo the infringement -- they just make a potentially infringing artifact publicly available.
This is true when talking about the infringement of the copyrights of others. But when discussing the infringement of GPL copyleft, making a potentially infringing artifact publicly available likely satisfies the license conditions.
The evil is that this case was settled, and before being settled was decided in a way contrary to all previous copyright decisions. The courts decided that rap records had to clear every single sample, thereby basically destroying the art form, but now you can literally feed every book into a blender, piece another book together out of the pieces, and sell it.
Hip-hop when it peaked with the Bomb Squad was such a frenetic mix of so many recognizable, unrecognizable, and transformed sources that it doesn't resemble anything that was made after the decisions against Biz Markie and De La Soul. Afterwards, you just licensed one song, slightly cut it up, and rapped over it. It was just a new way to sell old shit to young people unfamiliar with it.
Now you can literally just train a machine on the same stuff, and it's legal. A machine transformation was elevated over human creativity, simply because rich people wanted it.
> The courts decided that rap records had to clear every single sample, thereby basically destroying the art form, but now you can literally feed every book into a blender, piece another book together out of the pieces, and sell it.
Are they still enforcing the old way on hip hop samples, or has that changed with the recent rulings? If the new way of doing things is applied fairly to everyone that seems like a win.
> The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone.
Dollars? So 300 people's cable bill? That's basically nothing. They're spending too much, and it's still nothing, and the solution is going to be to privatize it and eventually loot it.
You can't hand out a collection plate and get $300K for Arxiv? Your local neighborhood church can. Civilization is obviously collapsing.
Okay, here goes. You can tell when someone is acting in bad faith when they talk about a law that has been in force and enforced since the 1960s is something new.
Laws can be in existence for decades before they are weaponized against people.
It's illegal to have most eBay/Amazon bulbs on your car because they are not DOT approved.
If someday they start impounding cars crossing state borders with light bars, fog lights, and LEDs of races they don't want in that state... Someone like you will say "you're just making stuff up, that law has been on effect since 1961."
Are you arguing that since we think we're all special that we should be accepting that other people think they're special?
Meanwhile, people getting laid off (just so the jobs could be exported to countries with more poverty and lower pollution, worker's rights, and standards for working conditions) were getting berated that they should "learn to code" for decades, while we laughed and discussed our stock options.
Yes, there's no way that somebody could have a product called OpenOffice that is literally an Open Source version of Office. Impossible.
The legal purpose of trademarks is to serve the same purpose as a signature: in order that one company cannot do business pretending to be another company without showing a clear intention to defraud - an intention made clear by the attempt to fake a signature, or imitate a mark. It is not to own words or sounds. It is a mark that you trade under.
This is a product that is openly hostile to the other product, and is adding a well-established prefix to indicate the reason for that hostility.
We do not live in a meritocracy, because society has no means to judge merit. We live in a society ruled by people who crammed before the tests, and who wrote the papers to agree with and flatter the teacher. Now they are the teachers (and bosses), and
1) expect to be flattered (and LLMs have been built as the ultimate flatterers),
2) feel that a good, ambitious student (or subordinate) will not question them and their work, but instead learn to conform to it, and
3) are not particularly interested in the quality of their work as such, but rather the acceptance of their work. In certain professions, such as judges, doctors, high-level lawyers and engineers, or politicians, they feel like (with good reason) that they can demand acceptance of their work, and punish those who don't accept it.
This position is what they worked so hard as young people for. They were not working to become the best at their jobs. They were working to get the most secure jobs. The most secure jobs are the ones that bad or lazy work doesn't endanger.
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