It’s great news regardless but I don’t know why they feel the need to over-attribute this to EVs. It’s not like the majority of the population in Beijing ever drove cars. Regulations on heavy industry are briefly glossed over 10 paragraphs down so they can go back to glowing about EVs. But my impression after visiting Beijing was that a lot of the smog came from people relying on coal cakes for everyday cooking and heating.
There’s no way this was Cloudflare taking a stand for liberty and free speech. They are simply choosing to obey one less regulation. Less for them to do. Less to be accountable for. Less to special-case for one country.
These corporations hate being regulated - it could be by a direct popular ballot, not politicians, and they would still resist. Let’s not mistake corporate obstructionism for libertarianism.
That’s moderation. When there’s a law against it, that’s censorship.
Frankly a couple of countries have passed laws against Nazi speech and paraphernalia, and after the Nazis plunged the world into the biggest war of all time and murdered 12 million people for their racist ideology, I’m cool with that. If that’s the bar: I can live with it. Murder 12 million, your little club no longer gets to meet.
There have always been rational limits on speech.
I agree. I share my use cases mostly to put the critical thinking behind them on display. I’m sure the crowd here is very savvy. But in the general public I agree that many if not most people would be completely seduced by the obsequious & confident tone of the robot. It can do so many things that it becomes tempting to rely on it. You wish it worked better than it did, and if you let yourself get lazy, you can easily slip into trusting it too much.
As time goes by I’m finding a place for AI.
I use it for information searches, but only in cases where I know the information exists and there is an actual answer. Like history questions or asking for nuanced definitions of words and concepts.
I use it to manipulate documents. I have a personal pet peeve about the format of most recipes for example. Recipes always list the ingredient amounts in a table at the top, but then down in the steps they just say “add the salt” or “mix in the flour.” Then I have to look up at the chart and find the amount of salt/flour, and then I lose my place in the steps and have to find it again. I just have AI throw out the chart and integrate the amounts into the steps: “mix in 2 cups of flour”. I can have it shorten the instructions too and break them into easier to read bullet points. I also ask it to make ingredient substitutions and other modifications. The other day I gave it a bread recipe and asked it to introduce a cold-proofing step and reformat everything the way I like. It did great.
Learning interactively. When I need to absorb a new skill or topic I sometimes do it conversationally with AI. Yes I can find articles and videos but then I am stuck with the information they lay out and the pace and order in which they do it. With AI you can stop and ask clarifying questions, or have it skip over the parts you already know. I find this is way faster than laborious googling. However only trust it for very straightforward topics. Like “explain the different kinds of welding and what they are for.” I wouldn’t trust it for more nuanced topics where perspective and opinion come into it. And I’ve leaned that it isn’t great at topics where there isn’t enough information out there. Like very niche questions about the meta of a certain video game that’s only been out a month.
Speech to text and summarization. AI records all my Zoom meetings for work and gives summaries of what was discussed and next steps. This is always better than nothing. I’m also impressed with how it seems to understand how to discard idle chit chat and only record actual work content. At most it says “the meeting began with coworkers exchanging details from their respective weekends.”
This kind of hard-and-fast summarization and manipulation of factual text is much easier with AI. Doing my job for me? No. Hovering over my entire computer? No. Writing my emails for me? Fuck off.
The takeaway is that specific tools I can go to when I need them, for point-specific needs, is all I want. I don’t need or what a hovering AI around all the time, and I don’t want whatever tripe Dell can come up with when I can get the best latest models direct from the leading players.
What? It’s not. The point stands that mostly in the US you meet a very select group of people from other countries, usually of more means, usually with some reason why they left. You are working very hard to not understand something pretty basic. It’s like you’ve never known an immigrant.
How will you make it through life without the ability to criticize a woman’s eyebrows? I leave that grand challenge to you.
Great then, bad example. It was crystal clear to me - I guess not everyone hears the same jokes.
We’re taking about on the scale of their home country. Most Venezuelans couldn’t even manage to get themselves here to be beggars.
It’s amazing trying to convince people that sexism in fact exists. On the one hand, you have the overwhelming reality of the facts on your side. But against you, there is also unlimited head-in-the-sand excuses.
So I think I’ll just gesture vaguely at everything and let you figure it out.
Congrats, one instance found. My question was which do you hear “more” about.
No, because that is not part of a systematic program to diminish men and undermine them from occupying positions of power. When women are equally represented in power and comments about women’s appearance are equally random and not 100% fucking predictable then I’ll handle all such comments the same, and not before.
You’re really far behind here if you don’t understand this, but I don’t expect a lot from someone who would make an openly sexist remark in public, I guess.
I have wondered a lot whether we could enshrine laws that would protect us from corruption like we’ve seen. Executive overreach in general is a problem but there are also smaller things like the fact that Trump filmed a fucking canned food advertisement on the Resolute Desk that seem like they should be eliminate-able.
It just doesn’t seem like we actually have laws anymore. The Supreme Court has declared presidents untouchable. And the way demographics are shifting, it’s harder and harder for Republicants to control Congress, but the electoral college favors red states, so Republicants WANT an overpowered president.
We could probably get them to agree to presidential controls during a Dem presidents’ administration, but could we get to a constitutional amendment or something they couldn’t just undo later when it suits them? I doubt it.
We are in a death match with an implacable foe who wants nothing more than our total destruction. There is no negotiating or agreeing our way out of this: the only thing we can do is win.
It happens, but not predictably. It happens to every powerful woman every time. Which have you heard more about: Hillary’s cankles or whatever the fuck that is that hangs off the bottom of Mitch McConnel’s chin? I rest my case.
Someone’s choices about how they handle or present their body are just as much a part of their appearance as the way their body was made at birth, so your elaborate excuses fail to get you off the sexism hook, from which you hung yourself quite clearly earlier.
Jesus Christ bodies are complex…
The predictable comment about a powerful woman’s appearance.
Oh - what does it do outside the brain?
You don’t control geopolitics but you do control your own outlook. If you can’t accept a someday threat but continue living today, then you are losing the battle before you even know if you have to fight. Yes, losing the ability to get through the day is overreacting, even in light of the threat potential. I could give you 6 other things to worry yourself into paralysis about if I wanted to. But you control your own outlook.
We killed a lot of people to ensure that oil is bought and sold with dollars around the world. No way we’re going to let that currency crutch just go away.