Ask any Starfleet crew? 😅

I was in a physical meeting where the other part cracked open their Windows laptop so we could go over documents together. Halfway in I noticed the microphone icon was on in the system bar.

Considering Microsoft and the state of Windows, I’m guessing the entire conversation is liable to be used as training data, and I would really have liked the option to nope the hell out in advance.

This post had 47 upvotes until I broke the feng shui.

Editorialising headline:

A new force of nature is reshaping the planet, study finds

From the RSP opinion piece (not a study,) emphasis mine:

However, this coupling of socially produced environmental challenges with disruptive social changes—the Anthropocene condition—is not new.

Yes, we live in the Anthropocene. Yes, in geological terms human effects on the environment are new. But as the source also says, “new” in that context is still thousands of years old:

Global climate change, biodiversity losses and other anthropogenic planetary changes all began long before the industrial age

Plus, as is quoted in the OP:

Human sociocultural capabilities to engineer ecosystems, from using fire to clear land, to propagating favoured species, to agriculture, to industrial food systems, have evolved and accumulated over millennia

Anthroecology is the more novel concept here, and an interesting approach, too. But that is all it is — there is no “new force of nature” at play, only a recent framework to better understand and (hopefully) manage our detrimental effects on the world around us.

Nope. We all know the phrase “if it’s free, you’re the product”. In one of his non-offensive moments, RMS said that social media users are really “the used”.

Under the current paradigm, the “AI” user is the real tool.

What you’re telling me is, this “groundbreaking” Columbia U project is already implemented by law in the EU? I guess somebody involved also invented a time machine.

Tragically indeed! I hope they found a home in a particularly nerdcentric sex dungeon.

By “one” I mean “certainly not me”.

Unrelated, how does one search for, say, “prosthetic Klingon boobs” without it ending up on one’s search history?

— …and my third wish is more wishes! — I’m a genie, not a moron. We’re done here.

Always, several times a day 🙂

I never got near the actual printshop (usually done abroad to cut costs), but yeah. You pick up stuff all along the production chain.

Especially when the printer offers to do some small change in the print files for “a modest added fee”… No thanks, tell me what you need and I’ll fix it myself!

“All em dashes in this 200 page book have somehow been replaced with hyphens? 😨 Give me ten minutes!” 😂

Probably a regional phrase. I’m in Scandinavia, English terms get absorbed and reappropriated into the language(s). Never considered that wasn’t the original usage.

But yeah, I designed, laid out, and did prepress on a few periodical art magazines here. I was the whole graphics department 😉

Rom is such an undervalued player in that one. May Day will always be Rom Day for me:

I was just posting elsewhere that I could probably settle for street sweeping.

Thirty years creative work experience, eight years academic — fuck it. If people want “AI” generated bullshit, I’m not bothered putting anymore original work out there.

Well, there goes my academic career.

Yeah, I also put more faith in those 200 work hours than in the original, generated code which the guy completely rewrote before submission.

consulting an LLM like a book

Saw a news item the other day, reporting that a significant number of university students now use “AI” bots instead of course literature. One student replied, “Nah, I opened a book like once. Anyway, the literature can be just as flawed as AI because there’s new research being made all the time”…

There is a significant overestimation of the factuality of “AI” responses at play there. And a lack of understanding of the entire chain of fact checking, verification, and review that goes into making a book, particularly for education.

I know that is slightly OT, but I think the comparison is fair.

It’s on my mobile keyboard as an alt option for the hyphen. And yes, I use keyboard shortcuts on my computer. Worked as a layouter for print in years. You learn to appreciate a good em dash.

being competent at writing now makes me get accusations of using [“AI”]

Long time em dash user over here, feeling your pain 😞

Big caveat there that “AI” still makes stuff up out of the blue, despite being ostensibly trained on “all of human knowledge”. And this guy seems to have used its generated code accordingly to better apply his PHP skills to C++.

You can probably tell I disagree strongly with “AI” being called “just a tool” 😛