But in terms of actual information it could be worse thanks to AI hallucinations and poor training materials.

The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.

That is not an improvement, it’s just also not really any worse.

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People always say things like this, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of extremely lonely people desperate to express themselves, and some of them think that a machine is their only hope.

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/03/new-surgeon-general-advisory-raises-alarm-about-devastating-impact-epidemic-loneliness-isolation-united-states.html

Some of those people talking to LLMs are fools who think they’ll get some sort of wise response, sure. The rest of them are just looking for someone to talk to. Unfortunately, if politics gets brought up, that LLM might lead them down a dark path without them realizing it.

And honestly, the pathetic fallacy is an easy trap to fall into, especially with computers. Back in the 80s when I talked to ELIZA, I knew rationally that it wasn’t alive, but there was still a tiny emotional part of me that would think of it as a human on the other end that I was talking to. And plenty of people let their emotions take over their reasoning abilities.

I’m 47 and my 14-year-old daughter gets upset when I call myself an old man, so I’m not sure I’m in agreement with you.

Yeah, I wouldn’t trust it on a computer port. I’d just plug it into a power brick.

Damn, check out the price of the thing someone else linked to at AliExpress for a fraction of that price. But having to spend money on that should not be necessary.

Oh very cool! And you can’t beat that price. Thanks.

Well the beauty of it was that it was comfortable to use with index finger or thumb. Which was nice when you were doing something precise or wanted to do something that involved a lot of broad movement.

Nope. My daughter is notorious for mixing up cables when they come out of the brick. Some charge her tablet, some are for data transfer, some charge other devices but not her tablet. It’s super confusing. I had to start labeling them for her.

I love trackballs (except that Kensington above. It was basically a pinch your skin torture device.) I still use the Logitech M570 trackball. It’s pretty good.

My favorite of all time though was the Logitech Trackman Vista. Absolutely perfect form factor that Logitech just gave up on one day and I will never know why.

And what the hell, add RS-422 while you’re at it. And a parallel port! And the left side expansion port they used to have on the Amiga 500 and 1000!

Doubtful.

USB C is the best thing to happen to peripherals since the mouse.

I would agree with you if there were a simple way to tell what the USB-C cable I have in my hand can be used for without knowing beforehand. Otherwise, for example, I don’t know whether the USB-C cable will charge my device or not. There should have been a simple way to label them for usage that was baked into the standard. As it is, the concept is terrific, but the execution can be extremely frustrating.

There’s also Hugo Boss.

I think this is a Ship of Theseus thing here that we’re going to argue about because at what point is it just UNIX-like and not UNIX?

UNIX-like is definitely a descriptor currently used for Linux.

Even the Wikipedia entry starts that way.

So is Linux. So I guess the light blue is all other UNIX variants?

rsync isn’t that fancy, but rsync is a nicer sync than rneighborsync. In fact, their whole kytchen is pretty ugly.