I remember having a professor passing around a bootleg CD of, iirc, Java documentation because he knew not everyone had access at home. He was great!

Sadly, I’ve had similar experiences. Some people are so indoctrinated or have had such bad experiences with corruption in other countries, they just refuse to acknowledge how it would work in the US.

Others are so committed to the identity of not letting anyone, especially the government, tell them what to do (pay taxes), but that is a dying breed in the era of MAGA and post-Covid. (I know COVID is still very much an issue for some areas, but I digress.)

My main point is that while getting someone to understand these two facts may not change their minds, their minds will not change unless they understand these 2 facts. It opens up the door to a conversation that cannot be had beforehand.

It really is the “everyone” that annoys people. I’ve asked conservatives to explain to me how insurance works as a business model. They pretty quickly realize two things:

1. Monthly premiums of everyone cover the needs of anyone in need today. (Some seem to think it is like a bank account, but pretty quickly realize why that doesn’t make sense. Framing it around car insurance instead of healthcare tends to help if they are struggling here.)

2. As a for profit business, they need to collect more in monthly premiums from each customer than they will provide that customer with benefits. Otherwise, the business is not profitable.

Once they understand these two facts, then they are ready to understand why government sponsored healthcare is optimal. It maximizes the number of people paying into the monthly premiums, while minimizing the profit margin because the government doesn’t need to be run at a profit. Many disagree with that last point, but will usually be satisfied by phrasing it as “bringing in a minimal profit. Otherwise, we wouldn’t want to be overtaxed, right?”

You got it!

You did! I had the same one too and I liked that I never had to try to find the right chord. People hadn’t really settled on micro USB for most things yet, so you still had 5 different flavors of usb cable floating around.

I mean, I can - I know how, but boy having the GUI is nice. I can put a commit message title and a detailed message in a way that works well with my brain. Using two -m flags will never click with me, and yes, I had to look it up again just to leave this comment.

Tech support has evolved since I got out. I don’t remember this specific point of confusion. However, during the last job I had that involved any level of help desk support with non-technical people, Obama was still in office.

Hold up, what did they mean because I cannot translate that

Subaru outback with a tow hitch. This is the way…

I very openly believe and evangelize that OpenAI prepping to go public is what triggered the wave of calls to pause R&D. They are in a hole so big that they’ll take a 1/3rd of the economy with them when they go belly up. The other big tech firms are probably all in the same boat. However, none of them can afford the public perception of being the first to flinch and cut back on AI research. So, they are angling for the government to step in and force everyone to cut their R&D budget all at the same time, so no one has to save face.

Isn’t that a rejection of the premise you set up though? If you are describing a flaw in that an AI isn’t capable of teaching a human, then 1) it isn’t flawless, and 2) it’s circular in that an AI isn’t capable because it isn’t capable. Would you apply the same the same logic to something like a philosophical zombie?

Not engaging with the other 2 paragraphs because they are irrelevant to the original comment.

That last sentence is interesting to me. Care to expand further?

Wizard of Oz?

I cave, wtf is this?

not that I don’t think programming is art

My problem with calling programming art…

Thus adding the label is just an attempt to tack on unneeded elevation to the craft. In some ways the video supports my viewpoint. The debate over what is art is a bit tired. It’s worth having, but personally I don’t think it is needed in this case.

I’m going to be real, “Ok, I think it is art, I just don’t want it to be called art” is a wild stance is any other context. As an extension of that claim, I’ll say it is bogus in this context too.

I’ve used the detectors as well. At my university, accusing a student of cheating is a big deal and you want to go into it with as much documentation as you can muster. Even though I know it is AI, I’m going to be showing it to administrators without my area of expertise and experience. Administrators like reports and numbers, so I run whatever the assignment is through a checker, let it generate a score over 90%, and now I’ve got a number inside of my paperwork that will encourage my supervisor, or more often my supe’s supe, to take my accusation seriously. Before these AI checkers, I used “turn it in”, and before that I had LCS tools and diff command.

Personally, I would have put the quotes around “criminals”

I’ve been getting interested in HAM, but it seems really intimidating to get started actually doing stuff and working towards a license. Any resources that you’d recommend for an absolute beginner?