Dishonest Larry? That sounds alrather Trumpian and it doesn’t sit well with me. What did Larry Page do to deserve a label from you?

The articles you share are both interesting and I appreciate the share. However I’ve found the tool useful. Moreso than wading through Wikipedia pages, which I do love to do but not when I am reading a book.

These tools certainly aren’t correct coincidentally. Ask Gemini to define 100 words and get back to me on the success rate. Is it coincidence? No. It’s statistics. ANNs are based on pattern recognition. They have significant defficiencies and downsides, but the unfortunate reality is that their margin of usefulness means they aren’t going away.

And if just like to bring something to your attention: poisoning wells is a well worn Jewish conspiracy theory, and I can’t help but find it a bit self defeating that you are claiming that a Jew (Larry page) is poisoning the well of my reading of Hannah Arendt.

If anything, I find your statements much more typical of people with an unhealthy media diet. And I am not accusing you, it’s just my observation from afar.

I think some context here is lost. I was asking for parralels between the Dreyfus affair and modern events. The anti Dreyfusards had phrases they used to identify each other and I thought about the parralels between that and the January 6 insurrection. Specifically the statement that the election was stolen. When I asked for similarities that started this conversation, because it basically refused to draw the parralels.

I agree about the environment, however insofar as this tool can help get us out of this political catastrophe caused by the US, it’s unfortunate but necessary. “Drill baby drill” needs to stop by any means necessary.

Why is that? The book was written in 1951. It’s a real struggle to find the translations, the relevant information and the context by yourself.

I don’t live in the US either.

I did put in a complaint. Maybe they fixed it.

Was the porn floppy 8, 5 or 3 inches?

It’s such a brilliant show. I also love the fact that there are weird little unexplained things that only make sense way later but actually hinted at major plot points.

Walter: “You used to love pancakes” Peter: “I’ve never liked pancakes”

I paraphrase but two major elements of the plot right there.

I love it but it’s so hard to watch. My insides hurt.

My wife can’t handle the pain.

I was where you were a few months ago. It’s an awful feeling and I’ve been obsessed with computers for 28 years. This has been exceptionally difficult for me. I had a really rough year end where I was working on recurring critical defects for weeks. I caused most of them (proximate cause) but the state of the industry itself is what placed me in an impossible position where I was having to make things of poor quality that nobody likes.

Technology itself is not the problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with AI. The way it has presented itself to the world is because of greed and a feeding frenzy. The way it is and works now makes it a bad tool. A tool that does a good job 80% of the time is garbage. It’s being shoved at us with little regard for us and the consequences.

But I am hopeful. I am using AI for my personal projects. It’s not really a choice for me. For many years I’ve tried to get people to work with me on something; anything really. But it either didn’t happen or fizzled out very quickly. These are ideas that I couldn’t execute on my own, and now I can.

So there is a way to find opportunity in chaos. And this is the phase we are in.

I can also see positive things coming out of this. I’ve seen quite a few total newbies who switched to Linux who said they would have been stuck without AI and given up.

The failure of this massive experiment will become the basis for new innovation. We should be perplexed at where we are now, considering how windows forms apps were easier to build 15 years ago than a basic web app is now. We accumulated a lot of complexity without our productivity increasing, instead we are in desperation trying to throw money and “compute” at the complexity.

AI kind of feels like asbestos to me. Too useful to ignore and too harmful to embrace. But I really think that from some unexpected corners we might see a new era for technology emerging. I am optimistic.