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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 5h

They don't USE Tylenol, they use a local anesthetic.

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 5h

Can't remember the title offhand but there are SF short stories, maybe even short-shorts, where the events span millions of years...

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

passenger compartment. Airplanes don't flap their wings. We don't listen to music on machines that draw bows across strings. Every successful invention for performing a task performed by humans does it in a completely different way than humans do.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

The whole humanoid robot idea seems not so much about actually doing the tasks, and more about imitating the feeling of mastery over a human. Sewing machines don't imitate the hand motions of a seamstress. Automobiles don't have the engine into a separate wagon loosely harnessed to the

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

Well said

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

(Not a golfer) Why do you need to? There's nothing you can do to affect the outcome once it's in the air.

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

"Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string." --Emerson

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

As a matter of fact, when I used Wikipedia, I often do not quote the Wikipedia article, I go to Wikipedia's sources and directly quote the sources.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

likely find that information." And not all that infrequently, the source is made up in whole cloth--including books that don't exist, with ISBN numbers that don't exist.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 10h

It's particularly bad because Wikipedia's references are usually correct, whereas AI LLM's source citations are often phony. Often the source cited does not support the statement being made. Often the source cited appears to be not "where I got the information," but "a place I think you could

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 12h

Oh, yeah. Published in 1950, when the Second World War was as recent in memory as the pandemic. And everyone had seen the rise of fascism, not only in Europe, but also in the UK...

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 15h

Calling it "Antifa" is playing their game. I think we should always call it "Antifascist."

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

We don't always say "upper case." We use our synonyms. We say "capitalize," not "upperize." And for the record, if I interpret m-w.com correctly, "upper case," two words, refers only to the literal type case, the correct Germanic-derived word for "majuscule" is "uppercase."

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

Forbes--Forbes!--says that AI "workslop" is killing productivity. "Workslop is AI-generated content that masquerades as finished work but fails to meaningfully advance any actual task."

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

They may not even BE doing it faster. The elephant in the room is the study that showed programmers BELIEVED AI was speeding them up by 20%, when the data showed they were actually being slowed down by 19%.

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

But I could have gotten the right answer quicker by NOT using AI.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

For the AI fans, I know that YOU could have crafted a more clever prompt, adding qualifications like "double-check the results, explain your reasoning, and include URLs to the sources you used," and used Your Pet LLM instead of Google's, YOU could have gotten the right answer using AI.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

Just plain wrong. To put it as kindly as possible, what it gave was the right answer for standard time, not for daylight time. But it explicitly said it was giving an EDT answer!

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

LLMs just aren't very good. I needed to schedule an online meeting with someone in Brazil, and I thought, just this once I'll take a shortcut. Instead of using timeanddate.com, I'll just let Google AI do the work. I knew the time difference was an hour, I just wanted to double-check which way.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

master puppetry. Exaggerated claims by people selling new technologies are always with us. I personally was once told that I didn't have a hope of an IT career if I didn't learn the PL/I programming language. And then, same thing the OS/2 Presentation Manager.

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

Animation is obviously here to stay. And just as obviously it did not supersede or replace live action. And just as obviously the use of animation doesn't automatically make a movie good... or bad. The Muppets have made eight successful movies, but nobody suggests that aspiring filmmakers need to

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 18h

Storytelling, and engagement with the actors and the characters the play, is here to stay. AI stands or falls depending on how well it supports those goals. Before 1937 they knew animation could make an audience laugh, but not until "Snow White" did they know it could make an audience cry.

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dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 19h

What a relief. Things are so upside-down nowadays, I was starting to get anxious that he might get it after all. I wonder how Trump's contribution to peace in Gaza will be perceived in Norway new year. Trump believes that if a war ends, and if he's ever expressed a wish for it to end, he stopped it.

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 1d

The White House has posted images of Trump as King AND as Pope.

dpbsmith.bsky.social @dpbsmith.bsky.social · 1d

I can't prove it, but I assume the "No Kings" slogan might have been inspired by this official posting from the White House. And for the record, at least as I write this, congestion pricing is still in effect (and increasingly liked).

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