Did you tell him you guess you have to stop doing non-web development then? Clearly you’re not qualified if you can’t have the corresponding title.

Machine learning has many valid applications, and there are some fields genuinely utilizing ML tools to make leaps and bounds in advancements.

LLMs, aka bullshit generators, which is where a huge majority of corporate AI investment has gone in this latest craze, is one of the poorest. Not to mention the steaming pile of ethical issues with training data.

Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to “lay off workers to stop inflation.” I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc… believed that to be the case, but there’s rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we’ve seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.

You can very safely remove the “probably” from your first sentence.

I mean, there is a hard limit on how much info your brain can take in. It’s time. Every hour spent learning one thing is an hour not spent learning everything else.

Libre Office

Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.

There is no way that arming Taiwan results in Taiwan starting a war of aggression against China.

What arming Taiwan does is make it an increasingly bad idea for China to invade Taiwan. It’s a deterrent to make sure the nuclear power who constantly threatens Taiwan (read: China) doesn’t think they can just go and take what they want without consequence, and probably commit a little genocide on the side.

You know, like Ukraine.

*Thinnest and yet roughest. Not thick enough to be a barrier, and it can rub you raw to provide an entry point at the same time!

“Sealed” is also a vague suggestion with HVAC. Every ducting join, every piece of equipment, all of it leaks. I shudder to think how much heating/cooling is wasted that way.

Yeah, the issue is that already-rich business owners own all the automation and are scooping the profits of the increased productivity.

I kind of disagree with you, in that when I think about the standalone meanings of the words in each phrase, I think they do say the same thing.

The meaning of the words “You are welcome [to the help I gave you]” implies, to me, that there wasn’t actually anything to offer thanks over. You’re acknowledging their thanks, but telling them that they are welcome to take/use whatever it is you’re talking about. [EDIT: normally when someone tells me I’m welcome to something, I feel less compelled to ask and thank in the future. “You’re welcome to anything in the fridge”, for example.]

It does not imply, to me, that I would appreciate them returning the favour. That might be implied meaning in the phrase, but it’s definitely not what those words mean by themselves.

In any case, “You’re welcome”, “no problem”, “no worries”, etc… are all idioms that mean something different than what their individual words mean. The phrases as a whole carry a different meaning than the words themselves suggest.

I disagree with all your points. What kind of servos are you talking about?

BLDC and AC servos maintain full torque at stop too, and have about 2-3× the torque of a stepper of similar size.

The only way a stepper can rival a servo for precision is with a high degree of microstepping, which is far from guaranteed positioning with open loop control.

I haven’t directly compared response time between steppers and servos, but I would be extremely surprised if there’s a significant enough difference to worry about. Most servo-controlled machines are larger and so are designed to accelerate slower than a printer, if that’s what you mean. This is intentional because inertia is a thing you have to worry about, not because the servo reacts to command changes slowly.

There are valid reasons steppers are used on printers, but it’s not because they have superior performance.

Agreed. Don’t make a threat - just make the GDPR complaint. Inform the company if you want. How many times have you remembered to follow up on one of those threats to see if you should still make a complaint?

It’s not infantilization. These bills are designed to prevent “one more hoop” design by the company to make it too annoying to unsubscribe. Your position assumes good faith behaviour by the company with the newsletter. That is absolutely not a given.

I don’t disagree that the people with money who are funding this kind of development don’t care about regulations or safety.

That said, the idea that they’ll do it out on the open sea or in space are absolutely laughable. Those ideas pitched so far completely ignore all the obvious engineering problems. Not to mention that going to international waters to avoid regulations means that the navy of that country you’re thumbing your nose at now has free reign on you.

In other words, AGI is what every layperson thinks of when people talk about AI. It’s (sort of) what you see in the movies.

LLMs, and every other AI technology we currently have, do not actually have any form of intelligence. They’re called AI because the sub-field of computer science that they arose from is called AI, and has been for decades.

Came here for this, thank you for your service.

Same. As it should be.