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Graceful degredation is a choice, made in the negative by survivors of the dot-com bubbles that fiercely want to extract a level of customer loyalty that mere “actual companies” could never dream of.

Business software is a weird world. Made weirder than there absolutely are people paid by Intuit (not OP) whose job is to convince people who don’t currently pay for QuickBooks that paying for QuickBooks will solve whatever quickbooks-esque problem they have.

It’s worse in the IT side. I’m modestly sure that COBOL and Java are only still around because of IBM and Oracle sales staff.

(Maybe less so for Java than COBOL. Or maybe Oracle’s sales team is just better.)

Honestly, at this point I’d settle for just “AI cannot be bundled with anything else.”

Neither my cell phone nor TV nor thermostat should ever have a built-in LLM “feature” that sends data to an unknown black box on somebody else’s server.

(I’m all down for killing with fire and debt any model built on stolen inputs,.too. OpenAI should be put in a hole so deep that they’re neighbors with Napster.)

Clear reporting should include not just the incremental environmental cost of each query, but also a statement of the invested cost in the underlying training.

TY and YM.

Worth noting is that “transgender” is not a shortened form of “transitioning gender”, but instead itself derives from the same latin root as “transition”, as do “transfigure” or “transform”.

So, “transgender” is closer to “changed gender” than “gender in flux.”

(Which is similar to how “transphobe” or “homophobe” mean exclusion, as in “hydrophobic”, and not fear as in “arachnophobia”)

FWIW.

US patents only last for 20 years. Technically, nothing is stopping you from making a part-for-part copy of a good laser printer from 2005 and selling it the same way some companies do replacement toner.

It’s just that making a cheap and reliable appliance is HARD if there are dozens of distinct parts that all have to move together. Heck, id expect a near-clone of a Cuisinart stand mixer before I’d expect a printer.

(And, even then, i doubt it’d be much cheaper than just buying one used.)

Edit: patents, not parents.

Mostly closeted late-identified MtF non-binary here:

You’ve cleanly identified the central uncertainty behind a hell of a lot of “gender binary” discourse, but you’re also brushing against a flamewar about something called “transmedicalism.”

(Thankfully, neither one needs to be answered to get to the correct public policy outcomes of “let people be people” and “don’t be a sexist fart.”)

Transmedicalism can be defined as a belief that only those who medically transition are transgender, with anything short of full HRT and surgery as merely a compromise state and anyone not transitioning full time dismissed as a cisgender person playing pretend indulging in something less than.

Needless to say, there are strong opinions on both sides. Just as there are LGB cis people who dismiss T as a class needing respect and protection, there are T people who dismiss Q+ as a class needing protection or respect.

What makes the argument especially infuriating is the dearth of good statistics on non-cisgender folk at all. Between low sample sizes, huge variance between state law and ethnic acceptance, and often-insulting definitions, precise data is harder to come by for trans sexuality than f-on-m sexual assault.

For your specifics;

• Social expectations are a huge part of gender identity. If I had been born decades later I very well might have come out as non-binary in high school, or might have instead been a full-time trans girl. And if I lived in a redder state, or had a more right-wing partner, I might still identify as entirely cis.

• Maybe? Like I said, it’s really hard to know.

• Data point worth noting : the cis folk who are closest to me are definitely cis.

• With the.huge caveat about data noted above, my understanding is that trans men and women are about even on their split between which sexes or genders they are attracted to. The most prominent single group may be MtF trans women who were in a cishet marriage before they transitioned, but my impression is that about 25% are “gay”, 25% “straight”, 25% “queer”, and 25% “confused by terms.”

There is no pattern of facts where “Apple gets to collect a tax on any transaction you make on your iPhone” is a good thing

A few years ago I put my position on the Republican party into a relatively pithy saying it’s really easy to remember.

" No Republicans. No excuses. No exceptions."

Feel free to share and steal without attribution.

Scaling small things up is always a logistics and repeatability issue. Always.

We had.technology to put a capsule of three men on the moon for a week before most humans alive today were born, and yet we haven’t gone back because while both “number of humans” and “length of stay” are fairly simple ideas to scale up, we never had the logistics to create and fuel the one.saturn V launch every other day that a permanent moon base would need.

Heck, the Internet is full of ground breaking improvements that were “buried” by the challenge of scaling up out of a lab.

It’s hard to say without knowing what country you’re in now. PRC is an undemocratic system to be embraced, escaped, or endured, but so are PRK, Iran, and a bunch others

OTOH, Canada or the USA were designed on the assumption that you’d agitate for the form of government. If you’re in either one, especially if you’re a citizen, you should definitely argue for the government you want.

The rest of the world is an interesting mix of “started undemocratic, embraced democracy” to “started democratic, embraced autocracy.”

IBM has never stopped selling mainframes. One of the big reasons why finance transactions are still COBOL is IBM consultants insisting that a centralized mainframe is better than a private cloud.

This isnt 1984. You have as much freedom to say whatever you want as you did in an equally-dense area in 1955, and you’re exactly as subject to what you say being reported inaccurately.

What’s changed is that you actually have a plausible ability to broadcast yourself. Today’s equivalent of newspapers and TV stations have infinite channels and infinite paper, and mostly just let you say whatever you want.

If you do cross that “whatever” , though, they can and do refuse to publish your stuff, but you’re free to go elsewhere.

And if it’s actual surveillance you’re worried about… Well, much hasn’t changed since “Enemy of the state” and you should be practicing both good privacy safeguards and rhetorical defense of the same whenever you can.

Things like the MS-PL strike me as Open Source but not Free Software, but I can’t think of a contrary example which is Free Software but not Open Source.

My parents chose each other. They’re both good people, but they weren’t a good match at all and none of us were especially surprised when they divorced.

The Mrs and I chose each other, and while it would be arrogant to assert that we’re definitely a good match I get the impression that my kids would be shocked if we split.

The structural key to a happy marriage is, I think, the freedom to leave. If my parents had split when I was a kid they’d probably have a better relationship. But because of economics and law and pride they didn’t, which made the pain last way longer than it should have.

Pascal’s wager is a defense of theism in general, not a specific flavor of theism. If you accept that there is a God, any God, then you can reason and argue about which way to worship her is correct.

If you do not believe that God exists, however, then the particularities of which godhead you worship are irrelevant trivia.

If God or Brahman or Kamisama exist, then they are aware of the imperfect worship flavors that they receive and have appropriate accommodations included, if they are worthy of worship at all. (Please note that Zeus is not included in this list, because that guy’s just a rapist bastard.)

Spoiler alert : it was just a survey of the reported confidence of folk who admitted to using AI.

So, AI users exhibit a reduction in literally the one skill that the AI expects them to actually have?

I should probably go read that link and see if it’s actual degradation or just selection.

A wizard drops you on the moon. You immediately panic about not being able to breathe, plus your salivia is boiling and your blood is…well, it killed you pretty darn quickly.

Thankfully, the wizard noticed and set spells that puts a tiny bit of atmosphere right over your head, and , repairs the damage inflicted already. There is a chair and a go-board in front of you.

“Wait, that’s it?” you ask the wizard after he explains what the spells did. “Arent I going to burn, or freeze, or something?”

“Eventually, yeah,” says the wizard as he sits down. “But the human body’s great at homeostasis. Since your blood isn’t boiling it can circulate heat within you, you can burn calories to add heat as needed, and sweating is absurdly effective since the relative humidity of a vacuum is pretty much less than zero.”

“But, didn’t the Apollo capsule spin to manage heat, and aren’t there huge radiator fins on the ISS so they don’t slowly burn? I thought managing heat was hard?”

“It is. For an inanimate object. Especially one that isn’t filled with water or surrounded by a thermo exchange medium. You ever see a capsule bleed or a probe sweat?”