blivet

Sure, but for some reason there doesn’t seem to be the same difficulty in print. I don’t recall any warnings about the use of sarcasm or irony in style guides before the internet era, and no one seemed to feel the need for anything like “/s”.

I’m old enough to have been an adult when the internet was first opened up to the general public. I remember guides to writing email that stressed that you should be careful using irony or sarcasm, that the tone was very difficult to convey. I don’t know what it could be, but there seems to be something about online communication that makes it next to impossible to use such devices.

I get the feeling that his engineering background, slight as it may be, helped him to hire competent people to run Tesla and SpaceX, and made it possible for those people to convince him not to insist on doing really stupid things.

Since he knows absolutely nothing about social media websites, not even enough to know what he doesn’t know, it’s impossible to stop him from carrying out whatever nonsensical plans happen to come to mind.

My old land line was almost the same number as an entertainment venue whose number spelled TICKETS. People would sometimes dial 1 instead of 4 (corresponding to the letter I), and get me. Usually on weekend mornings, grr, but fortunately it didn’t happen too often.

You can’t open the Model S rear doors from the inside if the car isn’t running, either. Everything else aside, when I heard that I knew I would never buy a Tesla. That is a horrifyingly stupid design decision.

“Now look what you’ve made me do!”

I brought mine with me when I got the latest booster, and the pharmacist said that she hadn’t seen one of those in a long time.

They don’t care about factuality, and in fact have no ability to “know” if they are correct. And they don’t “care”

I suspect that most people think (maybe not even consciously) that these models answer questions by retrieving data and then writing a response which incorporates that data, rather than just generating text that may or may not contain actual facts.

It really bears repeating over and over that all these so-called AI systems do is take a prompt and output text in response to it that reads as if a human wrote it.

Exactly. I learned that it is a waste of time to try to have a discussion with this kind of person way back in the 80s. They’re willfully ignorant.

Same. I find that even that many is a significant distraction.

I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t miss having to scroll past endless chains of puns, recitations of song lyrics and film dialogue, or references to popular comments from years ago.

Same here. I miss having actual discussions in comment threads once in a while.

Oddly enough, I didn’t see any of the posts you’re talking about. This is the first mention of Feinstein dying that I’ve seen, so thanks for the news, I guess.

Yeah, I have an extremely unusual name. From what I can tell there are at most three other people in the world with the same name as me, and none of them lives here in the US.

Leaving aside the fun of being hassled for having a weird name when I was a kid, as an adult I am very careful about what I put online, since there is no way to hide it. If it’s in English and connected with my name, it unquestionably concerns me.

What does that mean?

Yeah, the forum I mentioned has pretty heavy moderation, so I could have just happened to see a few comments before they were deleted.

I was thinking the same thing, that recently the tone around here has gotten more disagreeable. It might be something bigger going on, though. There is an old-style forum I visit that was quite pleasant for years, but lately I’ve been seeing surprisingly nasty comments there.

Why do you say that?

Yeah, I try to buy stuff from brick and mortar stores. I figure that even if it’s a big box store at least there are actual employees working there who live in my area.

But I can’t even find the kind of underwear I like at any physical store near me. Even online, Amazon seems to be the only place that stocks it.

The same goes for the style of jacket that I prefer. I’ve spent months looking everywhere, and the only place where I’ve found even an approximation of what I want is Amazon.

I’ve noticed that even in big box stores nowadays the selection is pretty limited. You’ll see a wall of racks full of the same item. I don’t know if it’s supply chain issues or if they’ve just decided that it’s not worth the trouble of trying to stock a variety of items that only appeal to a relatively small number of people.

I suppose the idea is that it’s possible that someone has written several books in the past, and wants to sell them on Amazon now.