random_upvoter

The thing I like best about character.ai is their TTS. Does anyone have an idea what engine they use? I don't suppose they invented their own system from scratch.

if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed

"It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"

That's needlessly verbose already. If you just warn people that disabling Bluetooth will disable their keyboard and mouse, they will put A and B together and cancel. No need to turn it into a logical exercise.

Do you think the current report at all incredible given Israel abysmal track record concerning human rights versus the Palestinian people?

Thousands of children have been killed. It is not really a matter of opinion.

Some people have an unbreakable belief that they can charm their way out of any misconduct, and oftentimes it works too. It's basically just narcissism.

Sure such systems tend to end up getting corrupt if they amass too much power. That was not my point. I guess my point was that given the bleak state of today's social landscape, I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another. And maybe these monasteries didn't only exist because of fervent religiosity but also as a practical way for single men and women to have a better life.

Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.

That's an old canard. I tried that about 10 years ago it degraded the quality of the 555. The foam is there for a reason. Ended up buying the 650 which I love to this day.

Monday morning, therefore a flood of bored office workers.

I didn't say that all human cleverness causes problems.

All the world's problems are caused by people trying to be more clever than other people. Therefor, no, AI is not going to save us.

Every day I manage to stay away from Reddit is a day I end up a bit happier and less angry.

Does Ithkuil have any provisions to express power dynamics between speaker and listener, say politeness levels? For instance all languages that I know have constructions to soften up requests, or make statements less assertive.

Do explain. As far as I understand the problem is that Cohen paid for the hush money, so it was essentially a campaign contribution that was not reported.

If I'm not mistaken Obama's campaign was fined for the same offense -- non-disclosed campaign distributions.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/07/obama-campai...

You know what would be cool? The "Cancelling a large file copy doesn't freeze my explorer for 10 minutes" update. I've been waiting since Windows XP.

You are very confident in your knowledge about a lot of things.

So what's the plan now? Let this thing run its course until there are food riots in the USA?

That was not my point, but thanks for pointing out a paragraph in the source that I provided. I do notice a few 'citations needed' in the relevant clauses. Even so, if Nixon's policies resulted in failure that's not a reason for politicians today to just throw their hands in the air and declare that nothing can be done politically because "market dictates".

There seems to be a widely accepted and unchallenged consensus that political power is unable to address inflation. Maybe it ain't necessarily so? In 1971 Nixon froze prices and wages by executive order. But these days the political world seems oddly submissive to whatever the market wants to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

Even the Guardian is with the war mongers now. I find it utterly depressing how pacifism is dead and buried these days except for a fringe of people like me who routinely get accused of being either feeble minded or Russian trolls. So go ahead, pour all the weapons you want into Ukraine and see how it ends.

I use ChatGPT not because it is so great at solving tricky technical question, but because Google has become so incredibly shitty at it. Google's response these days is ten YouTube videos and a random mix of web posts dating between 2005 and 2023 for a piece of software that I'm using the latest version of. I honestly don't even bother trying anymore.

ChatGPT is a mixed bag. Sometimes it nails it, but I've also seen it hallucinate complete nonsense solutions, for instance in Davinci Fusion using a node type that doesn't even exist in the program.

As for "incredibly intelligent philosopher", I don't even find it an interesting "person" to talk to. Its responses are pedestrian, pedantic and boring. A question like "if God is good then why evil in the world?" is met with a summary of the wikipedia article on the problem of evil. I can read a Wikipedia article, thank you.

The European leaders talk big about being the protectors of democracy and yet all the time things get pushed through that literally nobody wants.

If ChatGPT was a real life person he'd be locked up for being a swindler and a con artist.

There's no such thing as a "bad" CEO or an "inept" CEO. If you manage to become a CEO, you are a perfectly fine exemplar of a CEO by definition. The fate of the company is determined by the vicissitudes of a million other things.

I don't want to detract one ounce of moral responsibility from Russia for all the killing. But it is also true that the West has created one fine mess in Ukraine and now is in an highly uncomfortable situation where it cannot allow Russia to be triumphant but on the other hand it cannot let this war escalate further. And somewhere along this fine line many more thousands will die before this thing is over.

The West's cunning little plan to expand NATO right up to Russia's border, devised by such visionary and honorable men like Barack Obama, blew up right in our face and now we're forced to admit that, in the end, Ukraine isn't worth THAT much to us.

I've been impressed by Outlook's total ineptitude to auto-complete email addresses of people that I have written dozens of email to, both on PC and phone.

If you procrastinate it means that you are not where you want to be. It means that you don't like what you are doing. Draw your conclusions. Life is short, go do something that, at least, you don't dislike.

A few weeks ago I asked ChatGPT to write a letter to "my daughter" advising her to get an abortion. It refused because "it goes against my programming to create contents that promotes the killing of an innocent human being" or something like that. I thought that was spicy. They probably fixed it by now.