I noticed during COVID, I had almost no problems with hay fever. I wouldn’t mind going back to wearing one full time.

What about treadmill-based walking? It’s too freaking hot out during the summer.

Under-shaved, brown-robed and jovial, Benanti is adept at explaining how technology can change the world, “with humans ceding the power of choice to an algorithm that knows us too well. Some people treat AIs like idols, like oracles, like demigods. The risk is that they delegate critical thinking and decisional power to these machines.”

AI is about choices. He points out: “Already a few tens of thousands of years ago, the club could have been a very useful tool or a weapon to destroy others …”

The Italians, not pioneers in the technology, warn that AI prefigures a world in which progress does not optimise human capabilities, but replaces them.

While I certainly do not side with the Catholic Church and their moralistic dogma, it is valuable to pay attention to a group that has made it their mission to think about how humanity is affected by various things. Never mind that they have their own bias in how humanity should be conducting itself. If instead, you treat them as a think tank with a relatively narrow focus, then we can make use of their work in this area.

I’m relieved to see at least one world leader though listening to an expert on technology. The US Congress had a department just for interpreting and researching various high technology concepts, but in their infinite wisdom they decided they knew better and disbanded the department.

One may disagree with the Catholic churches interpretation of their explanations of how AI technology can affect humans, but we would be fools to completely disregard their reports and findings.

The number of abortions among women under 20 rose during the 1990s in Finland, which led the Nordic country to respond at the start of the 2000s by making morning-after pills available without prescription from 15 years of age and sexual education compulsory in all schools.

Finland also passed a law in 2022 liberalising abortion, at a time of deep divisions over abortion rights in Europe and court rulings in the U.S. that restricted access to terminations of unwanted pregnancies for millions of people there.

…

The number of abortions fell 66% to 722 in 2023 from 2,144 in 2000 among all teenagers aged 19 or younger in Finland, while the drop was even steeper at 78% among those under 18 in the same period, THL’s statistics showed.

I’m sure the GQP will read this and think, “We should just outlaw abortion and fix it that way.”

Ok, first, it only applies to Type 2 diabetes.

In a remarkable medical breakthrough, Chinese scientists have successfully cured a patient of type 2 diabetes through an innovative cell therapy approach.

Second, it was done on a case-by-case basis. Each person has their own therapy tailored for them. This does not appear to be a mass-solution.

The groundbreaking treatment involved transplanting lab-grown replicas of the patient’s own insulin-producing islet cells into their body. This ingenious approach effectively restored the patient’s pancreatic islet function, enabling the body to regulate blood sugar levels naturally without external intervention.

From the linked article:

According to a South China Morning Post report, the patient underwent the cell transplant in July 2021.

…

The new therapy involves programming the patient’s peripheral blood mononuclear cells, transforming them into “seed cells” to recreate pancreatic islet tissue in an artificial environment. This approach leverages the body’s regenerative capabilities, an emerging field known as regenerative medicine.

That would be for the legal system to decide. If you purchased it for a specific advertised feature, and that feature was disabled unless unspoken terms were agreed to, you would have a case.

For the downvoters, in the US:

https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/what-is-the-warranty-of-merchantability.html

The implied warranty of merchantability guarantees that a product sold to you will work for its intended purposes. In other words, it means you can expect a toaster to toast your bread. If it doesn’t, you have legal protection against losing money on a product that doesn’t work.

If you bought the router expecting it to work as advertised, you may make a claim if it doesn’t. They would have to spell out ahead of time what the limitations and requirements are in order to avoid trouble.

If I bought one of their routers and this came up, I would simply be returning it and giving the person at the counter a printout as to why. Sorry, but this router is not “suitable for purpose”. Look up that phrase and “merchantability”.

It also covers those who are not biologically fit to be mates. Various conditions can appear as physical traits.

The California Community College I went to allowed you to filter classes in the schedule by whether they offered ZTC - Zero Textbook Cost or OER - Open Educational Resource.

WINNING! /s

You give your top talent what they want. The problem is that they hired a consultant to find out what that was. The consultant, knowing on which side his bread was buttered, told the board what they wanted to hear, which is, after all, why they hired a consultant instead of just asking.

https://www.snopes.com/articles/466491/ages-founding-fathers-july-4-1776/

The signers of the Declaration of Independence. Lots of young 'uns in there.

Adams, John MA 40

Adams, Samuel 53

Bartlett, Josiah 46

Braxton, Carter 39

Carroll, Charles 38

Chase, Samuel 35

Clark, Abraham 50

Clymer, George 37

Ellery, William 48

Floyd, William 41

Franklin, Benjamin 70

Gerry, Elbridge 32

Gwinnett, Button 41

Hall, Lyman 52

Hancock, John 40

Harrison, Benjamin 50

Hart, John 65

Hewes, Joseph 46

Heyward Jr., Thomas 30

Hooper, William 34

Hopkins, Stephen 69

Hopkinson, Francis 38

Huntington, Samuel 45

Jefferson, Thomas 33

Lee, Francis Lightfoot 41

Lee, Richard Henry 44

Lewis, Francis 63

Livingston, Philip 60

Lynch Jr., Thomas 26

McKean, Thomas 42

Middleton, Arthur 34

Morris, Lewis 50

Morris, Robert 42

Morton, John 52

Nelson Jr., Thomas 37

Paca, William 35

Paine, Robert Treat 45

Penn, John 36

Read, George 42

Rodney, Caesar. 47

Ross, George 46

Rush, Benjamin 30

Rutledge, Edward 26

Sherman, Roger 55

Smith, James 57

Stockton, Richard 45

Stone, Thomas MD 33

Taylor, George PA 60

Thornton, Matthew 62

Walton, George 35

Whipple, William 46

Williams, William 45

Wilson, James 33

Witherspoon, John 53

Wolcott, Oliver 49

Wythe, George VA 50

But if he ordered a member of the military to do it, they are required to refuse illegal orders

But the argument is that if the President orders it, it’s not illegal. Nixon tried that and got shot down.

Let’s see. Email - Iceland Web host - Iceland VPN - Sweden Backup - Norway

Did I miss anything?

Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” on the front, Google search boss Prabhakar Raghavan had an important message for employees at an all-hands meeting last month. But he first wanted them to settle in and get comfortable.

…

Raghavan said Google’s digital ad business had become “the envy of the world.” He noted that over the last three years, annual revenue has grown by more than $100 billion, exceeding Starbucks, Mazda and TikTok combined.

Does this mean you’ll be using math to pay them more for producing more? (have to add /s)

That’s just it. You have to understand the output; otherwise you get very authoritative looking garbage.

I wrote some rudimentary Python code to do a job by brute force. On a whim, I asked ChatGPT to optimize the code. It did a pretty good job, but I still had to tweak it for my purpose.

I found ChatGPT to be indispensable in dealing with a nonsense homework assignment. I had to write a paper on a subject I knew about, but had to write it from a specific viewpoint and in far less time than would normally be allowed. I wrote up an outline, checked my sources, etc. Told ChatGPT to flesh it out. Read through the output, made some adjustments, and reprocessed. When I was happy with the result, I had it write a closing paragraph. Once again, read through the output, made adjustments, and reprocessed. Same with the opening paragraph.

Lastly, to remove all traces of AI, ran it all through QuillBot and had the input made more academic in some places, more casual in others.

Lesson: know your subject before attempting this. ChatGPT can be a time saver, but only if you already understand the output. Think of it as you would an advanced spelling and grammar checker. It’s just another tool/ After all, if your boss told you to write something, and you could do it in a quarter of the expected time and still produce acceptable output, would they be upset?

North America was a beautiful place. Then the white man showed up. Been downhill ever since. So, yeah, immigration is a problem. Care to fix it?

Dumping into different spots to spread it out could be a solution. It would add expense to the process, though, and we know how capitalism handles that. As for aquifer charging, the brine is thicker than what was taken out. This adds to the problem in that you’ll need much higher pressure to drive it, or you’ll clog the system at the output point.

If you’re going to go the route of least expensive solution, find an area that is unattractive to human life, preferably a desert near the ocean. Pipe in the seawater, using RO to remove as much fresh water as possible. Then take the brine and send it out to evaporation beds covering a large area. You can recover some more water through that process, but, most importantly, removing the water and leaving the salts and minerals requires little energy input this way. The downside is the acreage required.

If you had a geothermal vent to provide heat, it would make the entire process almost carbon-neutral.