MetaFilter

"Well, you seem like a person, but you're just a voice in a computer"

Oh good, fewer jobs for humans, more jobs for corporate-sponsored chatbots. I note there's no commentary on the implications for misinformation and the spreading of hate material.

Yes! Scribes are being put out of business! Any person will be able to publish whatever they want! Stop Gutenberg's madness before civilization ends!


Sorry, wrong moral panic.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 12:54 PM on May 13, 2024

Citing Gutenberg as purely benign form of technological change is also a bit questionable. Did printing advance science? Sure. Did it make modernity possible? Yeah, probably. Did it also spread misinformation, fuel pamphlets wars, and play a contributing role in the violence which tore Europe apart over the next couple centuries? Yes to this too.

Yes, that was the point of referencing Gutenberg.

It would be possible to go on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:21 PM on May 13, 2024

You joke, but I work in health care. Where I work we are testing "AI Supported" documentation. That is, the provider places their phone between then and the patient and press record. When they are done with the visit, they press stop. In less than two minutes, the documentation is in the patient's chart. Who did this before? People who's job title is literally "Medical Scribe".

I’m curious what part of the medical industry you… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:16 AM on May 14, 2024

scribes can check the content they are creating and a human wrote whatever got printed

now Chat GPT pulls bullshit out of thin air, wearing a bikini and waggling its ass, but its still bullshit and hallucinations

The question is going to come down to the rate that errors are made at. Humans are error prone, very much so when you overwork them. An AI has much more stamina, but is prone to flights of fancy.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:29 AM on May 14, 2024

To that end, David d'Angers monument to Gutenberg at the Place Gutenburg in Strasbourg. It includes a plaque of jaw-dropping iconography (CW: racism, colonialism) depicting elegantly dressed Europeans standing over a throng of naked, fawningly grateful Africans. A printing press is in the middle, the source of Europe's gifts

That is amazing. Thank you for sharing it.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:32 AM on May 14, 2024

Apart from all the other issues: the way they kept cutting "her" off in the "recognize multiple speakers" video, and making "her" perform for them, didn't feel good to listen to.

It’s an interesting dichotomy. On one hand it’s a computer interface, something which one would feel no compunction about interrupting and redirecting. On the other hand, it manages to emulate just enough sentience to make it uncomfortable.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:49 AM on May 14, 2024

And, before the providers start recording they need to get consent from the patient.

Interesting. I wonder what it is about getting cheap transcriptions that makes the medical industry want to cross this line now.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:08 AM on May 14, 2024

With regards to voice translation I currently use Siri for speech to text, Google Translate for text translation, and Siri to speak the translated text.

It’s not as cumbersome as it sounds (Google Translate has a nice facility for conversations) but the ability to recognize the speaker and know what language they’ll be using, as well as to recognize the end of someone speaking, will remove all the button pushing completely. I will use the shit out of that.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:26 AM on May 14, 2024

am not...entirely sure that I want my doctor having a literal word for word transcription of everything I said to them, something that will no doubt be fed to the insurance company and used to deny coverage or otherwise harm me.

And if it supports your claim it can always turn out to have "not been turned on" via the same system that manages police body cameras.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 10:15 AM on May 14, 2024

comforting people with dementia,

Japan is already doing this with very promising results.

Frankly, dealing with people with Alzheimer’s or dementia can require inhuman patience. Humans may not necessarily be replaceable by AI in this situation, but it can take a tremendous load off of them.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 12:39 PM on May 14, 2024

the “chat with people with dementia and remind them of things" case [will] never have the ROI they need to appease the overlords

Probably not the overlords, but I think the under-overlords may take it up. After all the investment just consists of training up a bot and covering computer time. I think there are quite a few people who would pay a moderate fee to ease the load of dealing with an ailing parent.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:43 PM on May 14, 2024

Point being that we're not too far away from that.

I have to admit that I am a greedy brat about all this. In my lifetime I’ve been:

Astonished and amazed I could fit an entire translation dictionary into a Palm Pilot.
Deeply impressed when machine text translation became useful.
Once again, astonished when machine dictation became useful.
Pleasantly surprised by Google Translate’s… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:43 AM on May 15, 2024

The rest of us will be unemployed and then homeless and then dead.

Unlikely. You could paint the same picture of the concentration of wealth that went into the French monarchy, and look what came out of that?

You do not want a bunch of bored, starving humans wandering around. It is very bad for the status quo.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:56 PM on May 16, 2024

This is all truly terrible. The last time we had a major shift from paid workers to machinery we were forced to cope with our work hours being cut to 40 hours a week and children being forced to go to school instead of a job.

In the face of increased mechanization, Europe is even starting to play with four day work weeks. What are we going to do?
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:22 PM on May 16, 2024

Industrialization led to more child labor, not less. It was the labor movement that reduced child labor and work hours.

And Industrialization fueled the labor movement.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 10:35 AM on May 17, 2024

That's true if your field of view is limited. The other thing that our mastery of machinery allowed us to do was export the shitty jobs that couldn't be automated and machine-gun down the people who objected.

The cost was high and it's certainly not an unalloyed good. But roughly 1 billion people are working reasonable hours and the children aren't working at all. I think that counts for something.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 10:42 AM on May 17, 2024

It would be nice, once we're all sitting around in the smoldering ruins of society, if people could at least admit that (a) the thirst to reduce translation to unpaid, zero-value labor was really shitty and has had entirely predictably disastrous results

Whoops!
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:03 AM on May 19, 2024

A slice of life wrapped in an enigma with onions and cilantro

I’m not in it until the Supreme Court rules.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:36 PM on May 14, 2024

Heh. I just went to find out if Taco Bell lists “tortas“ on their menu, but discovered that the entire Taco Bell website is blocked in Mexico.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:51 PM on May 14, 2024

A torta being a sandwich doesn't preclude a taco being a sandwich.

Yes it does, as both “torta” and “tacos” are categories, not individual foodstuffs, and neither of them is a subcategory of the other.

Unless of course a dish is both until you bite into it at which point its menuform collapses.

Mmmm. Now I want a quantum burrito.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:49 PM on May 14, 2024

a good ol' yuk-yuk rubes-between-the-coasts trope never gets old.

Yup, that pretty much covers it. Every area has its mean stereotype.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:27 PM on May 15, 2024

Tex-Mex is its own cuisine. I’ve eaten at Tex-Mex restaurants in Greece.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 11:04 AM on May 16, 2024

They said the quiet part out loud

The ad in reverse is lovely

It really is, and it gets at what they’re saying in a much less destruction-fetish way.

The way it is set up in the original is that all of these objects are slowly and grotesquely destroyed before being put into the iPad. So the iPad contains a mangled trumpet, a shattered piano, etc.

I have to admit that watching these objects that I have great nostalgia for being mangled… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 10:52 AM on May 9, 2024

>>That is almost certainly 100% CGI. Nothing was actually crushed.

>Yeah, that's kind of not the point?

It mean, it kind of is?

No. There is not a massive blowback because a single television or trumpet or piano was mangled. Real or imagined, no one had any attachment to that particular television or that particular instrument. People are upset because of what they represent.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 11:01 AM on May 9, 2024

I would bet a lot of money that this ad was designed to provoke outrage.

That would be incredibly out of character with Apple’s advertising for the last 40 years.

In fact, I think that may be part of the energy here. Apple has put out consistently gentle and/or uplifting ads over the years, and this is a disappointing misstep for them.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:27 PM on May 9, 2024

Judging people for not engaging with an advertisement on a deep level?

I’m mostly judging people who find it important to take time out of their day to show disrespect to people who are considering the deeper meaning of things.

If you don’t care about something that’s fine. But why people think it’s important to cast aspersions on people who do care I have no idea.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:31 PM on May 9, 2024

I’m not sure anyone has posted this yet, but the same ad from 2008.

Now I really am disappointed in Apple.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:36 PM on May 9, 2024

Apple has apologized.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:38 PM on May 9, 2024

I would think that almost everyone on earth that needs an iPad has one.

A few years back I talked to a group at Facebook that was dedicated to expanding cell phone coverage in Africa because they were running out of potential customers. Apple could use its enormous cash reserves to uplift economies to the point where people could afford iPads.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:36 AM on May 10, 2024

it's got resentfulness against the "elitism" of those smug morons who use Apple products, lording it over the rest of it;

It’s not all that weird, particularly here. Buying into the Apple ecosystem requires a lot of money, and vitriol for people who have money is a core part of the Metafilter experience.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:42 AM on May 11, 2024

Samsung provides a lovely follow-up.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:12 AM on May 16, 2024

"In select stores, based on historical sales performance."

Target Stores in Five States Receive Bomb Threats After Removing Some Pride Month Items.

Not normally a tactic I would approve of, but I'm hard pressed to think of a better one.

I really feel for the Target employees caught in the middle though.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 3:56 PM on May 13, 2024

Uhhh, Newsmax?

Doh. It's something I remembered happening so I just grabbed the first article that popped up.

Here's some local news covering it.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 4:26 PM on May 13, 2024

Battle Beyond the Movies

.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 5:39 AM on May 12, 2024

“I don’t know if I would say I’m an artist,” he said in an interview with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks in 2011. “I would say that I’m a craftsman. I attempt to ply my trade in the best possible way. If occasionally something transcends the craft, then that’s wonderful. It doesn’t happen very often.”

posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:23 AM on May 12, 2024

I have to admit I do feel sorry for the bulk of his directors, who remain anonymous while people just remember the name of the producer. Still, they got real world experience out of it.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 5:59 AM on May 13, 2024

We’re the men, and here’s the map.

Well, that was a very disappointing video on country code TLDs. They just shrug away digital colonialism and proclaim that the explosion of top level domains by rent-seeking registrars is because domain names are defunct and should be hidden from the user.

They’re quite correct. The days of typing a URL in are largely past us, and encoding the name of your site in a DNS address is more of a gimmick than anything else. For example, I have no idea… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:50 PM on May 10, 2024

Y There are a number of layers needed to connect your local computer to the many servers involved in a contemporary web interaction. One of which is securing the link to a server certified to represent the service at the domain, and another involves connecting you to the load balancers and eventual servers that respond to your address

Both of which are completely automated actions that the average user does not know or care about.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 9:58 AM on May 11, 2024

The Last Thing My Mother Wanted

Prediction: This will be commonplace within 10 years.

Once again, the Baby Boomers are plowing their way through and breaking the way open for the rest of us.

It was terrible to read about this woman’s life (the daughter’s) and it sounds like the mother didn’t have such a good time either. Oddly, having had a better relationship with my parents I now find myself unworried about the fact that they both have done what they… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:13 PM on May 9, 2024

I think there are a lot of valid point made here, but one thing I come back to is the idea that this is what a person wants. I wonder if perhaps this is strictly true in enough cases to make a choice to honor that valid.

On the other hand, how long are you willing to second guess someone before you let them die in peace?

And even if they do choose to die and they may have changed their mind later, what makes you believe that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:04 PM on May 9, 2024

I can remember thinking "You were willing to leave us"

Yeah, both of my parents have (separately) told me directly that they've done everything that they want to do and they're ready to move along whenever. It was a horrible sort of coming of age (at 54) to realize that my parents had done everything they felt important with *me*.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:21 PM on May 9, 2024

but we are hardwired to survive

Actually we’re hardwired to die. Happens to everyone.

And before that we are hardwired to assist in passing along the family genes, whether directly or as part of a support system. And quite a few people have sacrificed their own lives to do that over the years.

So no, we are not hardwired to survive.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 5:35 PM on May 9, 2024

No, I think a pointed and public refusal to extend sympathy to someone who's clearly had a very bad lifelong experience through no fault of her own and has just lost a parent because some members of that person's family are or were wealthy constitutes a form of cruelty.

I didn't read the original comment as a refusal but rather as a statement that they couldn't connect at a human level with something that was happening to someone in a difference… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:00 PM on May 9, 2024

“sadness” does not describe the experiences of the people i know who have had loved ones die by suicide

This bears repeating.

Taking death out of the picture — If you just stopped communicating with everyone you knew one day there would be a lot of hurt feelings. If you stated very clearly that there was no chance of you ever reconnecting with them, it would be a lot worse. People would feel like you were rejecting them… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:37 PM on May 9, 2024

“People who lose their parents can feel orphaned. People whose parents commit suicide can feel disowned.”

I interpret this as a suggestion that anyone likely to choose to end their life should refrain from having children

Nah, just that as this gets more common we should prepare for potential consequences. It would be a lot healthier if adult children become aware that their parent’s obligation to them has ended. We could even have a coming of age party when people turn 50.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:51 AM on May 10, 2024

Normally, I would suggest raising everyone else’s standard of living, but obviously that’s not going to work in this case. In fact, we need to place limits on society’s prosperity as a whole so that no one can afford to put their children in unhealthy situations.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 4:02 PM on May 10, 2024

Send not to know for whom the bell tolls (but in this case.......)

Trump’s trial date in classified documents case indefinitely infinitely postponed

I'm a dreamer so I'm hoping they take this to the appellate court and get Cannon tossed completely from the case. The trial date still probably wouldn't land before the election, but at least we'd be done with a blight on the legal system.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 2:30 PM on May 9, 2024

Retraction Isn’t Enough

The mass hordes of humanity will only remain misinformed until the next (perhaps equally poor) paper comes out. Spending time making sure that they get this retraction has a certain purity to it, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 7:14 AM on May 9, 2024

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

Awesome! But I have just found that one of the long streets I mentioned in my previous comment does indeed have three separate USRNs, despite being very much one street.

Are the USRNs for different legs of the street? If that were the case, it could just be treated as three different streets.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 8:23 PM on May 8, 2024

It's based on where local authority boundaries are, seemingly.

That would make sense, as the source of the data is the local authorities and they’re all keeping track of the bits that they are responsible for.

I live in a city where it is unusual for any long straight piece of pavement to NOT change its street name multiple times, so at this point it wouldn’t bother me to change the street name at the local authority… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 6:26 AM on May 9, 2024