I have some similar feelings to AI here. The advantages of self-checkout are only present because we've made existing systems worse to the point where something not-great is now a better option.

In the 1980s, a grocery lane would have a check-out clerk and a bagger. Sometimes two baggers. You would put your items on the belt and they'd be scanned and bagged (well, so that eggs weren't crushed, freezer items were together, etc) about as fast as you took them out of the cart.

By lowering wages and reducing staff, this got worse. Now the check-out clerk is poorly-trained and probably quitting/being laid off soon and the bagger has been laid off. Mysteriously, the human-checkout line is now kind of slow and frustrating!

Having individual customers do the check-out themselves is even worse (so frequently, someone gets the machine stuck yelling about putting items in the bagging area, or just stares vacantly at the screen), but by parallelizing the process it comes out to usually slightly faster.

The companies won’t pay the 10% out of their own pocket, as they most likely couldn’t. At least here in Germany, supermarket margins are pretty thin.

This doesn't pass a quick reasoning check:

1. Self-checkout machines cost the store capital investment (they introduce some new technology, there is a larger number of devices)
2. Self-checkout machines cost the store operating budget (more devices means more parts to be serviced)
3. Stores have added significant numbers of self-checkout machines

So the stores must be getting better margins at self-checkout than at human-checkout, or they wouldn't introduce it.

The problem is that they can't just talk about climate problems they need to take action. And since the Democratic party isn't going to support mass-executions of industry executives and billionaires, they'd have to talk about incremental changes. I'm not sure how they sell something like "we forecast that these new regulations will result in a 1 degree average temperature reduction over the next 4 years" (which would be huge). And that's imagining that the party as a whole is able to agree on something hard enough to shove it past the Republicans.

I think what you're saying here is that by "it's not possible" you meant "it's not possible to hold companies liable for their chat-bots' words and still have those companies producing chat-bots." I agree. I think that would be the correct outcome.

There would be some very narrow spaces where LLMs would be usable, but mostly they would cease to pollute everything. Unrelated to AI, I'd like to see lots of regulation that blocks externalizing costs. For example, maybe it's also "impossible" for Walmart to operate in the US if they don't have all their employees getting state assistance. That would also be good. Maybe it's "impossible" to have a beef industry without massive pollution and deforestation. Also good. Et cetera.

How would that be technically impossible? Or difficult? Companies are currently liable for the actions of the human agents, and I don't think the implementation needs to be different.

Maybe you mean socially impossible? Like, the major providers have a lot of money behind them and so why would they allow themselves to be liable for anything?

Companies should be liable for what their LLM says.

Yeah it really got the Batman atmosphere well. I wonder if it's because Batman was such a cultural icon that even if you "didn't read comics" you till knew who Batman was and what he was about?

Who wrote these regex? They are terrible:

• We've got a capture-group for the numbers (the () means we're saving that part for later). Are we planning to do something with the mlg numbers? Why don't we care about the mmmberry numbers?
• The capture is one or more numbers, but then it's an optional group. Write ([0-9]*) instead
• We match mlg and mlg1 but not mlga because we anchor to the end ($). But not on mmmberry--that one will match "mmmberry5" (but we don't track the number!) but also "mmmberry_is_the_worst" so the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy because they share a prefix

Maybe mlg has sock-puppet accounts mlg1, mlg2, but never MLG?

In that we aren't regulating any of it?

When people say "AI" these days, they mean the LLM-derived generative AI such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok.

These AI systems are not capable of finding authoritative search results. They are good at generating fluent, plausible, context-appropriate text. In legal and medical situations, that's the opposite of what you'd want.

Do you know how often doctors will take a patients history, step outside the exam room, and then google shit?

Think about how often the doctors land on some pseudo-science result. Now imagine that instead of a doctor it's a patient and instead of asking "could these be related" the patient is told "these are related".

a big ol disclaimer that it’s NOT to be taken seriously

This has worked very well for Fox News, which is not a news agency and is for entertainment purpose only. Also for dietary supplements, which are not medicine.

That looks like backspace, reaching from the top of the keyboard down. Which is how I post also, so it makes sense.

It's a disservice to pitch this as "easy-peasy, win-win, 10 seconds of work and you save in the end!"

More realistic to say:

• It will take up to 1h to find a way to buy it (and the answer may be "only on Amazon (tm)"
• It will cost more
• Also shipping $$$
• It will take longer (because you're not getting Prime shipping)

For that cost, you get some benefits:

• You get the actual product, not something that Amazon decides is "the same"
• Fuck you Amazon

And most of all

• The extra effort and money will maybe lead you to realize that you don't need to buy yet another thing.
• Or if you do still buy it, maybe you'll decide you might as well get the good version that lasts, instead of the cheap version that breaks in a month.