[–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is like, the opposite of old-fashioned. Calling your wife when you're on the way home is old-fashioned.

This article is the first time I'm actually hearing about this idea because it never even occurred to me as something people would actually want to do. I frankly don't see the point of this nonsense. I would much rather talk to my wife on the phone and communicate with her about plans. It's much more human and normal, and facilitates good communication habits. It takes 2 minutes to give my wife a call and, you know what, I get to talk to my wife! We don't need technology invading absolutely every aspect of our lives. We don't need to be constantly plugged in and attached to our phones at the hip.

It also has other downsides, like making it hard to surprise your partner, constant battery drain from the constant location chatter, etc. In fact, it seems like all downside with no actual benefit (setting aside the trust stuff, because it's pretty irrelevant either way).

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    The introduction of flouride to drinking water saw a massive improvement in the public's dental health across the board. It is still widely considered to be one of the greatest public health initiatives of the 20th century.

    You should also keep in mind that drinking water always has some level of natural flouride in it. Just the concentration varies by region. Public health officials discovered that areas with higher amounts of natural flouride also had lower rates of cavities and tooth decay. So some cities have their water flouridated to bring their flouride content up to beneficial levels.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago

    I was trying to help onboard a new lead engineer and I was working through debugging his caddy config on Slack. I'm clearly putting in effort to help him diagnose his issue and he posts "I asked chatgpt and it said these two lines need to be reversed", which was completely false (caddy has a system for reordering directives) and honestly just straight up insulting. Fucking pissed me off. People need to stop brining AI slop into conversations. It isn't welcome and can fuck right off.

    The actual issue? He forgot to restart his development server. 😡

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Just want to say that employers don't actually control your withholdings. By law, you can submit a new W-4 to change your withholdings at any time. In fact, it's often built-in to HR software to make it even easier to do.

    Of course, you still have to contend with the IRS come tax time if you underpay through the year.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    I think kubuntu was the very first distro I ever installed in a VM when trying out Linux 10 years ago. I've since moved on (an aging Arch install right now, which will eventually be replaced by a NixOS install whenever I get around to it), but just wanted to say that a whole new world lies at your footsteps, my friend. Enjoy it. It's like discovering the wonder of computing for the first time.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I understand that's how things are, but man, what a sorry state of affairs. CLIs used to be the ONLY way to use computers, and common people wrote programs all the time! It was part of normal school curriculum for fucks sake. My mom was required to learn BASIC in high school. Nothing even close to that now. Schools MAYBE have some intro programming elective, if they're lucky.

    We've managed to deskill multiple generations of computer users, and it gets worse every single year. More and more people only understand to scroll and press big buttons, with cognition of any sort being completely absent. Just monkeys in a cage created by corporations. It's heartbreaking, really.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Except we didn't call all of that AI then, and it's silly to call it AI now. In chess, they're called "chess engines". They are highly specialized tools for analyzing chess positions. In medical imaging, that's called computer vision, which is a specific, well-studied field of computer science.

    The problem with using the same meaningless term for everything is the precise issue you're describing: associating specialized computer programs for solving specific tasks with the misapplication of the generative capabilities of LLMs to areas in which it has no business being applied.

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