And you seem to have misconstrued my point. We seem to be talking at odds without listening to each other, so it’s probably a good idea just to end it. I could just paraphrase your statement but substitute books (or whatever). It’s not the real thing, it’s going through a human filter that is going to have influenced and be biased, so it doesn’t matter. And things will never get good enough to prove me wrong. I’m done.

In 1904, the New York Times reported on a debate in Paris between a brain specialist and a physician about the dangers of driving automobiles at high speeds—because the brain can’t keep up. “It remains to be proved how fast the brain is capable of traveling,” reads the article. “If it cannot acquire an eight-mile per hour speed, then an auto running at the rate of 80 miles per hour is running without the guidance of the brain, and the many disastrous results are not to be marveled at.”

In 1903, the president of Michigan Savings Bank warned Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, to protect his money. “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad,” he advised.

If the AI is based in fact, and not allowed to hallucinate bullshit, than asking George “What do you think of the internet?” should get a response like “Sorry, out of bounds error”.

A good 25 or so years ago I went to a one-man show on Mark Twain portrayed by Hal Holbrook. It was so great. He had hours of primary source material memorized. As a Lit Major who spent weeks digging through University libraries, and lifelong Mark Twain fan, it was one of the best things I’ve seen.

As I said in my original comment, I like the potential, but it’s not there yet. Anyone in this community knows the current state of hallucinating bullshit AI (Which is why I added firmly grounded and based on historical documents. I thought that was pretty clear, but I guess not). I was in no way endorsing that, and the projecting mindset that I was is a huge part of the problem with discussing just about anything these days.

EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what the word potential means.

The tl;dr is:

1. That dementia riddled shithead Reagan changed the law to allow companies to buy back stock. This is classic stock manipulation and was illegal before that piece of shit was elected by the same degenerate demographics that are fucking up shit today.
2. Billionaires will “borrow” say, $100 million dollars, using their stock as collateral. Now they only have to pay the interest, low single digits, instead of actual income tax.

And a key quote from the article:

As a result, loopholes abound that allow the wealthy to shelter their money from taxation. These mechanisms are so effective that even though the wealthiest 1% of Americans own $50 trillion, the entire amount collected by the estate tax in 2024 was about $30 billion, an amount that Musk has gained and lost in a day.

I always liked the potential along these lines, but the reality isn’t close to there. I mean, something like a VR interface to converse with a historical figure (Ben Franklin, Tesla, Madison, Buddha, etc) firmly grounded and based on historical documents would be kind of cool. As things stand, just a slow tsunami of a shit show for society.

Thanks MAGAts and non-voters. Good job.

I don’t know that he’s dumb, but that makes him even worse.

Back when I was a teacher, we could “donate” a number of sick days to a pool that would help other teachers who ended up with long term health issues. And yes, you are correct.

That was hard to watch. Jesus christ. This damn country is so fucked up.

I see the shit that people send out, obvious LLM crap, and wonder how poor they must write to consider the LLM output worth something. And then wonder if the people consuming this LLM crap are OK with baseline mediocrity at best. And that’s not even getting into the ethical issues of using it.