It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

This is the Internet, get the fuck out of here with a practical and realistic opinion.

Working in the aerospace industry has given me a lot of insight into the different ways engineers rationalize the potential for harm that they cause. The most common is wilful ignorance or straight up denial. No, the products I work on can never hurt anyone, it’s just xyz I know personally engineers who work on weaponry and fall heavily into that camp and it blows my mind.

Lol whoops yeah, ARRL. I work in aerospace where we love our alphabet soup and I brainfarted AFRL.

I wasn’t trying to say that the band plan doesn’t exist for a reason, it absolutely does, some reasons which you pointed out exactly. I’ve definitely been around guys who treat the band plan like it is the law, and I imagine the original commenter had the misfortune of running into one of those guys and believed him at face value. Imho it’s one of the reasons ham radio has been dying as a hobby.

Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.

If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.

A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.

A HAM license realistically is for two things:

1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else

For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.

The group AFRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which AFRL in my experience embodies.

I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier

Edit: formatting

May I present to you:

The Marriam-Webster Dictionary

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial

Definition #3b

I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it

That’s why there’s a Minecraft port on the Switch and the new Donkey Kong game has you blasting through rocks with your virtual monkey hands

I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.

Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper

Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)

That’s kind of the point though, isn’t it?

If I were to post with “Extend the plank!” there’s a near zero chance that even fans of the movie, or even the franchise, I’m thinking of will get the movie right. If I instead say “Who am I to argue with the Captain of the Enterprise” a normie might guess Star Trek, a true nerd and fan of the franchise will peg that instantly as from Star Trek Generations

Edit: That said, there are several lines in this thread that aren’t necessarily only recognizable to fans or people familiar with the movie, but instead just pop culture references.

Reaction time

In the US, using a cord like this will either be harmless or create effectively a dead short. Typical breakers will catch the latter but it will take tenths of a second for a breaker to react in which time the electricity could kill someone.

Depending on circuit conditions a GFCI might intervene as well, they’re typically faster at reacting (needing a few milliseconds) but for a cable designed to handle full residential power, it’s still enough to kill a person in that small window of time

It’s a still frame from Star Trek The Next Generation, episode The Game

The plot is a wearable device that is an AR “glasses” game that as you play the game it “makes you feel good” gets used to take over the Enterprise so terrorists can hijack it.

At the time I imagine it was intended to be part of anti-drug campaigns with the AR and companies curating what you see to distract from reality angle/sentiment being more relevant today

I hadn’t thought of that before, and I can think of several characters who’ve said things I doubt the writers would want attributed to them. I just want to see quotes from fiction being clearly labeled as such, and not using the grandiose of a character’s title to add weight to the quote.

For example when I see people quote Admiral William Adama on how when the military becomes the police, the people become the enemy of the state. That was Ron Moore writing a character for a show set in a post apocalyptic universe where the only survivors are hanging out on military ships, not a real world seasoned officer’s opinion. Is it an interesting point worth discussing? Sure, but I’m not putting it in the same category of 5-Star General Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex

Props to you for actually attributing the quote to the writer and not the character. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people take profound sounding quotes and attribute it to a fictional character that never existed, never had real thoughts or opinions of their own

Closing bracket indented with current level?

Lol yup, got the idea from a Technology Connections video on how one of the common humidifier designs are literally just large swamp coolers

I’ve taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it’s dry and grab another towel

It works so well I’m completely confused as to how/why there isn’t a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem

Man I was so hyped for Zelda HD back in the day off of that TP art style demo. The hype cycle around BotW was wild

It’s so incredibly annoying when people use smaller order of magnitude descriptors simply so they can then write more zeros. A good chunk of the time too it feels like it’s done to distract from a different point or to exaggerate without technically lying.

Doesn’t help that technical jargon is only best used when communicating with someone in that field or understands it. Big number + alphabet soup always seems scary 😞