Yeah, I’d like to see a source for this. There have been many proposed theories for why cats vocalize to humans, especially because “meowing” is not common between cats except for kittens. How do we know that it isn’t a request for food or attention?

“Allow us to introduce ourselves”

As long as I don’t have to maintain it.

(Who tf downvoted this? The “legacy code” lobby?)

FYI, “anthropomorphizing” doesn’t strictly mean “viewing as human”. I never meant to imply that people see a spoon as a human being.

Anthropomorphization is the act of associating human qualities with non-human entities.

My point is that humans are remarkably good at doing this, even as far as, e.g., ascribing “unhappiness” to a spoon simply for being unused.

This kind of behavior is why we must be extremely wary of the Turing test and other measures of machine “intelligence” - humans may see intelligence even where none exists simply because it’s our nature.

Yep, this is the major flaw that’s becoming clear about the Turing test, and why people are so hyped over LLMs: computers don’t have to be good at imitating people, because people are so good at anthropomorphizing computers (along with everything else).

This joke is much simpler if you’re bisexual.

You’re just Bismuth.

The “solution” is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it

Hilariously, Google actually used to do this: they had a database called the “knowledge graph” that slowly accumulated verified information and relationships between commonly-queried entities, producing an excellent corpus of reliable, easy-to-find information about a large number of common topics.

Then they decided having people curate things was too expensive and gave up on it.

So like, 3 months of PG&E bills?

Pretty sure the lyric is “ride the pony”, my dude.

Blubuntu

There’s that old chestnut: “you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”

RCS is an open standard, isn’t it? Are you referring to the E2E encryption that Google added to Android?

Ikr? Seems like a good thing to me. I want dumb devices controlled by a smart system.

Bold of you to assume no one will come up with a replacement date library rather than just getting rid of JS.

Alien might be the scariest movie of all time, IMO, so this makes perfect sense to me.

I do use Kodi for local content, but this unfortunately doesn’t help with streaming services, and even dedicated steaming boxes have ads on their home screens now.

I’m not sure how an email service helps here…?

*Pi-hole

Already got one. A lot of devices seem to route ads over channels that can’t be blocked without compromising other device functions.

My dad used to sautee them with bits of bacon or prosciutto. I don’t eat pork anymore, but god damn do I miss those Brussels sprouts.

I kinda disagree here - I have no problem using smart lights, etc., as long as they’re controlled by a non-cloud system like HomeAssistant. This just doesn’t seem to be an option for more complex devices.