I thought it was just getting good.

I never actually had an account or much inclination to use it but it seemed like the first online service ubiquitous enough for local government and business notifications. In that sense, it was just starting to be a real benefit for an informed populace

However downvoting as that seemed more like a prerequisite to your posted opinion - I’ll agree that it’s fine for all the loonies to rant at each other there, but that makes the opinion “popular” …… crap, wrong community

That’s one of the many things I don’t get. How did he get elected the first time, how could anyone have voted for someone with a long history of stuffing contractors? Bankruptcies? Questionable tax practices? This guy came in as a well known real estate developer fraud who ripped people off: individuals, small businesses, irs, etc, for decades. How did this ever fly in the first place?

It is a hot topic worthy of discussion, like how could anyone this racist have any positive public standing? How can someone instigating racial hatred and violence not be shut down?

I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.

OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)

When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up

Just like always, it depends on how you define or redefine ai. For example, what used to be called ai has been very successful in photo processing. The same thing is going to happen: some portion or incarnation of the current generative ai will be successful, but it will be dismissed similar to “it’s just machine learning, not ai”

I have a lot of hope for Apple’s approach, where they are incorporating it as tools into specific capabilities, and prioritizing privacy. While there’s no direct profit, it should help sell a lot more devices with ever higher tech specs. I also like their “private cloud” model that has a lot of potential beyond private ai

I understand you don’t appreciate where we’ve come from and how fast, can’t see the year to years changes, but the iPhone is just a little over ten years old. Do you really not see huge changes between an early iPhone and today’s?

Sure but the point remains that it’s not in the corps best interest to be too forthcoming with their reasons. It doesn’t benefit them, and can only hurt them

Yeah, and I’m fine with that short term. But only if it’s very short term and only if we use it as a brief reprieve to build out renewable energy faster than otherwise. That seems unlikely

Pension funds are multi-billion dollar funds, so they can afford their own brokers to directly buy a whole company in one-shot, with no repeat business.

They’re not usually run this way. Generally pension funds are the same as your 401k, but on a bigger scale. They also usually focus more attention n managing risk and expenses…… I used to work for a company that did exactly this for some insane number of hundreds of billions of dollars

You might invest part of your 401k in a public shared sp500 index fund, a pension plan might invest part of its money in a private sp500 index plan managed solely for them, usually with lower fees

But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding

Unless it’s a small company, they don’t know anything about you, nor make a decision in any way specific to you. They agreed to a budget expenditure and they want to know the hiring manager followed through. There is no personal connection

And now with AI it’s even worse …… how do I respond that when i asked a technical question, it was suspicious that you looked down, paused several seconds, then appeared to be reading an answer? While being able to use the tools is a prerequisite, that’s not what the interview is for …… but I have to make a judgement call with no proof

Recruiters are essentially salesmen. They want to have a full dossier of product (you) when they talk to a potential client. They might also job hop among agencies, and bringing a full dossier of product helps them get their new job. It’s much easier to build that product inventory with ghost jobs than it is to actually work directly with someone looking for a job.

Maybe it’s my limited experience, but I’ve never worked for an employer that did this, as far as I know. Any opening was real at the time it was posted. However we’ve held onto people if we expect another opening or we like them even though they don’t fit but can’t promise a new opening until we get it approved …… or maybe we got the ok to hire and started the process but were shut down by bad numbers somewhere but hope that will change again

Sure, but it’s perfectly legit to use that to put a plus next to social skills or works well with team.

I’ve definitely dinged people who were too robotic - you do have to interact to successfully do your job.

You’re assuming no candidates are dickheads.

Company has to watch out for

• maybe a candidate was a dickhead
• maybe one of the interviewers was a dickhead
• maybe something changed so it looks misrepresented

My current company makes the effort to at least tell whether you’re still under consideration but I don’t think they’re allowed by legal to give any details.

At least in the US, it’s fine to not give a reason but if you do give a reason you’re liable for it. What company wants to risk that?

It very much comes down to how you use them. Within my household, I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple cable go bad. However I’ve had third party bad from purchase, and my teens go through cables every 6-12 months.

What kind of abuse do your cables go through?

• do you pull from the hard plastic or the cable?
• are they on the floor being stepped on or with chairs rolling over them?
• when carrying are they just stuffed in your backpack or neatly rolled up in a plastic pocket or in a baggie?
• when tangled, do you just pull harder or do you untangle?

I’m not buying it this time around. Sure, that was the explanation for 2016, and I’m sure a bunch of people who thought like that got some good laughs. But surely they could see what happened. Surely they lived through the following four years. Surely they can see that breaking glass might be cathartic but now they’re surrounded by broken windows

Surely they saw our liberal outrage was directed at how easily they were manipulated into making their own lives worse? Surely they saw further divisiveness as “liberal elites” just shook their heads in sadness and started giving up on their brethren in less successful places. Surely they see those same cities they wanted to wreck are doing better than ever while they’re stuck with the consequences of their votes?

The Wikipedia article on animal consciousness has an interesting discussion

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

Of particular note as I sit here petting my dog, is the example of self-awareness in dogs. Historically dogs don’t seem to exhibit self-awareness, but we used a mirror test and dogs aren’t as visual. A sniff test, using their dominant sense, shows they are

Thanks for the fascinating rabbit hole …. Popping my head back up: it seems like no. It actually reminds me a lot of the term “artificial intelligence” where every time it’s demonstrated, the definition changes. So the question really is whether we move the goalposts or whether we just define the intended meaning poorly.

To me it looks like both terms have an implied “like a human” that has not yet been met. When an animal achieves the definition of sapient, it’s the definition that’s wrong because accepted use implies “like a human”.

And of course the real answer in both cases is to use more precise terms. That’s where things get really interesting

If an alien can travel to meet us, and we have nowhere near the technology that we could travel to them, then yes they are far beyond our level of technology.

Since the question mentioned “civilization”, these are sapient beings, not just microbes or animals of some sort. While there’s still a chance of primitive life in our solar system, sapient life pretty much implies travel from outside the solar system and we can only do that in our fiction