I constantly see people reply to question with "I asked ChatGPT for you and this is what it says" without a hint of the shame they should feel. The willingness to just accept plausible-sounding AI spew uncritically and without further investigation seems to be baked into some people.
That sort of response seems not too different from the classic "let me google that for you". It seems to me that it is a way to express that the answer to the question can be "trivially" obtained yourself by doing research on your own. Alternatively it can be interpreted as "I don't know anything more than Google/ChatGPT does".
What annoys me more about this type of response is that I feel there's a less rude way to express the same.
Let me google that for you is typically a sarcastic response pointing out someone’s laziness to verify something exceptionally easy to answer.
The ChatGPT responses seem to generally be in the tone of someone who has a harder question that requires a human (not googleable), and the laziness is the answer, not the question.
In my view the role of who is wasting others time with laziness is reversed.
The issue is not truth, though.
It's the difference between completely fabricated but plausible text generated through a stochastic process versus a result pointing towards writing at least exists somewhere on the internet and can be referenced.
Said source may be have completely unhinged and bonkers content (Time Cube, anyone?),
but it at least exists prior to the query.
At least those folks are acknowledging the source. It's the ones who ask ChatGPT and then give the answer as if it were their own that are likely to cause more of a problem.
Go look at "The Credit Card Song" from 1974. It's intended to be humorous, but the idea of uncritically accepting anything a computer said was prevalent enough then to give the song an underlying basis.
If I wanted ChatGPT's opinion, I'd have asked ChatGPT. If I'm asking others, it's because it's too important to be left to ChatGPT's inaccuracies and I'm hoping someone has specific knowledge. If they don't, then they don't have to contribute.
It's not constructive to copy-paste LLM slop to discussions. I've yet to see a context where that is welcome, and people should feel shame for doing that.
'member the moral panic when students started (often uncritically) using Wikipedia ?
Ah, we didn't knew just how good we had it...
(At least it is (was ?) real humans doing the writing, you can look at modification history, well made articles have sources, and you can debate issues with the article in the Talk page and even maybe contribute directly to it...)
Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.
Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
Correction: those that don't enter a polling station. What you do in there is up to you. You can cast a vote, spoil the ballot, cast a "donkey vote" (numbering the options in the order printed), leave the ballot empty, as long as it goes in the box.
> Going for someone's feelings is just kinda silly.
It's also extremely counterproductive, because anyone who did care about their work being any good will quickly be turned into a grey rock by phrases like "you messed up", "unacceptable" and and "horrific".
And those who don't care about their work also don't care a jot what you think about it.
I think the core issue is that everyone reacts differently to different approaches of conveying a problem. Some people you scream at them "You're trash, you suck!" and their motivation to succeed explodes. Do it to others and they just collapse and check out. Some people screw up big, get a gentle talking to, and walk away feeling like it's no big deal. Others are dead inside and know they can never make that mistake again.
There is no magic response, it needs to be tailored to the individual, and being able to read what kind of response is right for which individual is part of what separates shitty and great managers.
> In fact, many towns just sprang up around train stations.
And this is how the Japanese system works so well. The trains don't make money, but the massive improvements to land value near stations does and the train companies own that land.
They get to make money, society gets the personal and economic benefits of a functional public transit system.
Passenger trains on their own fundamentally do not make money for the operators in most cases, except perhaps specialty routes like airports: the value is distributed into society, but doesn't all come back as ticket prices. So any system where a train company is just a train company will either need heavy subsidy or will slowly wither away under "efficiency" drives.
What they do have is a huge pile of capital intensive resources that are juicy targets for vampiric extraction and captive markets that are slow to extract themselves when exploited (and slow to come back).
Well, quite. A fully ticket-funded passenger rail system is a rare, rare thing. There are simply better ways to make money than going solo on building and running a railway and not either diversifying or getting state support.
Yes, it's true for roads, but no-one expects roads to all turn a profit in the way that rail lines have to. Even for place with road use fees for motorways, most people can access the road system for rather less than the cost to construct and maintain it.
This is untrue. From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
... look at all the entries in Japan where ratio >= 100%. It is a lot. This one is bonkers to me (JR Central Rail: 245.95%), but easily explained by owning and operating one of the busiest bullet train routes in the world between Tokyo and Osaka.
And, this does not include all of the (profitable) real estate projects these companies use to further increase ridership!
However, it may not include the real estate income, but it does include the income from extra ridership created by the real estate being near the station.
It's true, the bullet train prints money for JR. But there are also many train companies that are only profitable because of their real estate holdings around the lines, especially smaller private companies like Tokyu.
The bullet train in Japan only "prints money" for one JR company: JR Central, thanks to the busiest(?) bullet train route in the world: Tokyo to Osaka. Most other bullet train lines in Japan are break-even or loss making, but supported by the central gov't (for social policy).
> only profitable because of their real estate holdings around the lines
Again about Tokyu: This is untrue. I could only find stats from 2005, but all train lines in the Tokyo metropolitan area (including Yokohama) have improved farebox recovery ratios in the last 20 years.
After the opening of the last Tokyo Metro line (Fukutoshin) -- with direct connection to Tokyu Toyoko line (Shibuya to Yokohama), the farebox recovery is surely much higher. I guess over 150%, but probably closer to 175%. The trains are jammed 8+ hours per day. This means that, excluding real estate development, the Tokyu train lines are profitable by themselves.
> especially smaller private companies like Tokyu.
About Tokyu: "[S]maller"? Absolutely not. It is surely one of the top 5 largest private rail companies in Japan by revenue/profits. They are huge in the Tokyo area.
Hanlon's Razor is worse than useless if the target is aware of the principle. Then they can be malicious and play it off as incompetence. Which works especially well when they are also surrounded by genuine incompetents. They can also be, and often are, malicious and incompetent.
It's like saying "if it's white, fluffy and has four legs, never assume it is anything but a sheep". If the wolf knows you're applying that logic, what happens next?
Hanlon's razor is a great counterbalance to peoples' natural inclination of assuming people aren't dumb. The problem is when people divorce it from that context and assume it applies in general.
Businesses are traditionally taxed on their profits, not their turnover. Being a turnover tax, DST acts more like VAT does for consumers. Mathematically it has to be passed onto the customers, it just makes Google the collection agent on behalf of the government. This is why turnover taxes are such a bad idea.
I think those talks have ultimately stalled, so the right solution is getting back on track to a global tax system.
(Interestingly the deal struck in 2021 exchanged the promise of no US tariffs with the transition away from DST. It's no surprise this is a hot topic again with Trump's tariff regime.)
I've gotten a job offer from every technical interview I ever took in a suit, so it Worked For Me. And none of the jobs that I took I ever wore a suit to again (except for conferences or trade shows, and occasionally when I was going out after work to somewhere posh, which did provoke fun "Omg are you interviewing" questions!) Which I actually have found a bit of a shame because I do quite like a chance to wear a suit, though I'm also grateful not to have to iron infinite shirts.
Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where people are wound this tightly about it!
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