Re: Oh yeah !
Cloud sharing. Ducking autocorrect.
326 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2007
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest to Episcopalian parents, and there was generally a nice cuppa after church. Most of Oregon and Washington you could get a real cup of tea served alongside hippy herbal crap.
Then my wife and I went through over a decade of hell in Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Her regular fights and taunts and fits trying to get a cup of TEA, not iced sugar water with a few leaves waved in it, were both epic and heartbreaking. On more than one occasion a well meaning but clueless server offered to microwave the Ice tea.
...it's crap. One university I worked for briefly required all papers to go through TurnItIn(ToOurDataMiner) which generated a percentage score. It counted repeated page headers as evidence of cheating, as well as properly cited quotations. I ignore the output entirely. The one person who did try to buy two papers and splice them together to meet an assignment requirement to talk about two creation myths was easy to spot without it, as the student wrote for shit and the paper they turned in was decently written but took a wild shift in tone at the halfway mark. And it didn't cover the requirements anyway.
My unit at a large state Engineering college have shifted almost entirely to using open access materials for course readings. We found that the textbooks just didn't cover what we teach very well, and they are far too expensive. It only takes a small investment in time to get our students information that is free to them.
I understood. My point is that access to the cellular network is not free. If they offered a system to cut out their servers, I would have to pay to connect my car to a cellular network to use remote start. Hondalink costs $110 a year. Verizon charges me $10/month to add a smart device to my plan. Either option would cost about the same.
Exactly this. If the hardware is installed in the car, there is a 0% chance that the cost was not included in the purchase price. If there is no ongoing cost, then I would never buy that car.
My Honda does have two remote start options. If I am parked in line of sight, I can use the keyfob to warm up the vehicle. I have street parking, but 99% of the time I can see the car from my bedroom window. This is included 100% in the cost of the car. There is an option to use a cellphone app to remote start the car. If I lived where I was in a neighborhood of taller apartments, I could see the use of that. Or I could use it to warm the car since I shuttle to my office from a surface lot. I understand that operating an app that requires sending a signal over a cellular network costs money every time it is used, and so I would not mind paying if I needed that option. While it uses hardware already installed in my car, there is a cost to operate that Honda should be able to recover.
Anti-SLAPP laws are state level. He may have a hard time in California but not Texas. On the other hand, the ADL could counter-sue and force Musk into discovery where they could demand material on X's moderation policies (or lack thereof), decision making process (or lack thereof) and since Musk is blaming them for economic damage, they could require X to turn over substantial business records showing their value, revenue, and expenditures as well as how Musk's actions have impacted the company's value.
They seem to be very good at creating citations that match the format you ask for, but in academic papers ChatGPT will list a real researcher and journal title in the relivant discipline and make up the other parts. The way legal and academic journals are usually paywalled it would be difficult for a program to access and parse actual articles.
And it is helpful to note that the company that this engineer works for is owned by a company that is owned by a person on the sanctions list for their contributions to Russia's military and defense software and hardware, including their systems to track and punish dissent. Their cog in the machine may not be in the military sector, but the machine very much is.
I teach writing in a large college of Engineering. So far, I can be pretty sure that I have received very few papers written by AI. Those that I think were written by AI don't follow the requirements of the assignment very well. So in that they are very good at mimicking student writing.
The best way I have of spotting AI or other cheating is working closely with students in class activities and research. If a student can't tell you anything about their sources, they probably didn't read them. Of course that also never stops students from using them.
With that being said, next year I plan on having students edit text from popular AI sources. Let's face it, people are going to use these tools in the workplace. I can see using ChatGPT for a rough draft. We will talk about the ethics of using writing tools, how to attribute authorship, and why you never ever want to feed them proprietary information. But I assume students are going to use the tools, so I want them to use them well.
I teach a University writing course aimed primary at Engineering students. My experience is that students who cheat do more work and get lower scores.
By the time they turn in a draft assignment in my class they need a bibliography and outline of their thesis and supporting evidence. They ave to discuss their topics in class and on discussion boards. Once they have done that, they can flesh out their pre-writings into a complete memo, proposal, or white paper (we don't have them write "college essays").
Even if they did use an AI, I would be impressed if they can construct a prompt that includes all of the assignment requirements and generates a cohesive piece of writing. Still plagarism under OSU definitions, but I would be impressed.
But one thing that I think Musk fails to consider is that popularity IS a technical problem. His Tesla consulting engineers may not have been impressed with Twitter's code, and Musk himself appears to be focused on features like adding video, changing search, and prioritization. But much of the challenge at Twitter isn't just adding features and tweaking UI. It's keeping the system robust enough to handle millions of people making billions of Tweets. Twitter is still relatively simple because it's freaking big. Big and simple with a good support staff allows them to have very good uptime. Big and complex will make a lot more crashes and service outages. Add to this Musk's stated desire to cut back on the number of data centers that spread traffic and provide redundancy to cover if one goes down, and he's looking at more and more little problems adding up over time towards major outrages. Start monkeying with the code base, especially more large files when you start sharing long form video, and the system will not hold up. It is possible that he will hire enough people to cover the existing operations and roll out new features, but I will not hold my breath. He's lost the most experienced staff. Even if he went on a hiring spree, the people with institutional knowledge are seriously thinned out.
The problem is Twitter users care. The blue check allowed them to follow the verified accounts of that they are interested in. It was exclusive, but that made it both more trustworthy and more valuable.
People use Twitter because they want to share their thoughts and follow people they are interested in. People don't join Twitter to pay money. We have PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, and a host of other platforms that people use.
Musk has blown up the niche Twitter occupied in order to enter a niche that is overcrowded already.
The fact that Musk thinks Twitter is a software and server company is why he is shedding billions of dollars. Twitter software isn't all that innovative. It does take a lot of work to run a microblog site with the volume of Twitter, but it isn't like creating self-driving cars (which his other company is failing at).
The value of Twitter is, or rapidly was, its community. He doesn't seem to grasp the social part of Social Media, and that's why he rolled out a subscription Blue Check program with disastrous results. The blue check was valuable because you couldn't buy it. Lots of people want to find Stephen King. Very few people want to find my account. Nobody wants to find Steven King (blue check mark). But if paying $8 a month prioritizes my posts and the fake King over Stephen King's, people will leave the platform.
The coding part of allowing people to buy a blue check was simple. They pushed it out in under a week. The social part of letting people buy a blue check was a disaster that led to impersonation of accounts, hid content people wanted to find, and destroyed the trust that Twitter spent years building in the community of users that joined Twitter to find content from authors, entertainers, journalists, and brands.
We are not talking about a self aware intelligence that can make it's own decisions. If we get there, then we can have a different conversation. But right now AI is a tool. It can use inputs to process complex problems. A bunch of humans created the AI. One or more humans refined a series of inputs until they got a usable result. One or more humans selected which results to apply for a patent on. Humans switch the power to the AI on and off. Until an AI can create a design without nay input and without filtering the output, they should not have the ability to hold a patent.