There goes a man who knows who butters his bread and has no problems in getting his nose brown…

Personally, I think this is more appropriate.

Yeah.

Whilst I didn’t explicitly list that category as such, if you think about it, my AI for video surveillance and AI for scientific research examples are both in it.

AI isn’t at all reliable.

Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it’s just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.

(This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)

Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it’s just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn’t try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting one kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it’s in practice not a beach anymore.

You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you’re just back to having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure since problems can pop-up anywere, take and form and, worse, unlike a human the AI work is not consistent so errors are unpredictable, plus the AI will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. how increase experience means you learn to do little things to make your work and even the work of others easier).

This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, “not very bad” includes things like “not significantly damage client relations” which is much broader than merely “not be life threathening”, which is why, for example, Lawyers using AI to produce legal documents are getting into trouble as the AI quotes made up precedents), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset and if the AI fails to spot it, it’s alright and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn’t there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it and an AI alert just results in a human checking it, or scientific research were one tries to find unknown relations in massive datasets)

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

Also there are generaly very specific requirements on how things are made for them to fall under a Protected Origin, so for example in the age when pretty much all industrially made smoked meats are filled with nitrites and other preservatives, Parma Ham is literally still only made with pork meat and salt, nothing else (so the quality is far greater than the modern version of similar products which do not have that Protected Origin, many of which even have chemicals added to them to “accelerate the cure” so that they can be made faster).

Another example: Manchego Cheese isn’t just cheese made in specific area of Spain, it’s actually has to be made in a certain way using the milk of a specific breed of sheep called Manchega (hence the name of the cheese).

Doubt it.

They’re not actually handy to put a grilled beef patty inside, since they size is all wrong and they get soaked and mushy with the juices.

Yeah, well, there’s no Oil in Europe either, so ICE cars are even worse for a self-sustaining Europe (at least Lithum is only consumed once for an EV car, whilst Oil is consumed all the time for ICE cars)

If Europe can constantly source Oil from abroad to keep ICE cars going, I’m sure it can also source (a far lower quantity of) Lithium from abroad to make cars that can then run on electric power produced right here in Europe.

Your entire “argument” is one big cherry picked excuse.

In my experience, how many people think like that really depends on the country of Europe: my own native Portugal is far more shit when it comes to Environmentalism in general - especially around cars as the country has a very 1980s mindset on them and a car is still seen as symbol of status - whilst for example The Netherlands is almost the the opposite.

Well informed people knew that it wasn’t safe already for quite a while.

Most people did not, most companies did not, most public institutions either did not or could make believed they did not.

That’s changing (as are lots of other things) because Trump is being far more loud about how Europe is an adversary of America than previous administrations (it was too for Democrats, though only on business and trade terms)

There was quite a lot of fighting against treating America as a safe haven for the data of Europeans from people in the know in Tech and IT Security in Europe but we lost, but now crooked politicians can’t make believe America or American companies are safe for the data of Europeans anymore.

Europe just did a 180 on the commitment for no ICE cars to be sold from 2035 onwards under pressure of just a handful of big automakers.

And when I say Europe, I actually mean crooked European politicians rather than the public in general.

I mean, even if one puts the aside the whole strategical point of Europe delaying even more commiting to the first big tech revolution of the 21st century so that a handful of large automakers make a little bit more profit, there are actually lives as stake: fumes for diesel cars are estimated to kill more than 10,000 people a year in Europe.

Corruption in politics is both killing people and fucking up our future prosperity.

Yes, China has very purposefully put itself at the forefront of the first technological revolution of the 21st century and done this at multiple levels (solar panel production, battery tech, EVs)

Meanwhile the American elites have decided that 19th century technology is were they want to be. Well, that and dead ending killing the country’s lead in the Tech revolution by going down a branch with no future in the form of LLMs and making everybody lose trust in keeping their data in anything owned by American companies.

And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.

The Dollar went down.

Convert that S&P 500 to Yuan and it’s a whole different picture.

There’s a lot of Economics in Economics.

For example Behavioral Economics actually conducts experiments to determine how people tend to react to various situations (for example, they’ve actually discovered that at least for some forms of medicine the price when told to the patient can influence how well it works, effectively having a placebo and even a nocebo effect?), so it’s pretty similar to Sciences such as Physics or Chemistry.

The rest of Economics, not really, especially the stuff directly and indirectly linked to political decision making (so, Central Bank stuff, Think Tanks, Financial Press, “Economists” in the mainstream Press) - that shit is Politics using Mathematics as a Smoke & Mirrors to make the policy-supporting unsupported and unproven claims look like they’re actually the outcome of a rigorous scientific process.

The situation is so hilariously bad that when a guy from Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler - finally got an Economics “Nobel” Prize (which is not a prize instituted by Alfred Nobel but actually a prize from the Swedish Central Bank “in honor of Alfred Nobel” which they convinced the Nobel Committee to endorse) they didn’t give it to him for his edifice of work that disproves that real humans behave as the theoretical homo economicus human model that supports pretty much the entire mathematical edifice for Free Market Theory, but instead they gave it to him for just his work on Nudge Theory which is all about how to influence people in aggregate to do more of what people in power want (so stuff like making the desired behavior - say, “donate organs when you die” - be opt out rather than opt in to get a higher percentage of people with that behavior).

All this to say that whilst most of Economics in the present era is a Shit Show of Politics passing itself as a Science, a little bit of it is actually Science, though that little bit is almost never the stuff the “Economists” in panels in the News or in Central Banks talk about to the public or politicians.

Funnilly enough, I voted yesterday, didn’t at all follow this on TV (what’s the point: me following the news about isn’t going to change anything, better just check the final results the next day) and forgot to check the results until I saw this post in Lemmy.

Nice to see that a leftwing guy won this first round (even though he’s from the mainstream “left” party, he’s actually from a different faction that the self-serving neoliberal crooks that have dominated that party for 2+ decades, so he’s probably center-left unlike the leadership of his party which is at best center-right)

Not nice to see the far-right fascist who almost certainly gets support from American fascists (he certainly parrots a lot of their propaganda) getting second place followed by the far-right ultra-neoliberal (who also probably gets support from the more traditionals American far-right, though Reaganists - when it started his party under his leadership wanted to privatise the National Health Service until they found out the public were overwhelmingly against it - rather than Fascists) in third place.

Nice to see the sleazy rat with fingers in all pies fielded by the curreny mainstream rightwing party in Government only get 11%.

That said, there will be a second round between the top two candidates and if you add up the numbers from just the people who are very openly and without a doubt rightwing, they exceed 50% (just) so there is still a real risk that the far-right fascist might win.

Also note that the President in Portugal is a position with very little power, with almost all of the power being in Parliament and Government, similar to Germany.

I couldn’t agree more and had exact the same experience.

In my case I was actually in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and seeing what was done (the state unconditional saving Asset Owners by sacrificing the rest, in constrast with the whole Free Market stuff I had been reading on The Economist for almost a decade) and their take on it, really opened my eyes to the complete total self-serving bullshit of not just The Economist but also the whole edifice of Free Market Economics (a skepticism further boosted by me actually starting to learn Economics - especially Behavioral Economics since it’s the only “Mainly Science rather than Politics” part of it and my background is party in Physics - and deepening my understanding of the Finance Industry as I tried to figure out the Why and How of the Crash).

That shit is Politics hidden behind a veil of Mathematics purposelly misused in a way eerily similar to how I saw pricing for over the counter derivatives being done in Finance: designing models so that they yield the desired results under certain conditions and further controlling their output by feeding them with cherry picked inputs and then presenting the output of the models as “Mathematical proof” that things are as as you say they are, so basically circular logic with some complex Mathematics in the middle to hide their true nature as unsupported claims.

It’s pretty insidious Fake Science stuff if you don’t have a strong background in Science and access to the right information to pierce through it.

Well, after he got a Nobel Peace Prize, it makes sense that he moves onwards towards his next great wish: King Of The World.

The rest is pretty cartoonish Bad Guys Bad, Good Guys Good.

Andor was way more nouanced.

Further Andor showed the machinery of Fascism from the inside and had various different kinds of people with different levels of commitement and reasons for participating in it.

You could really feel the machinery of Fascism slowly closing its maw on people who were just pro-Obbey-The-Rules rather than pro-Fascism and either coopted them or crushed them. Meanwhile in the rest of Star Wars the Empire was pretty much just is Big Powerful Evil For The Sake Of Evil Guys + Mindless obedient human puppets.

For the Empire side Andor showed people under Fascism, the rest Star Wars just shows the symbology of Fascism (down to the detail that all the members of the Empire are human, never other species) but not the human side of it or the machinery influencing and even forcing them to behave as they do.

Given Trump’s relation with reality and mental age, the formalism are irrelevant: in his mind if he has the shinny thing then the prize is his.

Notice how the EU just succumbed to lobbying from part of the European Auto Industry and cancelled the whole “ICE car sales ban from 2035” having even before that put extra tariffs on EV cars from China (so, not quite as extreme as the US, but none the less a caving to EU auto makers) to help big auto makers in Europe who refuse to transition to EVs (and this at a time where Diesel polution kills about 10,000 people a year in the EU, so they’re literally putting the interests of large auto makers over the lives of people).

You know what they could’ve done instead?

Subsidies for European auto manufactures with a large percentage of EV car sales relative to ICE cars (which, if high enough would mean lots of money for subsidizing smaller companies to grow and replace the larger ones if the large makers don’t increase their EV sales rather than keeping on extracting juicy margings from ICE SUVs).

The problem in Europe is political capture by dinossaur businesses which would rather make believe the next great Tech Revolution - around Renewables - isn’t happening and have pretty much bought politicians to make sure Europeans and smaller European companies can’t easilly benefit from it.

Europe has the Tech capability to go there but the current political structure (late stage Neoliberal Capitalism) were politicians mainly represent large economic interests (not only above citizens but even above small and mid-size businesses) means that at best politicians simply refuse to send serious money to forward-looking disruptive businesses or forcing the pricing-in of things like Environmental costs in products made by large companies, whilst at worst actually making laws to reduce everybody’s options to move away from buying the products of said large companies.

It might look as an economic and progress problem at first sight, but dive any further and you’ll see Economic options being shaped by Politics (in some cases simply by Politicians in Europe choosing “not to intervene in Markets” but only for markets dominated by big players, in other cases by making laws which de facto activelly obstruct adoption of improved Tech) and in turn Politics being shaped by Big Money.

I think the previous poster was absolutelly correct in their interpretation of the West’s problem in this as broader societal problems.

Mind you, I don’t even think that China’s political system is all that great - rather I think that in the present day the power structures in the West (more in the US, but also to quiet an extent in Europe) are actually hindering the moving forward even whilst there’s plenty of capability to do so (certainly in Europe which mainly has invested massivelly in things like Higher Education).

The US was already been past its peak as an Imperial Power since at least the 2008 Crash (though if you look at things like social mobility in the US, the seeds of it go all the way back to the 70s when the country started becoming ever less a “land of opportunity”), but Trump has definitelly accelerated the decay by a huge factor.

That said, at some point a far-right populist portraying himself as “man of the people” who will “bring back national greatness” like Trump getting power, is historically pretty common in nations which have reached a peak of great power and started decaying from there - in other words, if it wasn’t Trump, this stage of the circle of prosperity and decay would in the US have delivered power to some other similar character.