young men pay more for car insurance than young women (today). This is based on statistical models. Should they be outlawed?
EU has outlawed them. their argument is that differentiation is only valid if the difference is the actual cause and not merely statistical correlation.
true, but was mostly picking up on the "unfortunate" part. given archive.todays behavior, i don't think it's unfortunate. they deserve to be blocked, even if this block here didn't happen for those reasons.
This was true in reality yes, but not via Google-the-search-engine but Google Maps actually, most website visits were from the link on our Google Maps listing, the rest was basically either from Facebook or Instagram, almost no search engine traffic.
the first computer i got to use was a TRS-80 III i believe in highschool. this thing was already old at the time which was the late 90s, but it did the job. we had a full classroom of them, one of which was acting as a server with two floppy disks, and all the others were booting off the server, freeing the floppy drive for our data. we learned BASIC on it, so i guess that is all that was running on there.
the school also had a 286 i believe, (i am guessing by what models were common in the late 80s) in the library running Novell Netware that i was allowed to use. i distinctly remember wondering if that was unix, trying some unix commands that i had read about. i was able to use turbo pascal on it and a few other programs.
the science teacher had an Apple II i think that i was also allowed to play with occasionally. i remember pranking the teacher with a function that would turn the desktop upside down. and at home we had a PC or compatible. most likely a Tandy 1000 from RadioShack. i remember that the family bought some software for it. was it DeskMate? i don't recognize the screenshots that i can find online now. i do remember using word perfect and connecting to BBS systems with a modem, downloading software that i would try out and play around with.
oh, before all that i did a 3 week internship at a machine design company where i got to use autocad on a PC on whatever that was running on. probably DOS as well.
i had friends with ataris or amigas. but i never got a chance to actually use them, the friends were just showing them to me.
one more interesting detail from that time. at one point we visited friends who had an amiga i believe with a floppy drive that could write 10MB on a 3.5" floppy. i could not find a reference to that on wikipedia, so i don't know what that was. but i am pretty confident that i remember the 10MB capacity correctly.
when i entered university in the early 90s i got my first computer that was actually my own. it came with DOS obviously, while we were using unix at the uni (SunOS/Solaris/AIX (also one class where we got access to VMS)) and when i discovered linux, i made it dual boot, and i remember every time i reinstalled linux to upgrade it, i shrank the DOS partition until finally it was gone completely.
around the same time when i visited my grandparents, grandma, who was volunteering as a secretary for some NGOs wished for a computer. grandpa sent me out to get one, and i picked OS/2 to run on it. i believe i installed emacs for her to use, and LaTeX which i had learned about at uni. when i came back a year later, someone helped her by installing windows on it. could not have that. then i decided to change universities and study in my grandparents home town, so moved in with them, of course bringing my linux computer. grandma was intrigued and wanted to learn linux too. again, emacs and LaTeX set up for her and the G.R.E.A.T desktop system.
wow, long answer. i got a but carried away, sorry. i hope it is interesting.
My only netware experience was with pxeboot (or similar) of a dos/win3.11 environment over ipx, but that was 93 onwards.
> someone helped her by installing windows on it
"helped"
Personally I hadn't tried Linux until after windows 95, and a command line only environment wasn't great. It wasn't until redhat 6 came out that my VGA card (SiS 6326) was properly supported (more than 640x480 with a broken cursor)
By the time I went to university in 2000 there were a handful of CDE powered workstations running some form of unix in one of the labs (the blue lab), but the majority of unix style machines were Linux.
When I started work as a trainee in 2003 they'd just bought a new Solaris setup with an oracle RAC to run a jboss middleware app. The last Solaris box we bought were some T2000s and a pair of X4500s, bought just before I took over in 2006. By 2008 everything was running on linux.
Scares me to think that 2008 was neared to Linux launching than it is today. Its probably about the last time I actually compiled a kernel - certainly via make menuconfig - too.
well actually, to be honest for me too. i had actually read about unix before i could get access to a computer, and the first o'reilly book i bought was titled "DOS meets Unix" in 1988, long before i had my own computer.
well, that's kind of my implied criticism. which is why i checked what would happen if i removed all the em-dashes. it's not that much better. but i think the number of em-dashes also matters. check your article with and without em-dashes, see what difference it makes.
Imo the article is completely copy/pasted from Claude. The figures, which couldn't be copy/pasted verbatim, were screenshotted/pasted.
Quoting from the article.
> The Town of Atherton's lawsuit against Caltrain electrification is the clearest case study we have of how a tiny, wealthy minority can hijack a regional public project — and stick everyone else with the bill.
The unnecessary emdash-for-effect is a huge LLM-ism. No human I know uses such a device in writing.
> Here is the short version. In 2012, Caltrain budgeted its electrification project — the backbone of the Peninsula's transit future and a prerequisite for high-speed rail to ever reach San Francisco — at roughly $1.5 billion. By 2017 that number had ballooned to $1.9 billion. In between, the Town of Atherton sued.
"Here's the short version" along with the bolding of the numbers tells us something about the "author's" prompt. He prompted it for a short version, and told it to include those two numbers.
I challenge any commenter to name one time they began a paragraph with the meager "Here's the short version."
> One veto point, closed.
Why is the comma even there? Classic LLM melodrama.
there was also a delay in the decision for funding until may 2017. that's another 8 months. but then we don't know when that decision would have been made originally.
if we are going to complain about AI content then i suggest we also include some evidence to make the argument at least somewhat insightful. i'll start: pangram gives this a 100% score (without the sources section), on account of the em-dashes. remove those and the score drops to 49%. include the sources and the score drops to 36%.
(edit, i misread the score: after removal of the em-dashes the result is 48% generated and 49% assisted, add the sources, then it is 33% generated, 36% assisted, and 30% human. i didn't check the original text including the sources. i ran out of free credits.)
that's the thing. em-dashes are such a low hanging fruit, that i fear that they soon will be gone. i mean if i am ever to post an AI generated text, removing them is the first thing i would do.
(edit: turns out it doesn't help as much as i thought it would. see the edit above)
> Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon.
In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy, which LLMs do a LOT.
There are other spots that stand out, but this is the point where I said to myself "oh this is the point where the author stopped "cowriting" and just pasted the LLM slop directly."
EU has outlawed them. their argument is that differentiation is only valid if the difference is the actual cause and not merely statistical correlation.
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