You're fixating on a symptom, not a cause. What you're really concerned about is the parasitic nature of predatory marketing. That's where all the garbage comes from. If you changed the USPS the way you say, all that trash would migrate to other delivery services. Attack the root cause: predatory marketing.
Right, because the US told Yanukovych to brutalize his people, and also told the people to revolt and the supreme court to remove him from office, so he could flee to Russia. Not saying the West didn't see this as an opportunity to strengthen economic ties, but it was not a bear and stick moment. Why do you insist that only the West is at fault? Culpability is shared
You're speaking as if the US started it. They did not. Russia literally invaded Ukraine in the false pretense that they are under the control of a Nazi regime. There is no Nazi regime, barely even a functioning contingent, and certainly nothing out of proportion with the rest of the world's far right representation. If anything, this "proxy war" serves two purposes: 1. To field test new technology and 2. To undercut Russian propaganda. It's apparent to anyone paying attention that Russia is the aggressor, they've vastly oversold their own capability, and their propaganda machine is flailing.
I'm not saying there are no issues within the US that urgently need resolved, but let's be honest with ourselves -- authoritarianism is authoritarianism no matter their lat/long or cultural/economic history, at home and abroad.
Edit: got caught up in my own argument and forgot to mention the obvious third reason: to help the sovereign nation of Ukraine defend itself from invasion.
Only if you have very limited experience searching for information. Those kinds of details should be a given. That's my concern, that people who do not know what information is useful come to rely on these summaries and forfeit their own agency, rather than develop critical reading and decision making skills
I've got nearly a decade of experience in competitive pistol and three-gun matches and I was never by any means competitive. The footage of what he accomplished in his training is impressive and requires a significant amount of practice and skill. Even if what I saw was only the best roll, it was no accident
The problem I see is that it introduces another degree of separation between the user and the wider Internet. Instead of indexing sites, browsers are trying to interpret them for us. The extreme edge case of this is not having websites at all anymore, just apps and an omniscient AI that answers anything. Cool in theory, but in practice these omniscient beings really aren't and instead are very fallible. Presumably these tools are also owned by corporations with shareholder values that are often contrary to user values. I can only speak for myself, but I experience these summaries as a loss of control over how I interact with the Internet and a step down a path I would rather not tread.
In this example the AI also does not provide anything valuable. It only defines a forum thread in terms of the question asked.
Also, Robert Sapolsky's book Determined explores whether we're conscious or not based on his work in neuroscience and primatology. It's like a book length version of the quote you posted
They found a way to create a high surface area capacitor made largely from abundant resources. Even a proof of concept is a discovery. We may not see it in practice in our lifetimes because science and industry take time, but that doesn't diminish the value at all.
Why is this a false equivalence? I'm not saying this is the next Faraday. I'm comparing contemporaries. You can't know what technologies will make what kind of difference in the future, but there's no harm in being excited about our interested in them and their possibilities. I think my comparisons are fair, especially if you consider the technology of each contemporary era. What about Turing? He created a mechanical computational machine and extrapolated the future possibility of machines that could mimic human communication. That is absolutely an edge case assumption given the technology of the time and yet here we are with LLMs running rampant.
A couple of guys doing cool stuff in a lab is how progress is made. If we stopped people like Tesla, Newton, and Faraday because "candles are readily available and whale oil is a natural resource" we wouldn't have any of the tech we take for granted today.
This discovery is super cool, like imagine its applications in walkable cities where the entire pedestrian pathway is also storing energy from wind and solar
You're fixating on a symptom, not a cause. What you're really concerned about is the parasitic nature of predatory marketing. That's where all the garbage comes from. If you changed the USPS the way you say, all that trash would migrate to other delivery services. Attack the root cause: predatory marketing.
Edit: typos