I tried to dictate some documents recently without paying the big bucks for specialized software, and was surprised just how bad Google and Microsoft’s speech recognition still is. Then I tried getting Word to transcribe some audio talks I had recorded, and that resulted in unreadable stuff with punctuation in all the wrong places. You could just about make out what it meant to say, so I tried asking various LLMs to tidy it up. That resulted in readable stuff that was largely made up and wrong, which also left out large chunks of the source material. In the end I just had to transcribe it all by hand.

It surprised me that these AI-ish products are still unable to transcribe speech coherently or tidy up a messy document without changing the meaning.

“Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.”

This whole industry is so full of hype and scams, the bubble surely has to burst at some point soon.

What’s with the suggestion that they’re injuring people at all? Has it happened?

This crude recourse to “evolutionary fitness” is the rhetoric of fascists.

I’m almost won over by your charming manners, but…

1. What is your source?
2. What happens when the severity of accidents are taken into account? Because it could be this: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds
3. Tesla’s self-driving features expose their cars to a distinctive kind of risk. It would be important to distinguish the accidents where this played a part.
4. Regardless of the statistics, there are some other clear design problems with Tesla’s, such as batteries that explode in a crash and doors that won’t open without power (not to mention autopilot’s limited camera-only inputs and software glitches). These are still concerns specific to Tesla that other brands don’t share, so again it’s worth reviewing accidents where these played a role when gauging Tesla’s safety.

I quite like lane assist in the 2019 Honda I drive, even though it gets it wrong occasionally. It will not function unless it detects that you’re providing some steering input of your own, and it’s easy to override just by steering the way you want to go. That and cruise control are handy on the highway and have worked well for 6 years with no problems. But it’s very far from either functioning or being advertised as “full self driving.”

Wouldn’t someone have noticed all the traffic on the network? And if the conversations were processed locally, wouldn’t someone notice the energy and cooling needs of the processor in the bulb, not to mention the presence of a load of memory? This seems very implausible.

It seems to be a common thing, couching misogyny in the language of “protecting” or “defending” women. This stuff makes my skin crawl.

We all know that cops will try to charge you with assaulting them if you so much as shrug while being arrested. And they’ll contrive situations just so they can do that. I’d say that makes their statistics meaningless without specific details and proof.

Trump will destroy it because it’s icky stuff relating to women, and it serves to help women.

She said that there’s been a 500 percent increase against ICE agents who are just “trying to do their jobs and remove public safety threats from… communities.”

Exactly what the Nazis who ran extermination camps claimed.

Israel has killed 70 healthcare workers in 50 days. And they’ve been doing this for years, every time claiming it’s not a deliberate policy. The world can see what Israel is, and its words are worthless.

An article on the same topic:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-ap-stylebook-warps-reality-to-serve-power

Didn’t the USA have a trade agreement with Canada (NAFTA) which Trump ripped up during his first presidency? And then during that same presidency didn’t Canada and the USA negotiate a new one (USMCA), which Trump ripped up during his second presidency?

They came to an agreement with Canada too, and Iran, before they suddenly decided they didn’t. Agreements with the USA aren’t worth much.

Ah, it has been a few years since I was last traumatized by this. Is it time again?

I seem to remember he took a poster off the wall to keep as a souvenir, so they killed him. Don’t touch the posters, people.

Seems like in the USA everyone gets treated badly all of the time, except the very richest.

No one is immune to a concerted propaganda campaign. American propaganda has just been a bit more extreme than most, for a bit longer.

You have 10 minutes to clear your desk and get out. Not a team player!