“This claim leans heavily into anthropomorphizing non-human things, and that is very rare in rigorous science. Therefore I suspect this is not an accurate representation of rigorous science.”

1. Is clear and valid reasoning

2. Is clearly conveyed by the part you mentioned

3. Presents a straightforward reasoning tool people can apply more generally to help them identify cases where scientific results are likely being misrepresented. Exactly the kind of tool that someone can adopt to become better at applying critical thinking in their life.

4. Is much more useful in a broader set of circumstances than the more specific arguments that appear later in the comment to further deconstruct this specific case.

I mean, he’s walking through his very solid reasoning for why the headline fails the sniff test, despite being a factoid that is frequently repeated through many channels by many people.

People talk all the time about how we need to strengthen critical thinking skills in the general public. Outside of formal training, this is what that looks like: a culture of publicly explaining the thought process that leads you to question something that many others have accepted without question. The knee jerk reaction of criticizing such statements as rude or overly negative is a big part of why these skills have such a hard time spreading, since people who have the skills feel it’s not socially acceptable to share their conclusions.

Three years? The last time I used pickle was for a school project over a decade ago and even then these vulnerabilities were clearly laid out in the documentation, and it strongly advised against using it for any serious application. The only reason I kept using it in the project is precisely because it was a school project, and I knew the application would never be used in any production context worth attacking. Watching the ML community enthusiastically embrace pickle in the time since has been very amusing to say the least. Honestly I’m surprised it only seems to be catching up to them now.

Or just revise the law to state that international copyrights will only be enforced if they are held by Canadian trading partners in good standing, and that the only prosecutable violations of those copyrights are those which have taken place during the most recent contiguous period that that partner has been in good standing.

That way we don’t need to keep updating the law every time a trading partner starts/stops acting up, and other trading partners won’t need to worry about impacts to their IP. It will simply be baked in that every time a trading partner unilaterally breaks a trade agreement with us they will in effect be granting amnesty to every Canadian citizen who ever breached their copyright in the past and creating an open season on their IP within Canada until they can reach a new mutually acceptable trade agreement. Honestly this should be a standard practice for many countries.

I use it for coding, mostly as a time saver. Generally as I’m typing, it will give a suggestion that’s functionally the same as what I was going to type anyway so I hit tab and go to the next line. It’s able to do this accurately for around 80% of the total lines that I’m writing and going from writing full lines to writing 0-3 characters + tab on most of those lines makes a massive speed difference. It’s especially great for writing one off scripts when I’m doing something that’s not even a coding project, but there’s some tedious file juggling involved. Writing a script completely by hand for that often would take slightly longer than just doing the task manually, and as I said, it’s a one-off. But writing the script with copilot often takes as little as 10% of the time which is really nice.

Even in cases where I don’t already know how to solve a problem (particularly a problem involving specific integrations) it can often be faster to ask it how to solve the problem and then look up the specific functions, endpoints, etc it uses in the docs rather than trying to find those doc entries directly with a search. And if it hallucinates a function that doesn’t exist in the docs then I tell it that and it often successfully corrects itself. When it fails more than once I’ve generally found that there’s a high probability that the SDK/API/etc I’m looking at doesn’t have anything that does what I need so it’s time for me to start rethinking my approach

Outside of coding, I also use stable diffusion to generate images of D&D characters I’m creating instead of image searching and settling for something kind of close to what I was picturing.

I also regularly use SD when I stumble upon some art I’d like to use as a desktop wallpaper, but can’t find at high enough resolution. I just upscale it and proceed. Sometimes I’ll have something at the wrong aspect ratio and use generative fill to extend the edges of the image to the desired aspect ratio, those parts of the image are nothing special, but the important part is the original image and I just need some filler to prevent it from abruptly ending before the edges of the screen.

One last case is if I need to put together a tediously long document, I generally find that having it generate a first draft with the right structure and then iterating a bunch on that comes more easily than starting with an empty page.