You should consider talking to a therapist about why you don’t consider non-romantic relationships to be valuable, because your take is not only not universal, but also indicative that you have some shit you need to work through.

When I started playing the game, one of the rules was that if someone else announced they’d lost the game, I didn’t lose. It was only if I thought about it when someone hadn’t lost (within the past 20 minutes) that I would lose. And since you have to announce you’ve lost when you think about it, just whispering “the game” or something similar, when your intent is clearly to get someone to lose the game, is also functionally an announcement of your loss.

You might say that I’m not playing right, but I’d argue that my version of the game is more mature and functions like a pink elephant challenge (“Don’t think about pink elephants. What are you thinking about?”), giving the game more nuance and depth. Not much, but still. And besides, I’d say that your version of the game is supposed to have that rule, too, and whoever told you about it just forgot to mention it. Maybe because they want you to lose more frequently. Maybe they just didn’t know.

You’re welcome to play my version of the game.

Sorry for your loss, but I haven’t lost the game for years.

Only if you have a sign posted, reading “All ye who enter here forfeit thine selves – body, mind, spirit, and soul – to the owner of these lands, until such time as ye leave or are slain,” with the sign carved from stone by hand, with a willowbark dagger, blessed under the light of a blood moon, approximately eight feet tall, flanked by two shrubberies – that look nice and are not too expensive – and visible to all who enter, lit eternal by the captured light of the new moon.

Please, enlighten me - how do you propose we use the term “AI” in a way that’s more useful than a definition that includes machine learning, large language models, and computer vision?

I doubt I’ll agree with your definition, but I’m curious to see how you would exclude machine learning, computer vision, LLMs, etc., from your definition. My assumption is that your definition is going to be either a derivative of “AI is anything computers can’t do yet” or based on pop culture / sci fi, but maybe you’ll surprise me.

To be clear, I’m a software engineer; I’m not speaking in sales speak. I’ve derived my understanding of the term from a combination of its historical context and how it’s used in both professional and academic contexts, not from marketing propaganda or from sci fi and pop culture. I’m certainly aware of the hype machine that’s ongoing, but there are also tons of fascinating advancements happening on a regular basis, and the term “AI” is at minimum a useful term to refer to technologies that leverage similar techniques.

it’s not ‘ai’, it’s just a poorly trained voice recognition system that’s trying to decipher any random person’s voice.

I’m baffled that you can say “It’s not ‘AI,’ it’s a machine learning powered speech to text system” with a straight face.

Even if we were to agree that ML-powered speech to text isn’t AI (and I don’t agree to that premise, for the record), there’s still the matter of processing the transcription to transform it into something that can be understood by the point of sale system - aka natural language processing. And while that NLP could be implemented without use of an LLM, given LLM’s current level of hype and the ease with which they can be shoved into any given product, I wouldn’t bet on Taco Bell execs approving such an approach, much less asking for it.

I’m a millennial and I did it more than once on hardware older than I was, but because I wanted to, not because there were no other options.