I have no experience with this, but for what it's worth, looks like there's a rack mounting enclosure available which mechanically extends the power switch: https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/rackmac-studio
I have something similar from MyElectronics, and it works, but it's a bit expensive, and still imprecise. At least the power button isn't in the back corner underneath!
When I was visiting home last year, I noticed my mom would throw her dog's poop in random peoples' bushes after picking it up, instead of taking it with her in a bag. I told her she shouldn't do that, but she said she thought it was fine because people don't walk in bushes, and so they won't step in the poop. I did my best to explain to her that 1) kids play all kinds of places, including in bushes; 2) rain can spread it around into the rest of the person's yard; and 3) you need to respect other peoples' property even if you think it won't matter. She was unconvinced, but said she'd "think about my perspective" and "look it up" whether I was right.
A few days later, she told me: "I asked AI and you were right about the dog poop". Really bizarre to me. I gave her the reasoning for why it's a bad thing to do, but she wouldn't accept it until she heard it from this "moral authority".
I don't find your mother's reaction bizarre. When people are told that some behavior they've been doing for years is bad for reasons X,Y,Z, it's typical to be defensive and skeptical. The fact that your mother really did follow up and check your reasons demonstrates that she takes your point of view seriously. If she didn't, she wouldn't have bothered to verify your assertions, and she wouldn't have told you you were right all along.
As far as trusting AI, I presume your mother was asking ChatGPT, not Llama 7B or something. The LLM backed up your reasoning rather than telling her that dog feces in bushes is harmless isn't just happenstance, it's because the big frontier commercial models really do know a lot.
That isn't to say the LLMs know everything, or that they're right all the time, but they tend to be more right than wrong. I wouldn't trust an LLM for medical advice over, say, a doctor, or for electrical advice over an electrician. But I'd absolutely trust ChatGPT or Claude for medical advice over an electrician, or for electrical advice over a medical doctor.
But to bring the point back to the article, we might currently be living in a brief period where these big corporate AIs can be reasonably trusted. Google's Gemeni is absolutely going to become ad driven, and OpenAI seems on the path to following the same direction. Xai's Grok is already practicing Elon-thought. Not only will the models show ads, but they'll be trained to tell their users what they want to hear because humans love confirmation bias. Future models may well tell your mother that dog feces can safely be thrown in bushes, if that's the answer that will make her likelier to come back and see some ads next time.
Ads seem foolishly benign. It's an easy metric to look at, but say you're the evil mastermind in charge and you've got this system of yours to do such things. Sure, you'd nominally have it set to optimize for dollars, but would you really not also have an option to optimize for whatever suits your interests at the time? Vote Kodos, perhaps?
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If the person's mother was a thinking human, and not an animal that would have failed the Gom Jabbar, she could have thought critically about those reasons instead of having the AI be the authority. Do kids play in bushes? Is that really something you need an AI to confirm for you?
On the one hand, confirming a new piece of information with a second source is good practice (even if we should trust our family implicitly on such topics). On the other, I'm not even a dog person and I understand the etiquette here. So, really, this story sounds like someone outsourcing their common sense or common courtesy to a machine, which is scary to me.
However, maybe she was just making conversation & thought you might be impressed that she knows what AI is and how to use it.
Quite a tangent, but for the purpose of avoiding anaerobic decomposition (and byproducts, CH4, H2S etc) of the dog poo and associated compostable bag (if you’re in one of those neighbourhoods), I do the same as your mum. If possible, flick it off the path. Else use a bag. Nature is full of the faeces of plenty of other things which we don’t bother picking up.
Depending on where you live, the patches of "nature" may be too small to absorb the feces, especially in modern cities where there are almost as many dogs as inhabitants.
It's a similar problem to why we don't urinate against trees - while in a countryside forest it may be ok, if 5 men do it every night after leaving the pub, the designated pissing tree will start to have problems due to soil change.
It’s a great process where I live. But you’re right. Doesn’t scale to populated areas.
Wonder what the potential microbial turnover of lawn is? Multiply that by the average walk length and I bet that could handle one or two nuggets per day, even in a city.
That’s a side hustle idea for any disengaged strava engineers. Leave me an acknowledgement on the ‘about’ page.
It's ok in wild bushes (as long as children don't usually play there), but what's the justification for dumping it in other people's bushes and gardens?
They probably would say "no" if you asked them, so you probably shouldn't. The OP's mom, I mean.
I don't know how old your mom is, but my pet theory of authority is that people older than about 40 accept printed text as authoritative. As in, non-handwritten letters that look regular.
When we were kids, you had either direct speech, hand-written words, or printed words.
The first two could be done by anybody. Anything informal like your local message board would be handwritten, sometimes with crappy printing from a home printer. It used to cost a bit to print text that looked nice, and that text used to be associated with a book or newspaper, which were authoritative.
Now suddenly everything you read is shaped like a newspaper. There's even crappy news websites that have the physical appearance of a proper newspaper website, with misinformation on them.
No, people who are older than 40 still grew up in newspaper world. Yes, the internet existed, but it didn't have the deluge of terrible content until well into the new millennium, and you couldn't get that content portable until roughly when the iPhone became ubiquitous. A lot of content at the time was simply the newspaper or national TV station, on the web. It was only later that you could virally share awful content that was formatted like good content.
Now that isn't to say that just because something is a newspaper, it is good content, far from it. But quality has definitely collapsed, overall and for the legacy outlets.
I am not quite 40, but not that far off. I can’t really imagine being a young adult during their era where newspapers fell apart and online imitators emerged, experiencing that process first-hand, and then coming out of that ignorant of the poor media environment. Maybe the handful of years made a big difference.
I think it really did. It went from "how nice, I can read the FT and the Economist on a screen now" to "Earth is flat, here is the research" in a few years at most.
Newspapers themselves were already in the old game of sensationalism, so they had no issues maxing out on clickbait titles and rage content. Especially ad-based papers, which have every incentive aligned to sell you what you want to hear.
The new bit was everyone sharing crap with each other, I don't think we really had that in the old world, the way we do now. I don't even know how someone managed to spread the rumor about Marilyn Manson removing his own ribs to pleasure himself in pre-social media.
> it used to cost a bit to print text that looked nice
More than a bit. Before print-on-demand technology was developed that made it feasible to conduct small (<1000) print runs, publishing required engaging the services of not just the printer but also a professional typesetter, hardcover designer, etc. There were very real minimum costs involved that meant that any book printed needed to sell thousands of not tens of thousands of copies to even have a chance of profitability. This meant also requiring the services of marketers and distributors, who took their own cut, thus needing books with potential to sell even more copies.
The result of needing so many people involved in publishing and needing to sell so many copies is that the Overton window was very small and in a narrow center. The sheer volume was what gave printed media its credibility.
There were indeed smaller crackpot publishers, but at either much reduced quality, or with any premise of profitability rejected as irrelevant.
Print-on-demand drastically reduced the number of people required to get a work to print, and that made it easier for more marginal voices to get printed.
Many people were taught language-use in a way that terrified them. To many of us the Written Word has the significance of that big black circle which was shown to Pavlov's dog alongside the feeding bell.
Welcome to my world. People don't listen to reason or arguments, they only accept social proof / authority / money talks etc. And yes, AI is already an authority. Why do you think companies are spending so much money on it? For profit? No, for power, as then profit comes automatically.
Well, I prefer this to people who bag up the poop and then throw the bag in the bushes, which seems increasingly common. Another popular option seems to be hanging the bag on a nearby tree branch, as if there's someone who's responsible for coming by and collecting it later.
Do you have a link to an actual Kansas statute which makes it illegal to sell a used mattress? I searched for it without success. Various sites claim that Kansas makes this illegal without citing a statute (often in the context of hokey stories about people finding silly loopholes in this purported law), but I'm suspicious that it's an urban legend.
I did some digging and, like you note, was unable to find any official documentation for it. Given the number of sites that indicate it is illegal in Kansas (when listing state by state), I took in on faith that it wasn't a mass hallucination. It seems like this may be false.
Thank you for prompting me to look into it further.
Off-topic, but there are six different people using the word "hoster" in this thread. I've never heard that word used instead of "host" or "hosting service" before, and yet here it's somehow prevalent. I feel like I'm having a stroke, or I just stepped into an alternate universe. Where did you all pick up that word?
Are you sure about this? Everything I can find says Benadryl is diphenhydramine, and Unisom is doxylamine. (Both linked to increased dementia risk, for what it's worth.)
Yes, I would use first generation antihistamines like those sparingly as they are anticholergenic. It's more of a long term concern rather than for occasional use.
For the low dose melatonin, Life Extension brand sells patented MicroActive formula of fast release/slow release melatonin in a 1.5mg dosage and a 6 hour time released 300mcg version. It's a quality brand and those are the dosage ranges I would recommend sticking around.
I have seen the insanely high 30mg+ amounts being sold and that's ridiculous. If you need that much, there's other factors going on. I would look into reducing caffeine intake, doing proper sleep hygiene (google it), and talk to a doctor/get a referral to a sleep specialist if it's an ongoing thing.
But, also look into l-theanine, glycine/magnesium glycinate, valerian root extract, passionflower, lemon balm and things of that sort for occasional sleeplessness or trouble falling asleep. (Visit examine.com & ergo-log.com and search for these ingredients on there to see all the references, how they work, and for more info.)
Natural isn't necessarily better, but I would recommend those any day over Z drugs, antihistamines and a lot of other rx sleep drugs. Make sure you're buying a quality brand though.
Finally, please don't give melatonin to children...
I’ll never understand the desire of people to take pills for everything. There are always side effects. If you have a medically diagnosed acute or chronic condition and there’s not another option that’s one thing. But if you can eat better, be more active, lose excess weight, etc that’s what you should try to do.
They're both first generation antihistamines and work as agonists on the H1 receptor, causing sedation. There's no reason to choose one over the other for a first time user, but they can cause rapid tolerance. So, I'm guessing the only reason they offer both is if you'd become tolerant to one of them and can no longer fall asleep on it.
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