Huzzah!

This one-stop shopping/installation must be a big part of Home Depot’s success. Sorry I didn’t figure it out until now.

I’m emboldened now to replace my horrid glass-top electric stove (how I hate them) with gas.

So I’m talking to ChatGPT about the ins and outs of this replacement. I find the open-ended conversational format pleasant and efficient.

Chat doesn’t “think” much for its responses, which suggests to me it has already trained on a huge amount of this information, saving me from becoming a temporary expert in that area.

I definitely find AI preferable to Googling for certain kinds of straightforward information, such as French grammar and idioms or navigating government/corporate websites or handling home repair issues.

Kinda like using a calculator vs a slide rule.

On the Dark Side (or the Far Side), bumping a post that Barry linked yesterday:
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/google-sued-allegedly-using-gemini-ai-tool-track-users-private-communications

Li-Meng Yan: The Chinese virologist who publicly claimed in 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing COVID-19) was intentionally manufactured and released by the Chinese government is Dr. Li-Meng Yan (also spelled Yan Li-Meng; Chinese). She is of Chinese nationality and was a post-doctoral researcher in virology at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. Yan fled to the United States in April 2020, citing safety concerns, and became a whistleblower figure amid early pandemic origin debates.
Key Details on Her Claims and Timeline Background: Yan specialized in virology and immunology, focusing on influenza and SARS-related viruses. She worked at a WHO reference lab in Hong Kong and claimed she was among the first to investigate SARS-like cases in late December 2019.
Her Allegations (2020): In July 2020, she told Fox News that China knew about person-to-person transmission earlier than reported and suppressed information, including her own research.
By September 2020, she escalated: In interviews (e.g., Loose Women on September 11 and Tucker Carlson on September 15), she asserted the virus was “man-made” in a Wuhan lab controlled by the Chinese government and intentionally released as a bioweapon. She called wet market origins a “smoke screen” and promised scientific evidence via preprints.
She co-authored two non-peer-reviewed papers (September and October 2020) claiming lab engineering based on genetic analysis, funded by a group linked to Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui (a Chinese exile). Yan said her mother was arrested in China in retaliation.

Reception: Her claims were amplified by right-wing media but widely debunked by scientists (e.g., Columbia’s Angela Rasmussen called them a “shitshow of disinformation”). The papers were criticized for flawed methods, pseudonyms for co-authors, and political motivations. Twitter (now X) suspended her account in September 2020. Mainstream virologists, including those at the Wuhan Institute, rejected lab-leak evidence at the time.

It didn’t seem all that farfetched at the time, and less so now. It does highlight the tenuous attitude many Americans have towards their government. It’s dismissed as dangerous conspiracy. I think it’s fair to say, many Americans are struggling to find a trustworthy source for news, recognizing the official government press release always reflects a desire to maintain the status quo. Even reformers that are rocking the boat, hopefully don’t want to tip the boat over.

Still not a fan of AI. Except for finding patterns in extremely large datasets, which, in itself is extremely useful, there is still too much hallucinating going on for me. You do not need AI to determine that $16,000+ for HVAC is way out of line. When I researched HVAC when ours went down got everything I needed from, roughly six queries. I’m very comfortable with that.

My Google-Fu is excellent. I even programmed for a search engine company during the dotcom bubble.

I found it much easier to get this information via Chat than Google. My conversation with Chat went a lot deeper and more specific than my summary above.

For one thing Chat usually offers more information than I ask for, thus I discover things I wouldn’t have thought to search for.

We also had an interesting discussion about the financial health of the company that gave me the $16K estimate. I thought it was strange that the owner of the company would call me to rate his techs. Chat agreed and noted that it was predatory pricing, I rejected it, and the owner was calling to salvage the sale.

In any case the future of search will more and more involve AI, even if you don’t notice it.

It’s the furnace plus installation, new thermostat, and haul-away of the old furnace.

As to air-conditioning — New Mexico is so dry we use evaporative cooling AKA swamp cooler, which sorta does the job in the summer. It’s an entirely separate system from the furnace and not controlled by thermostat.

With a regular furnace A/C setup, an evaporative coil is placed on top of the furnace and cool air uses the same ducts as the furnace.

Though certainly there are those who would claim this was (mostly?) always the case…

Personally, I’d like to believe that once upon a time they WERE accountable, though “understandably”, once the CIA got a taste of all that drug money, it would have been hard to draw down—“I can resist anything but temptation”, etc….
(Besides, I’ve always been more than a bit naive…. Sigh…)

The next day, Zerohedge.com shares a Brownstone Institute’s piece asking if the CIA cooked up the virus:

Dr Ralph Baric “has been accused of engineering the Covid-19 virus in his lab at the University of North Carolina, but he has never had to testify about his role in the pandemic despite his well-documented collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“The newly released emails [apparently from Sen. Rand Paul’ long demands] reveal that the CIA hoped to discuss “Coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation with Baric” and that Baric held quarterly meetings with members of the Intelligence Community.

“These emails are just the latest additions to the suspicious amalgamation of facts implicating the US Intelligence Community’s role in the origins of the pandemic, as discussed in The Covid Response at Five Years [link at original].

“A very brief overview of the timeline suggests that the CIA and the Intelligence Community are implicated in the creation of the virus, a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and censorship to evade any public scrutiny for their role in the pandemic.”

DETAILS HERE https://www.zerohedge.com/political/was-covid-always-cia-plot

Like they say in the movies, this is getting intense.

I don’t think that ChatGPT did much there. It’s all info you could have got on your own albeit taking more time. The same happened to me. I ran a series of queries in a search engine and went from there. I think you used AI as a search engine.