Addressing any of you who are on TSF's Death Watch . . . . .
I can testify from experience that don't waste your time. It happens when it happens.
My own experience: My father was a malignant narcissist. I was the only one of the three children who returned home to look after him as he was 92 and our mother was predeceased. And he was a handful and still abusive.
You bet I had passing thoughts about his demise. But I didn't dwell on them.
Sunday night, I kissed him good night. Didn't see him at all on Monday. Tuesday at 6 p.m., I was having coffee at D&D when the town police called to notify me that he had been taken to the regional hospital.
I notified my siblings and rushed to the ER. The staff worked on him for 3 hours, but he was gone.
I found out later that his death was caused by his own hand. One week before, he rear-ended a van at a gas station, causing his breastbone to hit the steering column. (It was an old car w/o air bags.) He refused medical attention and hid from me and my siblings his accident. But because he didn't follow up with a doctor, he didn't realize that he had a partially dissected aorta, with a slow bleed into his chest for seven days. And on the day of his death, he had actually gone for a therapeutic massage, not realizing that his backache was a warning of an impending heart attack, which he later sustained. (The massage hastened the heart attack.)
And you bet I didn't see THIS coming . . . . .
So, my point is life and death are sort of like the theatrical device of deus ex machina, the proverbial hand of God coming out of the clouds and messing with the plot of the play. TSF will go when he goes and you won't see it coming.
Go get another cup of coffee or an icy cold bottle of beer. You'll know soon enough.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Dr. FrankEpstein on the job!
You know, he's already a chatbot ...
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220281483
reposted here
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgpt-presidency/
Judge for yourself.
Tue, Apr 29th 2025 09:34am - Mike Masnick
snip
But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.
snip
This is not the response of someone working from actual knowledge or policy understanding. Instead, it’s precisely how an LLM operates: taking a prompt (the question about job losses) and generating text based on some core parameters (the “system prompt” that requires deflecting blame and asserting greatness).
The hallmarks of AI generation are all here:
• Confident assertions without factual backing
• Meandering diversions that maintain loose semantic connection to the topic
• Pattern-matching to previous responses (“ripped off,” “billions of dollars”)
• Optimization for what sounds good rather than what’s true
Great article and hard to summarize, because the author gives so many spot-on examples.
Response to no_hypocrisy (Original post)
He must be ancient in there. Like Halloween in there. 
