They may not be right, but the fact that they've existed for as long as they have is evidence that they are not illegal. As for your car or any other thing which updates the T&C, I'm sure there's a clause buried in there that says you don't have to click anything, that if you reject the terms you need to discontinue use of the product. By continuing to use the product you've given your implicit consent to the T&C.

I'd love to see this kind of bullshit struck down in court someday, but I'm not holding my breath for it.

USAian here. IMHO, the bigger problem in US politics (I don't know about Canadian) is that the first-past-the-post electoral system by its nature polarizes the country. The system encourages it by penalizing anyone who votes for a moderate. Say that A and Z are the extreme candidates, and a moderate called J enters the race. J is closer to A in ideology, so will pull more voters away from A than away from Z. This splits the A vote and practically guarantees a win for Z, even if there's a sizeable majority who would have voted A if J wasn't an option. So, that's the first problem I see. We need an electoral system where you can vote for a moderate without fear of throwing the win to the candidate you like the least.

I'd go after political parties next. People here in both parties are actively demonizing the other. It's simply become cheering for your team. A lot of that is related to the problem above, but a lot is that we seem to like team sports. People are very loyal to "their" team. So, take away team membership. Demote political parties to the advisory level, no more or less powerful than any other group. Candidates wouldn't belong to a party, wouldn't have an (R) or (D) after their names. Instead, candidates would be endorsed by a party, just like candidates are currently endorsed by, say, the Teamsters or the NRA. The endorsement says "This candidate's goals currently align with ours." rather than "This candidate belongs to us." Just like the Teamsters and the NRA could (in theory) both endorse the same candidate, a middle-of-the-road candidate might actually get endorsed by both the Republicans and the Democrats. The aim here is to lessen the cheerleading section who think, "We want this guy to win because he's our guy!" without actually examining the candidate's actual positions or qualifications. I also want to stop the ridiculous "majority party is in charge" situation in Congress. That's just plain dumb. Remove the party identity, remove the disproportionate benefit of having a single person more in the majority party. Maybe congress will vote their consciences rather than voting strictly to score a win for their party or worse, voting simply to stop the other party from scoring a win.

It's probably hopelessly naive, but maybe it'll work for the next 250 years before it unravels like the current system has.

How is slinging fries, or any kitchen work for that matter, not manufacturing? At the very least it's assembly. What do you think of when you say "making things"? Do you mean creative or artistic work? If so, does the guy bolting together the same car parts all day qualify as "making things"? If so, why doesn't the guy stuffing the Happy Meal box qualify?

I'm not conservative by any measure. I just think there's a really weird distinction being made here, especially when you're discussing taking pride in one's work. And when it comes down to it, why don't you think people in the service industry take as much pride in serving others as people in manufacturing take pride in making things?

Immigrants from Latin America do not share our commitment to rule of law - corruption is commonplace, patronage and cronyism is expected, bribes and extortion is just cost of doing business. This is why these countries are so poor and people are fleeing them for US.

Doesn't that imply that the people who are immigrating do share a commitment to the rule of law? They're trying to leave the places with corruption to come to a country that values the opposite. The ones who are thriving in the lawless environment are staying where they are.

The trouble is, the American values you describe aren't even shared universally across Americans, right here and now. There's a huge battle going on right now against the separation of religion and state. People are making laws based on Christian scripture. There are people who think prayer (but only Christian prayer) belongs in schools. And rationality? Were you here for the past four years? COVID brought out the biggest wave of irrational science deniers and people fighting against evidence-based decision making. And strangely, whether you're pro-vaccine or pro-ivermectin you can look at the other side and claim that they're the irrational ones refusing to believe the evidence.

But let's talk specifically about freedom. Sure, you won't find any American who says they're against freedom. But what does freedom mean, specifically? Very few people actually believe in absolute freedom - the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want, and to whomever I want. Most people would say I shouldn't be free to punch someone I disagree with. There's a huge rift right now over whether women should have the freedom of bodily autonomy regarding pregnancy, with a lot of the loudest advocates for freedom coming out against it. Or the freedom to choose your own pronouns and gender. The freedom to marry someone of the same sex. The freedom of people to smoke in public. In fact, your original post seemed to be opposed to the freedom to immigrate to this country. (At least, you stated that "I think collapse due to mass economic migration is more likely." That seems to be an argument against immigration, but who knows? Maybe you're pro-societal-collapse.)

Freedom is the quintessential American value - so vague that everyone can claim to be in favor of it while fighting tooth and nail to deny it to the people they don't agree with.

My point to all this is simply that "they don't share our values" is a not a valid reason to oppose immigration. There's no such thing as "our values". Half the people in this country already don't share the values of the other half. Or like "freedom", only share the ideal of it but not the practice. Immigration certainly isn't going to inject more chaos into what we already have.

Okay, Spanky, I'll bite. What are "our" values? I assume you're an American. So am I. Born and raised here. Parents and grandparents all born and raised here. And yet, I'm guessing that you and I don't share a lot of values. From your first example it sounds like you place much more value on gender conformity than I do. So do tell, which of "our" values aren't shared by immigrants? What views on the rule of law and community do you assume that we as Americans share?

(If you're not an American, I apologize. I'm sure that your country, whatever it is, is every bit as homogeneous in its beliefs as you've implied.)

Definitely. I have a friend in that category. A meteorite fell near where he lives and hit someone else's house. He offered to pay for roof repairs if he could have the meteorite -- and the section of roof that it hit. He's now the very proud owner of a space rock and about a 2 foot square section of residential roof with a hole in it. He has both mounted in a nice display.

I'm sure the batteries are worth more than just the salvage value, and probably worth more than the purchase price when new. (Not sure about that, space-rated stuff tends to be pricey.)

I read the article and it doesn't tell me any more than the summary. What were the complaints about? If they're complaining about something offensive in the content, sure, I understand that. But it sounds like they were just complaints that AI was involved in any way.

Who the fuck cares? AI is a tool. Think of it as a tool of the person who ultimately signed off on the work. Would anyone care if the copywriter used a pencil or typewriter or word processor or even just threw a box of magnetic poetry at the fridge? No? They why worry that the name of the tool is (very misleadingly) called "AI"?

"But it's putting people out of work!" I hear you cry. Oh, boo hoo. Every technology advance ever has done that. You used to have transcriptionists who would type up a hand-written manuscript. They're gone. Or typesetters who would painstakingly arrange actual bits of lead to be inked to put words on a page. It's just the next verse of the same song we've been singing since the invention of the wheel.

US healthcare wait times are less in some (but not all) cases.

Long wait times are the norm even to see your primary care physician where I am. I live in a sparsely-populated region of the US and our wait times are outrageous. My friends in the UK are appalled at how long we have to wait for routine care.

And I'll never understand why vision and dental aren't considered "healthcare". The US system is a mess.

• Right now, 24MB seems wasteful for a single web page.
• A few years ago, 2MB would have seemed wasteful.
• Before that, hundreds of KB would have been wasteful.
• And in the pre-web days applications would be wasteful if they used tens of KB.
• Or single-digit numbers of KB.
• In even earlier days, using extra individual bytes was wasteful.
• People have been known to optimize code just to find individual *bits* of unused space.

The point is, the problem of creeping bloat has existed ever since the world's second program was written, and people have been complaining about it for just as long.

A wise person once said, "Software expands to fill all available memory." The same can be said for filling bandwidth. As long as an excess resource exists there's no incentive to optimize its use. Where we once scraped to find unused bits we now casually toss around megabytes and gigabytes. At 300 bps there might have been room for a few ASCII art flourishes on the BBS. Now that a typical home connection is literally hundreds of thousands of times faster there's room video sidebars and frameworks that save the programmer a little effort.

It all boils down to time. In general people are willing to wait a few seconds for a response. Anything slower than that and we start looking for ways to speed it up. Anything faster than that isn't noticed, so isn't worth optimizing away. Page load times stay roughly constant even as bandwidth increases because that's what's fast enough on the human scale. Any extra bandwidth gets consumed by higher bandwidth art, or supplemental data, or just wasteful programmers importing a whole framework for that very special .toUpperCase() method that's so much better than the built-in one. There's no need to optimize. It's fast enough.

And yeah, it sucks for the people on the trailing edge of the technology where it's not fast enough. Conscientious developers will at least try to stay within the last generation's resource limits, but I doubt you're going to see anyone trying to optimize out single bytes or even single kilobytes at this point.

Very much the same for me. My high school teacher was barely keeping a chapter ahead of the students in the "BASIC for Dummies" (or whatever the real title was) book we were using. I had already burned through the entire book and had done all the assignments. He tried to give me another textbook to work through and I told him no. I'd already completed more coursework than the rest of the class would the entire term. I'd happily do something challenging but I wasn't going to slog through all the same 10 PRINT "hello, world"; 20 GOTO 10 sort of assignments again. Another kid was in the same boat I was. To his credit, the teacher actually found some elementary school teachers in the district who had these newfangled "computer" things in their classrooms but didn't know what to do with them. We spent the rest of the term going around doing custom programming work for whatever ideas the teachers had.

Ah, TRS-80 and Apple //e. Those were the days.

I expect you're right, that true AGI will require some way to interact with the environment. We learn by exploring, after all. This could be a virtual body in a virtual environment. It just has to have consistent interactions.

But that has nothing to do with the current crop of poseur AIs. LLMs "know" one thing: The statistical likelihood of one word following another. That's it. It turns out that when you have a huge body of data to train on you can make a model that is amazingly realistic. You can even give it considerations like "say this in the style of..." and it will turn out something that reads like it could have been written by that person.

That's all it is. A statistical parlor trick. Truth isn't a consideration. Common sense or general fund of knowledge isn't a consideration. It's just that "people eat chickens" is statistically more likely to appear in the training data than "chickens eat people". When an LLM hallucinates it's because the words in the false statement are at least as likely as the words in the true statement. There's no knowledge of any sort except for a huge table of statistics about which words tend to follow each other in the training set.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.