With the Palestine/Israel thing going on right now, the amount of AI generated images I saw is staggering. I could tell it was AI made because I use it, myself. Meanwhile, my friends keep forwarding me photos of "the horrors" where the truly horrifying thing is the number of extra fingers the mutilated person has.

People grew up relying on the news and on photo evidence as the undoubted truth-bearers. It will take a while for everyone to adjust.

Damn, you already changed your password from "changeme".
You're overqualified.

In the words of George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
That's already half of humanity right there.

Indeed. Facebook and Instagram are exactly the same, designed by committees and the finest engineers to make them as addictive as possible.
If you're going down the rabbithole of which social media to ban, the truth is that all of them should get banned.

You still have to wonder what sense is there to hold a "Friends, Love and Peace" music festival right next to a fucking concentration camp.

That's the mindset of people who watch the bombings of Ukraine, add to their facebook profile pictures a blue and yellow filter, and call it "Helping the cause".

Hell, in today's tech world, a person above 40 has no business in congress unless they're part of the industry.

Careful what you wish for. The last time the US tried to interfere with the ways a country likes to run, they fought a losing war for 20 years, only for the taliban to go back and play with the toys the US left behind.
You can't change people unless they decide to change by themselves. Otherwise, you will just give more control tools to the people you were playing police against.

Here is something even more interesting... The CEO has been slowly unloading shares for the past year, with a chunk of them sold a week before the announcement.
It also shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, before joining Unity, he was previously the former CEO of... EA.

So to sum it up: The guy leaves his position as CEO of EA, the company best known for it's aggressive monetization strategies, then joins Unity and starts slowly unloading shares before announcing an aggressive monetization plan.

Does this reek of insider trading?

Microsoft owns Zenimax, Bethesda's parent company. Of course they have no interest in releasing for playstation or non-microsoft systems. They shelled out the money to ensure exclusivity.

Life expectancy is a difficult thing to measure and compare as it's just a quantitative number that doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. As you said, shaving two years off your life expectancy when most people in the developed world might look at 90+ years with the tail end of it finished in a nursing home might actually look like a bonus.
But when that 2.2 years actually means a lung cancer at 50 and the inability to walk a flight of stairs without having to take several breaks, it's a huge difference.

The quality of life you will have matters far more than the 2.2 number they advance, but sadly we don't have a way to measure that.

AI excels at two specific kinds of speech: Corporate speech that doesn't mean jackshit, and scientific article language where no figure of speech is allowed.
I had to write both kinds within my career and every time I did, I felt that I had to put my humanity aside to write "correctly".

Does it surprise anyone that AI will flourish when writing for both?

And how would those countries feel about losing their population? North African countries in particular are starting to suffer greatly since their brightest are leaving to work abroad, often never to return. The talk about "investing in African countries' education systems" means that the African countries will bear the burden of supporting the growth of a child into an economically valuable adult, only to never reap the benefit.
This talk of simply "harvesting" the African population is pretty much a neo-colonialistic ideal of plundering african resources, except that these will be human resources.

Disclaimer: I am someone from North Africa who's preparing to move abroad, as well. I am just witnessing a growing political wave of protecting the only wealth Africa has left, it's people.

Well, well, well... Tinfoil hat is on, but the attacks began on the 11th of July? Guess whose Air Force, Navy and Marines started landing in Peru that very month?
Yes, it could be a pure coincidence. But the world's most advanced standing army using the remote jungles as a testing ground for new tech is far more plausible than a rag-tag bunch of miners using a 100 grand piece of advanced equipment just to spook random villagers away from their mine.

I would argue the opposite. The money has been flowing for tech companies that didn't seem to bring any use at all for years now. The only game-changing advance we had since the internet was the LLM fad, and we really look into it, it's not even that much of a game changer.
All we have been getting, for years now, are advances in how to sell worse junk better, with the occasional 0.1% efficiency increase to whatever was actually making our lives better, like renewables.