Having a whole lot of free time and very likely having reduced mobility to actually get out of the house could also be major contributors.

Be careful of the tax-incentives offered to big business to set up shop cheaply in small towns. If from a bottom-line perspective they have little invested, then they have little reason to abandon those investments, leading to a boom/bust cycle for the town next time the big tech vendors concoct some new 'best practices' scheme to try to cause the businesses dependent on them to buy more crap.

If the business has spent a lot of money out of their own coffers to build, they're more likely to treat that buildout so dismissively.

This is mainly due to inflation and to some extent a move to bigger luxury cars. Apples to apples it's not so bad.

The typical well-equipped Civic from the early '90s (EX or Si in the $11kâ"$12k range) would be around $26,000â"$28,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars today.

The 2025 Honda Civic starts around $24,250 for the LX trim, with better-equipped versions reaching $30,000 or more. Not only is this roughly the same price, but you're also getting a bigger and drastically safer car for the money today, even before considering the extra features standard on cars now.

Are you saying all copyright laws are stupid? Because thats what the Internet Archive unilaterally decided in these cases.

Its not just the usual issue about length of copyright term, because the IA were sharing (and initially they had no way to enforce the sharing, so really it was just distributing) scans of books that were both old and brand new.

So if you are saying all copyright laws are stupid, what else do you think shouldn't be a law? All property law full stop? Lets eliminate ownership entirely?

The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.

LK

Nice.

It's actually pretty funny, you mention WiFi only for the cameras, but I would love to have a good wifi-capable commercial-grade outdoor all-weather security camera that didn't basically rely on some other entity's wifi adapter, particularly if it could run off of power as varied as 120V to 277V.

And that is a fundamental problem.

Even in a professional setting, it takes real time and effort to devise IoT policy that actually works. Some IoT only works with like-appliances from the same manufacturer. Some IoT has to work with like-appliances, and has to work with general purpose PCs or phones or tablets. Some IoT works with industry-standard protocols and has interoperability with devices from other manufacturers. Some IoT is cloud-only. Some is local-to-other-devices and cloud. some is local, local to general purpose devices, and cloud.

And that's just reachability rules. That's not including things like security vulnerabilities due to the device manufacturer having ceased software support for hardware rev 1.5 six months after hardware rev 2.0 debuted but the durable goods that the controllers are embedded into have another decade of expected service life.

For the average person who isn't an IT engineer or hobbyist, they're going to basically have to subscribe to yet another service in the form of a cloud-managed firewall that the manufacturer supports for whatever amount of time the hardware is considered good for. That's going to be expensive as hell.

I guess it's difficult to be particularly sympathetic when a publication or service that is rather important-to and dependent-upon the research that has brought us what they're currently calling AI is swamped with low-quality, low-effort garbage generated by the same sorts of systems that their service has enabled.

I'm still wondering how/why this happens if one presumes that the names of researchers are associated with any academic papers. It seems like the reputational harm that should be done to someone publishing hot garbage would be enough to get them blacklisted from publishing altogether if their abuses were too frequent.

Given the sheer number of people that will make choices or take actions that are clearly and obviously against their interests, I simply must disagree.

Unless my original comment that started this particular thread stands.

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK

That's not actually what the announcement says:

When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.

(my emphasis). They're still accepting preprints of research papers without prior peer review.

Are you old enough to even remember--when people actually looked forward to a new Windows release?

I remember Win 3.11 but I don't remember anyone ever telling me they were looking forward to a new release of Windows.

Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.

Can we?

It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK