The credit cards that banks (like JPMorgan) offer their customers. "Alternative payment platforms" can coexist within the same clearing and settlement system as physical cards. And with the same data requirements. Transactions only need a yes/no verification for the amount entered at the point of sale. They don't need my banking and financial history.

Yeah, we did. Write out a pseudo-code (English language) description of what you want done. A _complete_ description. Hand it to a machine which generates and compiles the code. Done. Back in the 1990s.

But what we had in the 1990s was a group of middle managers that realized that their status and income depended on the number of warm bodies they had reporting to them. So they fought the move to technologies that would reduce their headcount from 500 to 5. Those people are retired and, increasingly dead. And we have Wall Street investors asking where all that expense money is going when you could just buy a beige box to do the work.

Not once the investment community realizes that they are being taken for a ride. Current AI is garbage because it's envisioned as a general purpose tool. We have great AI that can model protein folding or do many specific tasks. But the GPAI push is just designed to part suckers from their money.

A choke knob is an excellent anti-theft measure.

YouTube's only concern these days is revenue and profit.

They breach their own community guidelines each and every day by running scam ads that continue to run despite hundreds or even thousand viewer-reports. Those ads run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted -- however if a creator (the life-blood of the platform) is falsely accused of "scams or deceptive practices" by YT's AI then they're gone in the blink of an eye.

They also allow AI spambots to post endless comments linking to porn pages/sites and claim that their AI can't automatically detect such things -- although that same AI, when unleashed on creator's videos, constantly demonetizes anything that is deemed to be unsuitable.

I hate the AI dross that is overwhelming YT as much as anyone but I really have doubts that YT intends to do anything effective to stem its flow. You see, so long as AI-generated videos are getting eyeballs on ads, YouTube will be happy because they'll be generating revenue and profits.

Let's face it, YouTube is actually *encouraging* the use of AI on its platform. AI suggests ideas for new videos and will create thumbnails for you. VEO3 will even create shorts or entire videos on demand. Google wants to sell its AI services and is pitching them at YouTube creators so they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot are they?

This is why I'm moving to self-hosting my own videos on an instance of PeerTube and I encourage other creators to do the same. When you self-host you have *FULL* control and you no longer have to worry about censorship or losing your entire community just because one of YT's AI bots has runamok and identifies your cute cat videos as CSAM.

Got it.

Numb to emergency alerts. After the WEA system went live, the first one I got was from a Medicare broker: "Call now with your Zip Code and make sure you are getting everything you are entitled to." (The dog whistle for all retired people.)

Amber Alerts are next on my list. Solve your child custody fights on your own time. The recent Travis Decker case (killed his three daughters) illustrated how useless the alert system was. Because they don't issue them for planned visitation. This one also falls into the same catagory as the Blue Alert Program. Yeah, right. I'm going to be staring at the guy in the next car who might be the one with no compunction about killing cops.

Particularly Meal Team Six.

... I want my choke knob back.

... call a plumber and have all that PEX plumbing removed and replaced with copper.

No, wait! Copper is bad too. Switch to lead.

Yet.

But I see a flaw in that work. From the article:

Proof by contradiction would have been much more powerful evidence that dark matter exists. Apply MOND or other theories and show that the results would not fit the measurements. But no. Some people just don't want to test their beliefs.

... the BMI and ASCAP corporate headquarters? Just have a bunch of people walk into the lobby and start singing "Never Gonna Give You Up".

What's the code for Der Ring des Nibelungen?

I'll pay to get in for live music. If it's good. But not that canned garbage.

I got to bars to talk to people. Turn the damned music down. Or off altogether. I can't hear conversations over that garbage.

Many of the local coffee shops play streaming garbage. When I go in to read my paper with a cup of coffee, I put on noise canceling headphones and tune my radio to the local classical station. Many other people are wearing Airpods and, I'd guess, not listening to the background Spotify feed. May as well turn it off.

Perhaps. The Latin adjective vaccinus means "of or from the cow".

Exposure to cows (cowpox) conveyed immunity from the related smallpox virus to humans.