It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

She won $150K and donated it all.

She still has to pay income tax on $150K, given that the tax deduction on donations isn't 100%.

I'm guessing she does not have the free cash available to pay those taxes either.

She could've "donated it all" which also means "minus taxes". So she donated all her winnings net taxes owed. I think most of these lotteries already withhold 40% of the money and remit as taxes anyways so she probably just gave to charity what she got left.

The IRS takes their cut immediately, even if you're a foreigner. You then have to submit tons of paperwork showing whether or not your country has a tax treaty with the US, at which point they just withhold 25% for taxes. Then you have to submit even more paperwork if you want the last bit (because lottery winnings may be tax free in some countries, like Canada).

I would also guess that perhaps the lottery has the ability to donate a portion of your winnings to a charity of your choice to help bypass some of the paperwork regarding taxes, because it's not unusual for winners to donate a portion of their winnings.

This just seemed like an obvious swing-and-miss on the part of the manufacturers. TVs are passive consumption devices, and that's exactly what people want them to be.

Yeah, but the heart was in the right place - because videoconferencing is a thing after all (and was a thing pre-pandemic). So instead of everyone in a family gathering around a phone to say hi to grandma, they could do it from the living room sofa.

Conference bars are expensive - even if you go for the non-smart ones they're still pretty pricey, add on a Barco or other unit to do your conferencing stuff, and it's fairly expensive and you still have to supply the TV. Meanwhile, you can get a camera for the LG for $100 and it does Teams and Zoom and everything else.

So the idea was sound, you can still buy conference bars today or even smart conference bars even.

It was an idea, with bad to worse execution (the horrendous privacy policies notwithstanding). If they planned it out better with a real privacy focus, they might have done a lot better than simply being a way to monetize their customers in the end.

It's likely one where had they tried not to be greedy in the beginning it might have had some modicum of success. Instead they decided to be full on greed and untrustworthy from the get go.

It's actually a terrible idea.

As someone with an SCCA license used to driving racing cars that have much higher performance than nearly everything on the road (including your Tesla), I can tell you that no mass-market road car is hard to drive. The problem is never the car, it's the driver, or more accurately their lack of ability.

To properly solve a problem you need to attack the root cause, not one of it's symptoms.
If there are people out there that can't truly can't handle jthe acceleration of a car or type of car then they shouldn't have been legally allowed to drive it in the first place.

Except for the first time in basically automobile history, cars have broken acceleration records to the point it's physics limiting acceleration and not the vehicle.

ICE are slow and laggy - they take a while to get up to speed, which generally has limited acceleration for normal vehicles.

These days production EVs are easily able to get beyond those limits way too easily, and getting 0-60 times in 3 seconds isn't unusual. (a 0-60 in 3 seconds used to be the holy grail, and now production EVs are beating it on a regular basis).

I'm guessing China probably saw a bunch of rear-enders where some EV driver ran into the rear of the car ahead of them because the EV out-accelerated the car in front. And chances are everyone is close to everyone else so if you're a bit too enthusiastic with the pedal you might not be able to hit the brakes in time.

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D

It needs to be inconvenient and convoluted enough that clueless users can't be tricked into doing it via phishing.

False. It's the Dancing Pigs problem.

As long as there's a method, someone will write instructions that people will follow. And malware actors will hijack whatever method to install ransomware. You can bet one step will have people running command line commands and there was that ransomware installed via the command line.

The urge to get pirated apps will drive people to whatever the method is. There will be dozens of easy to follow tutorials, videos, and other things. The only saving grace might be the chance for AI assistants to screw it up completely and wipe people's computers when they try.

Well, better than Hyundai did, where the whole MAGA "oh noes immigrants" overrodw the whole "Made in America" and handcuffed, detained and locked up a bunch of South Koreans in those miserable ICE facilities to the point every one of them filed human rights violations. It took South Korean diplomats a week to get them back.

I'm guessing by the time Trump took over Toyota had sent back all its workers and it's up to the locals to operate the plant, so they got lucky. Chances are though the Japanese engineers that were providing supervision likely left out of caution.

So the plant is there, it's able to make batteries, but it's likely not running at full capacity because the expertise needed to do so doesn't dare enter the US. (Especially after what happened to South Korea).

Though, it's not likely to be an issue, since EV sales have tanked, so it might be too late.

...they find lots of conversations where people teach ChatGPT the lyrics of their favorite (copyrighted) songs. :-)

Chances are that's likely the real reason for fighting the order - they don't want to reveal the fact a lot of their users are using ChatGPT to violate copyright and it's something OpenAI doesn't want to admit to.

Pretty sure DRM is meant to drive people to warezzzz where the games are free and DRM-less.

Less DRM. More anti-cheat.

Most DRM is broken after a week - and the only reason it's kept on is usually because there are paid things that the game has (microtransactions).,

But the anti-cheat is the bigger one, and no one cares if you warez your game if you can't play it with everyone else and everyone you can play with cheats.

Low quality PC to console ports have always existed (and vice versa for that matter.) Define broken - crashing your console?

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

So how come games on Epic Games Store aren't cheaper? Game prices have only gone up despite EGS charging developers only 18% vs. Steam's 30%. Many games were exclusive to EGS, and they didn't launch at lower prices or spur a trend to lower prices.

They started at the same price point as other games.

Prices are just sticky - if you're paying $60 for a game, why release your new game at $55? People are used to $60 so you might as well pocket the extra $5 and selling it for the same $60 despite the store taking less money.

Many don't even know what a terminal is. We are now trained through 2-factor authorization techniques that it is OK to have to prove yourself through a second method outside the browser page. It's not a far leap from email or text messages to entering a code into an app window.

It doesn't matter. You can walk through someone to install the Terminal app on Windows if they're motivated enough for the outcome.

People search all the time for free stuff - perhaps you can set up a page to "get Photoshop for free!" that walks people into installing Terminal from the app store, and how to run the script etc. You can even offer video tutorials on how to do it.

A sufficiently motivated person is suddenly very adept at doing technical things, especially if you explain it in bite-sized chunks.

The desire to have "free apps" lead many iPhone users to jailbreak their iPhones which lead to several worms because they installed sshd and didn't change the default phone password.