There are two ways to do this. First is to feed AI slop into AI - this ruins the training models and is actually one of the biggest problems in AI right now - everyone is using it and posting slop all over the internet. But it also means when you crawl for data, you're ingesting that slop as well and it's corrupting your models

The other thing to do is to poison the well by posting non-slop that's deliberately wrong. If you give a command or code example, hide in ways that are destructive or don't get the job done. Things like today's equivalent of "rm -rf /" (which doesn't work since "rm" actually requires a couple more parameters to do it - but make it appear it's a normal argument to rm). Non-slop that's wrong is just as harmful - people are using it without thinking so if they're blindly following AI commands to do a task and it wipes their machine, well, that's a goal as well.

If you run a mailing list, have a hidden archive of AI slop generated archives that look a lot like the real thing and make it harder to sort the real from the fake

Your post is about encountering municipal bureaucracy when you had it in mind to do it yourself in the first place.

I'm no fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. But there's a reason you need to jump through some hoops when you want to change something on your property. Those trees you want to cut down might be crucial for flood mitigation. That room you want to turn into a spare bedroom might be a fire-trap if it lacks a window or quick access to an exit route. Digging on your property might disrupt buried pipes or cables.

Like it or not, we do need rules, even though sometimes they may seem silly to you.

Oddly, I don't think that's ever been an issue because DIY is happening all the time, and that's why those regulations are there because someone dies and people find out it's because an unauthorized renovation happened that created a firetrap.

So no, it's not a deterrent because it's happening all the time. It's made worse by house flippers because those people are cutting corners to save money (i.e., make more profit), who you know aren't taking time to get permits, do inspections, or even bring things to code. By the time the flawed renovations are discovered, it's too late and the buyer is basically left with their house falling to pieces.

So I don't get get the claptrap that DIY is illegal - because if it was illegal, substandard construction and renovation work wouldn't be happening. There's probably a small fraction of the unpermitted work done properly to code (or better - remember code is just a minimum) and you'll never know until decades down the line when someone tries to renovate and discovers no permit was ever taken out. It's just it was well constructed, well built that no one needed to do anything. But that is far from the norm, and DIYers are basically the reason for the regulatory hell.

Also why "house flipping" should be an immediate rejection of a house - it looks pretty but the pain is likely concealing a load of issues you won't find out until later.

For Africa, the situation is different. The government led projects aren't happening not because of regulations, but because corruption and other things are basically draining the resources. Building an electric grid even without regulations we have (basically it's the wild west outside of Western nations) still costs money and effort, and enough palms get greased that no money makes it down to do the work. That's why it's not happening. And having electricity is better than not, so even the shadiest and lousiest of DIY gear you can get off Temu makes your life way better than trying to get it done the right way. Electrification rates in Africa are disputed because if you have a house with a single LED light that provides light for a few hours after dark, you're considered to have electricity.

Even the most basic DIY solar projects in Africa provide that, but also power to charge cellphones and provide Internet connectivity (during the day - there are batteries but they provide the lighting) - when the sun is out the battery charges and runs an inverter so you can run a computer to get Internet (usually via cellular network). This is often enough for farmers to access trading networks and get weather forecasts which is why it exists and is considered an important resource. And while the sun is out, cellphone charging is done.

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!)