Bingo.

I do not want to buy a game that is "AI" generated. That is slop and garbage not deserving of being paid for.

If you want to make a "free" game with AI shit. Be my guest. You throw microtransactions of more AI slop, I hope nobody is that dumb to pay for it.

If a development house uses AI to generate place holder assets, those assets must never make their way into the final product.

Any AI generated material is public domain.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.

National budgets simply do not, and cannot, work that way. Taxes go into a central pot, and then get assigned out according to the priorities of the state as interpreted by the government that currently controls the national purse strings, ideally without having to borrow any additional money although that seldom happens and is deeply unpopular when it does (see "Austerity" - governments typicallydo not live within their means, yet usually expect their publics to do just that). For the whole system to work, they have to both tax things that are easy to collect the tax on, and over tax those things to make up for the costs of things where it is not easy to tax. If you want any taxes spent to be proportionate to what they are raised from, then the outcome will be a LOT of essential services that are currently supported by the public purse seeing drastic cuts, forcing more people to go private or join a *long* waiting list, and requiring suplemental per-use fees.

For most people, sure the odometer will be fine, but some of us live in rural communities and have vehicles that are used a significant amount of time off public roads, but still need to be taxed for their on-road usage - think tractors or road-legal quad bikes, for a couple of very obvious examples. A simple "per mile driven" based on the odometer is not the perfectly fair "one size fits all" solution that it might at first seem to be if those kinds of vehicles go electric at some point, so I think a little more nuance may be required before this scheme sees the light of day. Privacy concerns aside, many of those issues could easily be addressed via GPS-based tracking of just public road usage, and could also enable more nuanced billing to try deter drivers from using busy roads at peak times, effectively turning any road that is applied to into a toll road.

It should also be noted that this is on top of existing vehicle tax, which is paid as an annual fee in the UK. People with large SUVs and commercial vehicles will still be paying more to drive those vehicles per year, but whether the plan is to shift more of that tax to the per-mile rax rates based on criteria such as the likely amount of road surface wear they will create, e.g. different per mile rates for larger vehicles, isn't yet clear, either. Overall, it's probably the fairest system for users of different types of vehicle classes and power trains to pay their share of the public highway costs, but the devil is always in the details and at this point there are scant few of those available to see where the issues people ought to be concerned about might lie.

Too dark? Too soon? Or too personal?

Again I disagree. Not that the moderation system isn't broken--I suspect we agree about that--but rather that I fantasize that a "constructive" moderation system could "encourage" more positive social interactions. In particular I'd mostly like to see more humor, but I don't do funny--and I also didn't get such a mod. But such anti-social behavior problems are certainly not merely local or confined to Slashdot.

The examples I can find where someone actually got in trouble were explicit calls to violence. The famous one is a guy who wrote for a British sitcom called Father Ted. He explicitly said that if you see a trans girl in a woman's bathroom you should punch them in the balls. The two that got actual jail time were inciting an attack on a hotel full of immigrants during riots. Even in America that's not legal we just very seldom enforce those laws.

The example in the article you linked to the police admitted they were wrong and paid the people in question 20,000 British pounds as compensation. In America the 20K would not have been worth it because every time you interact with police there's a high probability they are going to kill you. When police get something wrong in America the payout should probably be at least half a million to account for that. But as far as I know the cops in the UK don't just randomly murder people for shits and giggles like they do in United States.

I'm not saying that there isn't some abuse going on though. 12,000 arrests is insane.

But at the same time they're probably needs to be a middle ground between arresting 12,000 people and the rampant stochastic terrorism we've got going on here in the United States where we've got idiots running around killing people trying to start a race war.

Running underground cables isn't the panacea many think it is, however. On my shelf in the office, I have a fulgurite, which in this case is a lump of melted metal from a power line that was underground and struck by lightning. It's cool looking, kinda like an eagle's claw.

Meanwhile, in the newer section of my neighborhood, they got rid of the unsightly power lines in our back yards and replaced them with breakout boxes and transformers in the front yards. The phone ones are especially beautiful, tilting over, rusting away, and who wouldn't want a nice concrete transformer pad right there in the front yard? The aesthetics aspect was oversold, and when there is a lightning strike, the whole front of the yard is often dug up to find the damaged spot - it isn't always obvious.

After listening to some 911 calls, I wonder how the AI system handles panicked calls. Sometimes the human operator has to do some serious calming of the caller to get anything intelligible out of the person making the call.

Not to stand up for the UK - which seems to be attempting to emulate 1984, just 40 years too late - but trying to show Russia and China as shining beacons of free speech isn't a very good comparison. Vladimir doesn't always arrest people who dare to speak, sometimes they just fall out of windows onto the street. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

I take it that death for saying the wrong thing isn't what you advocate for?

But to the topic at hand, a 911 system based on AI instead of actual intelligence AKA a human deciding what the problem is and responding correctly - well that AI system is a bucket of suck. It is the opposite of what those systems are supposed to do. People will die.

Apple forces nothing on me, and file conversion is a fact of life for professionals. If it is some sort of terrible imposition to you, copying the files in the first place is too much trouble, no matter the platform. It is as "difficult" as opening the program, control-A, then click okay.

You have a terminal case of being argumentative and the need to somehow be right. This weird discussion has lost any point other than to watch you squirm trying to be right, and entertain us. And your anal sex inclusion in the discussion is level 1000 creepy.

Yes, I know, since I was on the team for storage (Block, File, Object) at a large ISV with data centers around the world.

Again, yes, I'm aware of that. Typically, the data centers I was working with used multiple OC-192's. Telco class MAE routers are not cheap.

I think you meant egress. Which is common because Object Stores are non-atomic. If you want to change an object, your first step is to download what's there (if you didn't keep a local copy), change it, delete what you have in the store, then upload the changed dataset. Because it's non-atomic.
I did a quick squint at S3, looks like nine cents a gig egress up to 100 GiB, and then you go to a lower pricing tier. Ingress is also a change it looks like, for the API for sure, I didn't bother to identify transit as it's an object store.

Actually, the choice was made by a political appointee for policy reasons. Math had nothing to do with the outcome in that case.

Which is why SWIFT has API tiers, to limit the price of runaway programs with bugs, or unexpected traffic. So does S3, and you even have an exposed API to check your call statistics. Not sure with the S3 system has for a refresh cycle, what I worked with were contemporaneous. If I recall correctly, someone sells an API sifter for Amazon billing that will alert you to monitored issues. I'm a firm believer that "no news means you're ignorant, which is never good news."

I am comparing using an internal system versus a service.

The selection of a service over using internal mechanisms is when the service is either too lightly utilized to justify facilities, staffing, and capex,

or

outsourcing those functions is desirable from a operations stand point.

From that standpoint of facilities, staffing, and capex, it is unquestionable that the government fulfilling these will be less expensive in the long run than using a service. That leaves policy as a deciding factor going against it. The policy consideration wasn't articulated.

"Sir your dog shat on my lawn"
"No Sir, your didn't put a fence around your lawn, therefor my dog did not know it can not shit on it"

This is the entire OpenAI ToS. "You give us permission to shit on your lawn"

Here's the the thing, OpenAI is training, coding and operating this AI, therefor it should be legally responsible for bad information in the same way a bad employee at a burger place, spitting on the burger is.

The wealthy prefer a dystopian hell hole for 99.9% of the population and extraordinarily god-like opulence for themselves. They want to be able to control who lives and who dies on such a fundamental level that they are like the Pharaohs of old literally exalted to godhood.

You cannot as a regular person comprehend the kind of greed that a man like Elon Musk or Bill Gates experiences as their normal state of being. It is way past just wanting money or yachts or any of that and into the point where they want to be transhuman.

And you need to understand that they do not think of you as a human being. You are not at the same level organically or as a species in their eyes. You aren't even at the level that you for example perceive a chimpanzee as in their eyes. To a guy like Elon Musk you're more like a slime mold. An utterly alien existence that might occasionally be useful.