And in those three years, most of the world will have figured out how to route around the US altogether in such a way that it'll be a far bigger pain in the ass to start including us again than it would be to just continue to avoid us. Trump's lasting legacy will be that he's turned the United States into a non-player on the world stage. Making America Irrelevant Again should have been his slogan.

I've seen it said elsewhere and dismissed it as hyperbole, but more and more it seems, "The cruelty is the point."

Remember when the villains on Captain Planet seemed too simplistically evil and greedy to actually exist? Where even little kids were thinking, "These guys are absurd!" Sadly, some of the big decision makers now were little kids then, and watching those guys thinking, "I can't wait until I have enough power to do what those guys are doing."

Subject pretty much summarizes Altman's dream. That the unthinking masses will, without thought, fork over money, and without thought, fork over every thought they have to this device that will, also without thought (because AI doesn't actually think) suck up every data point it can to shovel into the mothership for more AI training data so they can better predict... uh, when to take a bite of your device? You'd think the AI companies would be gorged on data at this point, but apparently there's still some data they believe they don't have. All this device will be is an always on spy, perhaps one people with, without thought, carry around with them everywhere, sucking up background conversations around them, as well as answering queries that will be building a profile to best predict when to shove what ad at you in between answers.

The outward plan, the one they admit, is the hope that they can replace the entire workforce with machines. Since the government has zero concern about anyone that can't provide for themselves, there's a "hidden" but corollary to the outwardly stated goal. Once they've removed the ability for people to provide for themselves, and therefore have enough game tokens (money) left over to spend on whatever products are being pushed by the owners, they'll need SOMEONE to buy things. And since they've managed to convince us digital assets are real enough to be worth spending money on, they'll simply want to create digital representations of consumers. Ones that are easier to control than even us. I assume there will be some digital payment system for work rendered per cycle or some-such that they can then use to spend on whatever digital flashy things.

Or maybe they'll just spin up some digital only version of the matrix, where the entire world is modeled rather than lived in, with digital humans living digital lives of misery, permanently enslaved to the owner class digitally, spinning on their digital hamster wheels, buying their digital goods, and never really knowing that's what's happening. We can't expect the owner class to be satisfied with wringing actual humanity dry. They'll want to continue to extract misery from something.

Because NPC is not click bait friendly, AI on the other hand AI is very click bait friendly. I'ts all about the click bait you know.

Someone should take all the bits of the Arduino ecosystem that are open source software or open source hardware and fork/mirror it all so that you can download and use everything without needing to visit any Qualcomm or Arduino owned websites or agree to any terms of service.

The real question is whether SEGA or Phil Collins's label will sue first.

Much of the DOGE commission's responsibility had been moved to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for the past several months. See "DOGE 'cut muscle, not fat'; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts" by Ashley Belanger

In this case a false denial would put them in violation of two FTC consent decrees, and would almost certainly leak (Google employees are not known for keeping their mouths shut), so it would be a particularly stupid thing to do.

I got a desktop computer in 1995. It had a 686 Cyrix at 166MHz, 16MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM, 1.6 GB hard disk...and it was one of the fastest computers in my circle. By 2001, it was unusable. USB was on its way to replacing serial and parallel peripherals, which Windows 95 didn't support. 166MHz was slow, compared to the 600MHz P3's that were available (and a year later, they'd hit 1GHz). 48MB of RAM was nothing (64MB was common, 256MB was available), and while 1.6GB was a bottomless pit when Word documents was all I was creating, and 50MB installations for video games were considered pigs, 10GB drives were available...and needed for the CDs I was ripping into MP3s. Six years of computer progress was clear, obvious, palpable, and using the old computer had a clear feeling of constraint.

Today, unless you're doing local AI, 8K video rendering, or a handful of other niche applications, a 6-year-old computer will be perfectly usable. Six years ago, SSDs were already the default, 6-core CPUs were the default, and it was right at the cusp of when 16GB became mainstream. A six year old computer is perfectly usable for most tasks. It runs current iterations of OSes (admittedly a 6-year-old Mac might not because of the OSX shelf life on Intel), it *might* need a RAM upgrade, and it *might* benefit from a newer SSD to some extent...but while a 6-year difference was night-and-day in 2000, it's turned into "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

And, so too it is with phones. The difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 8 was readily understood and appreciated by most users; the storage capacity increases, camera improvements, FaceID implementation, Apple Wallet/NFC, bidirectional lightning cable, and screen size increase were all understood, palpable, and basically sold themselves. I went through the Wikipedia page to get a feel for what changed between the 13 and the 17...and the answers were the satellite connectivity (that may-or-may-not-work depending on carrier), Apple Intelligence (that they famously are still trying to get off the ground), the dynamic island, a few more camera improvements, and colors...oh, and they are more expensive now.

Samsung is kinda the same deal; the foldable phones are nifty, but at $2,000, one can get a phone, a laptop, *and* a tablet for the same price...and the difference between an S21 and an S25 is similarly uninspiring for a $1,000 upgrade.

So yeah, phones have gotten "good enough" for most people, they've been that way for a while, despite the price tags more frequently involving commas. So...yeah...makes perfect sense that with more money expected for less improvement...that 3-year-old phones are the norm now.

Everyone on earth hates the new notepad.

This mirrors my experience /w IETF effectively embracing voting and kings. So long as you pay lip service to process hoops and spew effectively unfalsifiable rhetoric to justify whatever position your hearts desire you can check all the boxes to move whatever you want. If the IETF is intended to simply serve as a forum for those with power to communicate they should drop the bullshit and own up to it.

The IETF meaning of consensus is supposed to be grounded in technical merit. Even if you have a consensus mob and there is no consensus on the technical issues you don't have consensus.

I will say browsing the thread I disagree with DJB in some respects. He veers into political mumbo jumbo speaking of antitrust and assorted political bullshit having nothing to do with the merits of the underlying technology.

I agree with DJB with regards to the charter. Every particular draft doesn't have to always meet everyone's standards. For example a draft implementing an integrity only cipher suite obviously will not prevent eavesdropping yet the goals of an integrity only cipher suite would need to be chartered. It is hard to argue this improves security, privacy, and deployability. If there were no hybrid Kyber already defined, implemented and in production use this would be a different story. Yet this issue is simply being ignored.

RedundantOS.

Of course they didn't say that. They've always been open about doing that for unpaid consumer accounts, it's how they can provide the service for free. If you don't want your the ads, or for your data to be used, you can get that, starting at at $7 per month.