"DirecTV Will Soon Bring AI Ads To Your Screensaver"

No they fucking won't, because I don't use DirecTV, and if I did I'd drop them like a bad habit.

But since I don't use DirecTV, this move only ensures that I'll never use DirecTV.

So, yeah congrats to DirecTV for alienating at least some fraction of their untapped audience. Truly forward thinking in reverse.

Before Secure Boot, rootkits were common. Back in the day I fixed a huge number of machines that were infected by malware that modified the Windows SATA/IDE driver. You couldn't remove it from inside Windows because the modified driver hid the files from AV software. You had to connect the drive to another machine, or boot a Linux live CD, remove the malware, and then do a refresh install of Windows to replace the deleted driver files.

Secure Boot put a stop to that and many similar attacks. It is a very, very worthwhile security enhancement.

Modern Thinkpads let you disable access to things such as USB boot with a password, and by all accounts it's decently well protected.

They also let you encrypt the boot drive with hardware encryption (no performance loss). Managed at the UEFI level, before the OS bootloader.

While a powerful attacker could still compromise the machine by say adding a hardware keylogger and then returning to collect your password, the reality is that unless you are up against state level adversaries that's not a realistic threat and the protections that Lenovo offers are more than adequate to protect your data even when someone has physical access.

It was that way here until the oil crisis, which shrank cars for a while. Now they are inflated again, but as things are getting crappier here, smaller vehicles are returning. If you have lots of space and fuel is cheap, larger vehicles are lovely. If neither thing is true, they are just more trouble and expense than they are worth.

Vehicles being higher up has little influence on how far their headlights cast, especially given safe following distances they are the least relevant thing. They are just commonly poorly aimed. I thought Europe had inspections for that kind of thing, though? In the US we theoretically do, but I see misaimed headlights constantly.

Our healthcare system right off the bat adds between 10 and 15,000 to my cost as an employee. This means I have to bring a shitload more value even before accounting for the wage differences.

I have lost opportunities to both Canada and London and if you're reading this you probably have too. My personal favorite although technically I wasn't going to apply for this was seeing a project in a call center I worked at go to canada to access the cheaper employees thanks to the single-payer healthcare system.

That project was Fielding calls from Americans for a American private insurance company. Basically Canadians telling Americans they got denied.

If we had a single pair of healthcare system it would create millions of jobs but the problem is the Private health insurance industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and the last time there was even a small chance of a single pair system they spent half a trillion dollars scaring you with death panels.

Meanwhile we have private death panels all over the place. But those are okay for some reason.

Technology is the answer, though. I don't plan to learn another script, though I might learn another language. But why should anyone have to? Computers are actually good at recognizing text and doing translations now. That's two legit uses for "AI" that have actually come true. For example I've successfully OCR'd Chinese documentation and translated it and had it not come out in broken English. This really makes one wonder why anyone is still doing bad documentation and ads, but I do still see them regularly. So weird.

It's time for you to come up with another word for it.

You know how you used to call it bleeding hearts but then it became political correct and then it became cancel culture and then it was woke? You guys tried dei but I think that was a little to iso complicated for the sort of person you're trying to appeal to.

I'm just saying that your material is getting stale and just like how cracker barrel had to change their logo you need to come up with some new branding for a new generation of keyboard warriors and Russian bots networks

The other religions tend to keep their heads down a little here. We have Christian nationalists in charge right now so those other religions while they will go about their business and try to get converts and tiths they usually aren't quite as politically involved here as the Christians

The scientologists would like to be but they've been dropping off the map as their members fade away. There is also the Moonies but I think they compete a little too strongly with Christian extremist evangelism here so they have a hard time getting a foothold.

The Hindus and the Muslims both kind of keep their heads down. And then that just leaves the smaller religions like paganism and whatnot that aren't enough to have any noticeable impact on politics.

Ordinarily Microsoft would be violating the law if they bundled their AI bullshit with their operating system. That is a classic antitrust violation..

But since we stopped any semblance of antitrust law enforcement 25 years ago that's right out the door and we can all just suck it the fuck down.

Never mind the fact that there are absolutely no viable competitors to Microsoft besides Apple and if you play games apple is not a viable competitor...

The bullshit they are pulling in Windows 11 is exactly why antitrust law exists but we are all so terrified of bureaucrats we forgotten that bureaucrats is a white collar cop.

Ironically we defunded the police it was just the police that took care of criminals like Microsoft. Your ass is still getting a ticket if you're 5 over and the cop needs to make quota this week...

And while Einstein's contributions were enormous he wasn't the only one working on general relativity.

I guess my point is we don't necessarily have to or certainly do not want to wait around hoping for a super genius to make a big leap for us.

What's more the next super genius could be out there but getting crushed by our brutal Dog eat Dog capitalist system that doesn't feed hungry children.

There's a bit of exaggeration there I think but they claim to have replaced 4,000 customer service reps. That's about $25,000 per rep which if you account for the cost of an American rep and the cost of an Indian rep that sounds about right.

Labor gets very expensive very fast. So automation becomes a big deal very fast.

The problem is that 100 million or whatever it really is is just gone from the economy. It gets absorbed by Salesforce Senior Management and the big stockholders.

Some of it in a very roundabout way might make it into your pocket through a 401k but those large stockholders have noticed there's 10 trillion in 401K money waiting to be looted so they're working on that. They just opened up 401K investment to risky private equity now that the private equity firms have run out of easy targets...

Meanwhile your job or your business has fewer customers because you can't yank thousands of people out of the economy permanently and not have knock-on effects.

And if you're an Evangelical that means he's going to hell.

You would think that would be bigger news but we have a lot of industry corporate capture in our media so there you go.

The idea was that the manufacturers wouldn't be stupid enough to cheat on the emissions tests, because the ramifications of needing to do remedial work on hundreds of thousands of cars, pay compensation, break the law... But they were, so clearly things need to change now and they have.

Thing is, Europe is moving away from fossil fuel vehicles anyway. There will always be some, but most countries are looking at 5-10 years for the end of most sales, and some have already reached the tipping point where most people buy some kind of EV and it's actually a pain in the arse to go buy fossil fuels now as many petrol stations are shutting down.

The remaining vehicles will be for specialist tasks, so emissions won't be such a big issue and there won't be very many of them. Even stuff like long distance haulage, which was supposed to be impossible for EVs, is working just fine with battery only vehicles now.

So left wing does not mean government like we are typically taught especially in America.

And right wing doesn't mean opposed to government again like we are typically taught.

Right wing means deference to a hierarchy. It comes from the monarchists back in the day who sat on the right wing.

Left wing doesn't necessarily mean the opposite though. What left-wing means is advocating a society where everyone has necessities, a little bit more than the necessities at least and more if society is able and finally that people get a say in how everything is run and governed regardless of their position in a hierarchy.

The right wing is appealing because it gives you a sense of order as well as allowing you to exercise command over people underneath you in the hierarchy.

The left wing is appealing because it gives everyone a say in running things and because it's at least trying to take care of everyone's needs regardless of who they are .

The left wing is very bad at fast action and command structures. You cannot run a left-wing military for example. It breaks down because everybody gets to say and their say is more or less equal. And in a war you need quick decisive action and people willing to follow orders.

The right wing on the other hand is absolutely terrible at meeting the needs of people and protecting civil rights because they always defer to the hierarchy. Your civil rights are entirely contingent on your place in society in a right wing society. This is exactly how it was for the monarchists.

This means that for a lot of things if the left wing starts trying to do them it horseshoes back to being right wing.

If the left wing continues to try and be left-wing and do those things they just fail because the left wing isn't very good at those things. It all just breaks down.

So when it comes to something like selectively taking away free speech the left wing can't do that. They have to abandon all their principles and all the things that make them left-wing to do it. Any attempt to create all sorts of weird special cases outside of immediate obvious harm breaks down very quickly and is either abandoned or well, the horseshoe.

If you look at dictatorships this is always how it goes. It's why communism doesn't work. You never get past the dictatorship of the proletariat because the right wing is better at military violence and once you're left wing revolution starts implementing a right wing command structure to get good at violence and win the war well you don't get a chance to get rid of that military dictatorship.

This is why communist China has a American style Private health insurance system andyou will find people worried about losing their jobs to automation

It's only a matter of time before AI can replace most common high profit lawyer work. I don't mean the ultra high profit stuff where rich assholes get away with crimes but the run of the bills stuff that keeps lawyers in business.

Think divorce, common lawsuits for harm caused, that's sort of thing.

But lawyers tend to be our elites and ruling class. So I can see them passing laws to protect themselves.

On the other hand that level of automation is worth trillions so I could see the people pushing the automation and the billionaire is using it and abusing it ramming it through anyway. At least for themselves maybe not for us peons.

At the end of the day it's kind of a scenario of a immovable Force and a irresistible Force and I don't know who's going to win.