Because billionaires are totally going to hand out vast amounts of money so people who don't make money for them can sit around at home watching pr0n.

UBI cultists love to talk about how evil the rich are while also claiming that the rich will pay them to do nothing productive. Because billionaires are such lovely, caring people.

There are some pretty good AI songs out there. Lots of really bad ones, but people who know what they're doing can now easily make the songs they want to hear.

I know someone who was a moderately-successful musician in the 90s (some Top 40 songs at the time) and now makes his own songs with AI after being out of music completely for twenty years. You could kind of tell the early ones were AI-generated but the later ones not really.

Sure, but in most cases their music is still owned by the label they signed their souls to. Who can license it to anyone they want to turn into AI slop.

Historically, musicians signed bad deals because the music labels were gatekeepers and if they wanted to have the success of a big popular band they had to sell their souls to get it.

Now musicians can make a decent living without having to sign their soul away. But thirty years ago there wasn't a lot of choice for most people.

Sending all your files to Microsoft is now supposed to be a security feature.

"Security" is now a codeword for "we're going to steal all your shit for your own good, and you will pay us for it."

I just set one up for my mother-in-law. Setup worked great until Windows Update couldn't install an update and couldn't not install an update, so I had to reinstall Windows to fix it. Then I copied over all the old files and went to back it up with Clonezilla and discovered that Microsoft had turned on disk encryption by default so now I have to figure out how to turn that off because I don't want her to lose all her data at some point in the future when something breaks and expect me to figure out a way to decrypt it.

I thought Windows was malware, but it seems to be progressing to Ransomware.

Bullshit. I live in the western US and have regularly driven through some of the least-populated areas of the country, but I've never seen an area you can go 500 miles without encountering any infrastructure. You might be able to accomplish it if you take careful note of where the truck stops are and go out of your way to avoid them, but on any realistic route you'll encounter truck stops -- if not towns -- at least every 150 miles.

As for charging infrastructure, if you stay on the interstates I don't think there's anywhere in the country you can go more than 100 miles without finding a Tesla Supercharger. Those aren't designed for truck charging, but this demonstrates that building out the infrastructure isn't that hard.

They certainly seem to have completely missed Article I. You know, the part that says that the legislature makes the laws? Even if you think restricting AI regulation to the federal government is a good idea, the right way to do it isn't with an executive order to set up a DOJ task force aimed at litigating state AI regulations out of existence based on complex legal theories about interstate commerce. The right way is for Congress to pass a law barring states from regulating AI. This is simpler, cheaper and should invoke public debate about the issue, which is how things are supposed to be done in constitutional republics.

I don't even think Trump is taking this route because he and his advisors don't believe they have the votes for it. I think they're doing it this way because they don't even consider governing through legislation rather than through executive power. Granted that Congress is fairly dysfunctional, but they actually can and do make laws... and the way to fix the dysfunction is to work the system.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

Yeah, that was a big goof, thanks for understanding.

Apple is capable of hiring talented people and creating a useful product. They just don't seem to be capable of being user-friendly in the ways that matter to me. TBH they were never great at it, and MUGs did the heavy lifting in the customer relations department for them for free. Anyway I'm totally capable of believing their performance claims, to a reasonable point, especially when the results aren't putting them first.

I wish they were friendlier, because their hardware is reasonably impressive. I'm also just not in their target demographic apparently because I'd rather have a slightly thicker device with better cooling and battery capacity.

The next Star Wars movie will be told in Stormtrooper vlog posts interspersed with 'look at my new armor' and 'here's how I apply my Stormtrooper makeup' videos from Foxtrot Squad.

Many of the Bigfoot and Stormtrooper vlogs on Youtube are more entertaining than the Hollywood movies I've watched in the last few years.

Also to Doc Holliday.