I can't think of a sci-fi series that's more polarizing than this one in recent memory?

Even in my own group of friends, it runs about 50/50 that people either loved Alien Earth, or they thought it was trash.

I watched it because of a high recommendation from one guy I know, and tried to give it a chance. I had to stop after a few episodes. It was just painfully awful, IMO. I mean, sure - lots of money was poured into good special F/X and it's the creatures we all know from the long-running franchise. But the story line and characters were ridiculous.

I mean, sure -- let's take a bunch of kids and immediately throw them into harm's way, doing "save the planet" stuff! And "Boy Kavalier" is a bad caricature of just about every tech CEO in modern times that people like to poke fun at. Except even more over-the-top with his "poor me ... because I'm SO intelligent, nobody can even have an enjoyable conversation with me" garbage.

The thing is though? I *do* get the points people raise in favor of it. The concept had "legs" in the sense there's potential in the idea you have competing corporations with different approaches to "improving humanity" and it creates a dynamic of tensions between your cyborgs vs your hybrids or synths. It's just that to me, it felt like they took those great ideas and squandered them.

This concerns me from the standpoint of using FireSticks for TV signage purposes.

Our workplace uses the "ScreenCloud" software to turn a number of our TVs around our offices into digital sign-boards displaying things like employee birthdays and general office news, calendar info, etc.

We already had issues where Amazon decided to lock down a newer model of FireStick to the point the ScreenCloud app refused to run on it anymore. At first, the makers of ScreenCloud expected us to "root" each FireStick and do a bunch of steps to it in "developer mode" so their app could keep working on one. Then, Amazon locked them out of even that work-around. It seems the two companies got together at that point, and the result was a requirement we buy some more pricey variant of the same FireStick that's designed just for use with ScreenCloud!

We live in a society where like it or not? We marginalize crimes that involve theft of property or money, vs violent crimes against people.
Hacking almost never escalates to the level of it badly injuring or killing other humans. (You *might* argue it did if you could prove people hacking firmware or software running life support machines in hospitals was involved, or direct attacks on a person's pacemaker? But even outliers like this would be more the realm of the CIA than individual hackers.)

But even IF you imposed severe punishments for hacking? The problem is with catching these people. Sure, they tend to get caught eventually, because most criminals don't know when to stop. But you rarely recoup all the money they took from people or organizations. They probably couldn't ever get it all repaid even if you somehow forced them to work for the rest of their life for employers who turned over 100% of their paychecks towards restitution.

It seems exceptionally weird that people have started writing as though "AI"'s needs are just axiomatic; and that the size of other things, like revenue or suckers with available capital, must be the problem.

The fact that you want something that costs more than you have isn't normally described as a 'funding gap'; it's just you having expensive tastes that you can't afford. Why are talking about there being X trillion in 'demand' when, in fact, there's only X trillion in unfunded hype because nobody has slapped a shock collar on Altman yet?

McKinsey is already involved. It's not really a classic Saudi project if it doesn't combine the dodgiest western white collar people and services money can buy with a healthy dollop of slave labor.

It looks weirdly like some sort of baby transport accessory. Maybe perfect for iphone air users hoping that a warm, soothing, environment conducive to frequent suckling will help their purchase recover developmentally normal weight?

Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

Barring pretty exciting advances in biotech(along with either the psychology or...less wholesome methods...of keeping people on-task when they learn that their 4-century lifespan will be dedicated to a period of drifting through nothing and a life sentence studying the surfaces of Kuiper belt objects inside a tiny habitube or something) you are going to hit a line where (human) exploration is not going to be readily separable from human colonization; just because shipping times become prohibitive: Anywhere on earth you can just pack some extra canned goods and a few spare parts and be there and back in under a decade even with age of sail era tech; even faster now unless the obstacle is political objections by people who already live there, in which case it's 'espionage' more than 'exploration'. Hasn't really been a notable case of 'exploration inextricably linked to colonization' since humans crossed the Bering straight into the Americas, with some weaker alternatives from the colonial period where it almost certainly wouldn't have been as cost-effective; but would have been theoretically feasible.

Near-earth objects are mostly in the same board. Shipping cost are higher, so presumably lunar mining overseers will receive less frequent breaks than offshore drill rig workers; but the moon is only 3-ish days away. As you move further away the numbers get less favorable; though they still remain within the realm of "there were people circumnavigating the earth in that time, even before we knew how scurvy worked" or at least "modest chunk of your expected working life"; and it may well be relevant that a lot of the more distant objects are either gas giants that you would only ever observe rather than land on, or very small solid bodies that you could potentially just have a robot slap an ion drive on and bring back for your perusal.

Ultimately, it seems like it boils down to an irrational emotional position. Some people, don't know why, just look at a situation and are all "the most fulfilling outcome possible would be making this the next generation's problem!" Leads to enough bad calls earthside; I assume there will be some particularly grim outcomes in more hostile environments.

It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

Just got email yesterday from Belkin, to tell me Wemo devices including their hugely popular Wemo mini plug and Wemo wall switch, outdoor switch and 3-way switch were on a list to be shut down in January, 2026. They're yanking the cloud server support required to make them work, and saying the only thing they'll still do after that is work on a LOCAL network via HomeKit.

It's not just Apple. Any of these vendors of "smart" devices get to dictate when they kill off the functionality. If it requires cloud servers, then all you did was buy some hardware that works with THEIR systems, on THEIR terms and conditions.

I use an Arlo video doorbell on my front door, and initially? I was fine with not paying for their optional monthly subscription that allowed uploading video to the cloud. I was content to use it so I could view live video when someone rang the bell, and to get push notifications when people walked within range of it. Well? After some relatively recent update they did, it seems I lost the ability to configure the zone the camera monitors for motion. They just monitor the whole darn thing if you don't pay for their subscription to "unlock" that capability. Worse yet? There's nowhere in their software to configure it to just stop alerting for motion. I had to suppress it on my iPhone app via the phone's own application settings.

It sucks but I don't see any alternative except buying only devices that give YOU full control over them on your home network. And a lot of those reduce the usability and convenience vs ones utilizing the "big cloud" offered by players like Apple, Google or Amazon.

I'd be curious what the breakdown is between 'addicts', in the compulsively-does-thing-despite-knowing-it-is-contrary-to-their-interests sense, and sad but locally reasonable behavior from people with tepid options.

'Addict' is a comparatively easy call to make when people are getting fired because they no-showed to play WoW; or spending all their time scrolling tiktok despite having a school or college worth of peers to socialize with; but if you are retired, less physically able to get out and about than you used to be, and at the age where your friends and peers are starting to die off, it seems like a much more open question whether having an engaging if ultimately rather hollow hobby is an 'addiction' or just a kind of depressing local maximum.

It's obviously not some ideal of perfected human flourishing; but if you are doing it because you don't really have things to do, rather than at the expense of things you have to do, that's not really classic addict behavior; just a mediocre hobby.

Could you help me understand the 'irony' here? Is saying impolite things about a dead guy the moral equivalent to being perhaps the most pivotal figure behind a war with an estimated half-million dead and a causus belli that was transparent bullshit; not to mention the elevation of extrajudicial torture to official policy? I'm not sure I follow.

And, if you'd like to expand on the 'political leanings' thing; I'd be more than happy to call anyone whose politics involve thinking that Cheney did a great job a monster as well; especially when it's so hard to argue that any of Cheney's ugliest aspects even paid off. Flirting with more expansive theories of the ends justifying the means can be a dangerous business; but, bare minimum, you can attempt to rank means by degree of atrocity and ends by degree of effectiveness; and on that score Cheney's work was honestly pretty shit.

Remember the 'Pax Americana' that the neocons assured us could be bombed into the fractious elements of the middle east? Lol. Bin Laden? Dude was chilling in an upmarket suburb in Pakistan while we were pissing away blood and treasure on hitting a mixture of hapless civilians and 'insurgents' who had the temerity to suggest that our puppet government was not the legitimate local administration in one peripherally involved country and one uninvolved one.

So, go ahead, please, explain your other level of irony. Tell us whose political loyalties are to this grade of not-even-effective violence. What'll it be?