Europe is plenty big. As big as the US but denser.

Sure most high speed companies run lines about 500km long, but there are plenty of connections through large parts of Europe that are high speed. And some individual runs are longer than 500km. You can travel through must of western Europe on high speed trains for distances much longer than 500km.

Someone talked about NIMBY and was modded troll, but the fact is they were right. Among the biggest opposition to high speed rail are NIMBY folks, and for understandable reasons. High speed, grade-separated rail really carves up the landscape, much like a freeway does, which deeply impacts people living near the proposed rail lines. Freeways have the advantage that their right of ways were carved out decades ago and people are used to them (and see the value). This could be true of rail also, but it would take several generations.

And when I see proposals to go from LA to SF, or from NYC to Chicago, I think that's great for people in those cities, but what about all the communities in between? What's the benefit to them? Is the high speed rail going to make some stops? By itself high speed rail comes up lacking in my opinion. We require much more than high speed rail, but that's never going to happen.

Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

I've often wondered about this - is the main goal to simply get all those with a tendency for murder to fight it out until these genes are no more - and if you can gain some territory along the way, so be it - so all countries collude to aid each other in rooting-out violence.

we are not the world police until there's an attempt to buy oil without using dollars.

This is clearly a disguised hunt for covert donut factories.

This is taking painkillers after you've stabbed yourself in the face for no reason.

Pretty much everything....

And to spawn-camp others.

What should be of interest to slashdotters isn't the irony of someone associated with cryptography losing their private key, but that there exists an open source system to securely allow voting and also to absolutely verify that the vote was counted. All while still maintaining anonymity. Barring the issue of losing private keys on the part of those administering the vote, this sort of system is very interesting, and really could be used to promote voter engagement and democracy. I had heard of it before, but kind of forgot about it.

If even Japan can see the crazy, that's saying something.

How do you know your mouse isn't faulty?

Chatbots were a lot stupider and more incoherent then, yes.

Are there eels in your hovercraft?

I get the idea why remote AI features could be a good trojan horse to get you to send your data into the cloud, but it doesn't make sense to think local AI would be such a trojan horse.

Ahh, the optimism of n00bs - I kind of miss it.

Zuboff states that surveillance capitalism "unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data [which] are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence', and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later." She states that these new capitalist products "are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets."