It sure is a good thing that 'AI' companies are notoriously discerning and selective about their training inputs and not doing something risky like battering on anything with an IP address and an ability to emit text in the desperate search for more; so this should be a purely theoretical concern.

Snark aside, I'd be very curious how viable this would be as an anti-scraper payload. Unlikely to be impossible to counter; but if the objective is mostly to increase their cost and risk when they trespass outside the bounds of robots.txt something that will just look a trifle nonsensical in places to a human but could cause real trouble if folded into a training set seems like it could be quite useful.

It can certainly be done otherwise; but it's not exactly unrelated when, in practice, a TPM is the industry standard mechanism for making a PC or PC-like system capable of cryptographically secure remote attestation; and when TPMs quite specifically mandate the features you need to do remote attestation rather than just the ones you would need to seal locally created secrets to a particular expected boot state. They are certainly can do that, and it's presently the most common use case; but locking down remote attestation was not some sort of accidental side effect of the design.

There's no doubt that AI is developing into a useful tool -- for people who understand its limitations and how long it is going to take to work the bugs out. But people have a long track record of getting burned by not understanding the gap between promise and delivery and, in retrospect, missing the point.

I think we should take a lesson from the history of the dot com boom and following bust. A lot of people got burned by their foolish enthusiasm, but in the end the promise was delivered, and then some. People just got the timescale for delivering profits wrong, and in any case their plans for getting there were remarkably unimaginative, e.g., take a bricks and mortar business like pet supplies and do exactly that on the Internet. They by in large completely missed all the *new* ways of making money ubiquitous global network access created.

I think in the case of AI, everybody knows a crash is coming. In fact they're planning on it. Nobody expects there to be hundreds or even dozens of major competitors in twenty years. They expect there to be one winner, an Amazon-level giant, with maybe a handful of also-rans subsisting off the big winner's scraps; tolerated because they at least in theory provide a legal shield to anti-trust actions.

And in this winner-take-all scenario, they're hoping to be Jeff Bezos -- only far, far more so. Bezos owns about 40% of online retail transactions. If AI delivers on its commercial promise, being the Jeff Bezos of *that* will be like owning 40% of the labor market. Assuming, as seems likely, that the winning enterprise is largely unencumbered by regulation and anti-trust restrictions, the person behind it will become the richest, and therefore the most powerful person in history. That's what these tech bros are playing for -- the rest of us are just along for the ride.

The place where TPMs potentially get toothy is remote attestation. As a purely local matter having your boot path determined to be what you think it is/should be is very useful; but, by design, you can also request that from a remote host. Again, super useful if you are dealing with a nasty secure orchestration problem(Google has a neat writeup of how they use it); but also the sort of thing that is potentially tempting for a relying party to use as part of authentication decisions.

We've seen hints at related issues on the Android side; where hardware attestation API or 'Play Integrity' API demands are made by some applications that block 3rd party ROMs, even if the boot sequence is entirely as expected(and even if the 3rd party ROM is almost certainly in much better shape than the first party one; eg. Graphene vs. some out-of-support entry level Samsung); which has chilled 3rd party ROMs considerably.

If relying parties who are important(ISPs, banks, etc.) do start demanding attestation the situation in practice becomes a great deal more restrictive.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

But you are leaving out the difference in fertility. The fertility rate of the UK, which as you noted is a population dominated by native britons who trace their ancestry on the island back a millennium or more, is 1.4 live births per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1. In a hundred years the UK will have a smaller population than Haiti.

Because under a true system of sovereignty, people wouldn't be allowed to vote for a Muslim mayor.

I suspect that the answer involves a hard look at where the wealth ends up, which is likely why there's limited appetite for tugging at that thread; but what I don't grasp about the Baumel explanation is why the cost goes up relative to the typical ability to pay; rather than mostly staying level.

The fact that productivity largely hasn't budged is certainly an explanation of why professors or nurses haven't followed the cost of transistors or TVs; but if something like education's cost increases are being driven by what they need to pay people who could work in a different industry; why do people who do work in that different industry not see the cost as more or less constant in relative terms, rather than steadily creeping up over time?

Is if they confirmed your age by a behavioral maturity test. AI could monitor posts, and if it figures out that someone with an emotional age of 15 or older wouldn't have posted such a thing, you're cut off.

Art and cultural activity is a major sector of the US economy. It adds a staggering 1.17 *trillion* dollars to the US GDP. However that's hard to see because for the most part it's not artists who receive this money.

The actual creative talent this massive edifice is built upon earns about 1.4% of the revenue generated. The rest goes to companies whose role in the system is managing capital and distributing. Of that 1.4% that goes to actual creators, the lion's share goes to a handful of superstars -- movie stars and music stars and the like. This is not as unfair as it sounds, as it reflects the superstar's ability to earn money for the companies they distribute through, but the long tail of struggling individual artists play a crucial role in artistic innovation and creativity. Behind every Elvis there's a Big Mama Thornton, and armies of gospel singers who may have made a record or two but never made a living.

We can't run this giant economic juggernaut off a handful of superstars with AI slop filling in the gaps in demand. But maybe we'll give that a try.

What baffles me about these stories of financial unsustainability in higher education is just where exactly all the cost comes from. I realize that thereâ(TM)s the opportunity cost of ~4 years of not working/part timing around classes; and that there are some particular subjects that need a large hadron collider or some cryogenic longwave IR space telescopes or a BSL4 virus lab; but I just donâ(TM)t understand how âoetake professor who is tenured but earns more or less fuck-all for someone of their experience and qualifications, or adjunct who isnâ(TM)t tenured and earns even less, provide whiteboardâ has somehow become a crushing financial burden for what are supposed to be wealthy, developed world, societies.

Same general confusion with parts of medicine; obviously Iâ(TM)m not expecting novel monoclonal antibodies or cutting edge oncology for $3.50; but why does it cost so much to speak to a GP for 30 minutes and get some 40 year old generic; or get a nasty cut checked for foreign objects and stitched up at the ER?

None of the woo "hurt him in terms of accelerating cancer". The problem is that he did that instead of actual treatment, and let a highly treatable cancer turn into a nearly-untreatable one.

When you mentioned "third partner" who cashed out early, I thought for a minute you were going to be talking about Ronald Wayne - what a life of bad decisions he made ;)

For those not familiar:

He got 10% of the original Apple stock (drew the first Apple Logo, made the partnership documents, wrote the Apple I manual, etc).
Twelve days later, he sold it for $800.
Okay, but he could still try to claim rights in court... nah, a year later he signed a contract with the company to forfeit any potential future claims against the company for $1500.
Okay, well, it's not like he had an opportunity to rethink... nah, Jobs and Wozniak spent two years trying to get him back, to no avail.
Okay, but he still had, like memorabilia he could hawk from the early days, like his signed contract. Nah, he sold that for $500 in 2016.
And that contract went on later to be sold for $1,6 million.
Okay, well, I'm sure he went on to do great things... nah, he ended up running a tiny postage stamp shop.
Which he ended up having to move into his Florida home because of repeated break-ins.
Which he then had to sell after an inside-job heist bankrupted him.

Jobs committed suicide-by-woo. He didn't "turn away from traditional therapy because it can't keep up with rapidly advancing metastasis", he turned away from treatment for a perfectly treatable form of cancer for nine months to try things like a vegan diet, acupuncture and herbal remedies, and that killed him.

Steve Jobs had islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. It's much less aggressive than normal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The five-year survival rate is 95% with surgical intervention. Jobs was specifically told that he had one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers "that can be cured", and there was no evidence at the time of his diagnosis that it had spread. Jobs instead turned to woo. Eight months later, there was signs on CT scans that his cancer had grown and possibly spread, and then he finally underwent surgery, it was confirmed that there were now secondary tumors on his liver. His odds of a five-year survival at this point were now 23%. And he did not roll that 23%.

Jobs himself regretted his decision to delay conventional medical intervention.

I did some proof of concept tests with both Pointer Lock and PointerEvents, but both failed because you don't get *any* data if you're not moving the mouse, and only get (heavily rounded) datapoints when you do move the mouse. You'd need raw access to data coming from the mouse, before even the mouse driver, to do what they did.

You *might* be able to pull off a statistical attack, collecting noise in the fluctuations of movement positions and timing in the data you receive when the mouse *is* moving. But I can't see how that could possibly have the fidelity to recover audio, except for *maybe* really deep bass. And again, it'd only apply for when the mouse is actually moving.

Neat attack, but not really practical in the browser.