>by it's nature must record and send everything back to some faceless intermediate

Someday soon it will be possible to do all of the AI work on-device. The only thing stopping it now are the weight and cooling constraints imposed by the teddy-bear form-factor. If you want a low-power AI and don't mind frequently recharging the batteries, you can do it today in a teddy-bear-shaped, teddy-bear-mass cuddly form factor. You will need to handle cooling though.

Calling them names and leveling false accusations at them is kind of the exact opposite of ignoring them in peace. Unless that's what brings you peace, in which case you're the mentally ill fuckup in that equation.

Demanding that people who are different from you to explain themselves to your satisfaction before you're willing to leave them the hell alone is peak conservative asshole.

I can manufacture outrageous events from my imagination and then extrapolate that fiction into a nation-wide systemic problem too!

This. Homeschooling should be illegal. Except in rare cases of severe handicap. Or as an option for *additional* credits if not available in the public school where the kid is going. But as you say it's used for control and to keep kids from meeting different viewpoints. Do you think there would be so many young nazi and evangelists if everyone was going to public school ?!?

And BTW I also strongly think that private schools should not exist. Finland closed them all and they are now... #1 in education worldwide. If the rich have to send their kids with the plebe, they make sure it's at least well funded.

The "pandemic" showed that the kids could do the schoolwork in 3 hours, so what were they doing the rest of the day?

Learning social skills by having to talk (how horrible!) to other people face-to-face. Interacting with people from different households (the travesty!). Hearing people with opposing points of view (madness!). Getting off their fat ass and walking from class to class (will this never end!). Not looking at their screens (this is the last straw!).

Connected toys that spy on you, on the other hand....

By the way, the companies that make and sell these toys are putting their stockholders at risk of a future privacy lawsuit. This is one of those times where corporate in-house lawyers should put the brakes on a product until the law is more settled. As it stands now, "will we get sued in 2030 and lose a fortune for what we are selling in 2025" is an open question.

Let's assume 2500 employees lost 2 hours of productivity each. Let's assume the productivity value for each employee is at least $40/hour. That's $200,000. That's far below $862K. But if the downtime were higher and the lost productivity were higher, it at least puts $862K within the realm of a credible number.

Don't forget, cleaning up a mess like this isn't as simple as resetting passwords back and having employees log in and change their passwords. There's also things like making sure none of the accounts were mis-used or rolling everything back to a known-good state in case they were.

You mean a country with one of the highest aged populations had a sudden increase in deaths when a highly contagious virus was going around? Well done, Dr. House.

Let's try all the excess deaths of people who weren't vaccinated. Or the ones where coroners deliberately changed death certificates or didn't bother to count covid deaths at all. How about fake reporting to keep the covid death count lower than it actually was?

For the 1000th time, having a "reaction" listed on VAERS _does not_ mean the vaccine caused the reaction. That is not how it works nor what that site is intended for.

But keep spreading misinformation if it makes you feel better and so you can keep your anti-vax credentials.

.. the person that doesn't get vaccinated infects someone you love who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons.

Those who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons are depending on the rest of us to create "herd immunity" to protect them, because short of living a life in isolation, that's the only protection they have.

You're just starting to acknowledge the possibility?

... but it won't: The True Believers will believe it is true, and for everyone else, the current administration's credibility on health-related matters died months ago.

While the U.S. government was shut down and citizens weren't receiving the services they paid for, Israel continued to receive $63 million every day.

The "AI photos" with too many body parts a few years back gave "AI" a bad name.

From the hallucinations and confident-but-wrong output of 2025's text-AI-chatbots, this bad reputation is still deserved.

For most people, It will take a few years of trust-able output from AI before people accept it as mature enough to use without sanity-checking its output.*

* When the day comes that people mostly "blindly trust" AI output we may all be in trouble. That day is probably within the next 5-10 years, maybe sooner.