There's sadly a segment of people so dumb and easily amused that they actually enjoy listening to or watching the stuff, and they have money to be taken. The recent success of whatever that shitty 70s soft-rock AI band was called, shows that you just need the right people promoting the crap and they'll gobble it up.

The monetization path is identical to that of the social media dreck that existed before AI. Individual uploaders can achieve monetary gains with the right promo, but the biggest winner is of course the house. Facebook has geared their whole platform to push and even generate AI slop, from what I hear.

Doesn't sound like it's going anywhere, unless the users decide to quit rolling around in that sty. I don't see that happening without either a broad cultural shift like we saw with smoking, which required a whole lot of messaging and some intervention from the government. With the US government being a wholly owned subsidiary of the tech companies, and ideologically opposed to doing anything useful for the people at large, I don't see that happening. And so we will all suffer the idiots.

"We're not going to do anything about the AI deluge, we're just going to wave our hands and declare ourselves 'responsible'. (In the sense of describing our greatness, not in the sense of 'accountable'.)"

The guy at Logitech could be a genuine idiot, but it's equally likely he's getting some sort of reach-around from his fellow tech CEOs on this.

They need to have "important", "smart", "successful" people continually spouting off the sci-fi bullshit in public so that it sounds believable to a certain type of person. They need the visual imagery of I, Robot sitting in a boardroom. Typically they have some worse-than-clipart AI-image in the article depicting exactly that.

What's better than masked, secret police? Faceless robots.

And for what? Fostering "stronger public trust", of course. Nothing says "trust" like secret police.

I don't think I've played an EA game since SimCity 4. I don't see much loss if EA disappears. Maybe the employees can find jobs where they are allowed to develop interesting games.

That said, I think it's more likely people keep buying the same EA game every year, but now the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the US get a cut. That is, of course, a bad thing.

We're going to have to hope this project pans out, I guess. I used to run Familiar linux with GPE (gnome-based) desktop on my HP Ipaq... H2215 I think? It had what was then the fastest mobile ARM processor, the Intel PXA255. Unfortunately it was power hungry so I had to have a big stupid battery.

ANYHOO they had phone versions of those PocketPC devices, and you could run Linux on those as well.

For the time being, I guess I'm stuck on Android. I have an app library there I'd rather not abandon, and I still want to be able to use the bank app.

This is silly. You can run whatever you want on a phone, and while more pixels and more real estate are better (he saw himself type on his 42.5" 4k TV) you can still do a lot with a small screen. Work is done with phones every day. It's of course absolutely true that most people are mostly consuming content with their phones rather than creating it, but that doesn't negate actual uses like CRM and data collection which are completely viable on a small-screen device.

Having all that processing power on the phone is mostly squandered, but it's handy for a lot of short-running, high-horsepower tasks. When was the last time you experienced a perceptible delay in loading an image that wasn't related to storage? And on the more expensive phones, even the storage is fairly snappy. I buy mostly cheap Motos and the storage is plodding on all of them, but I rarely do storage-limited tasks so it's only irritating when installing or updating apps.

Do you mean Palmtop PCs, or PDAs? Both have done a lot more jobs than that. I've known a lot of people who had sub-laptop PCs who did actual work with them. A friend of mine had a Dauphin 486 tablet-with-pen for example, and used it as his primary machine on the go. That had a kind of laughable form factor by today's standards, and it was amusing back then too to be honest since it was as thick as a GRiDPad 1910. Maybe thicker? Too lazy to look it up now, and I only have the gridpad so I can't just compare.

I used to work for a wannabe "ISP" - their main business was providing other services to apartment complexes, but they heard tech was a money printer, so they moved into repackaging and reselling services from an actual ISP.

The few apartment complexes they set up before I left were a predictable shitshow. The whole apartment complex shared a single IP, with everything behind NAT. Each apartment had a wifi access point, but no modem. I wasn't directly involved with that property, but I have no doubt every aspect of the deployment was fucked up. You look at the Google reviews for these apartments and one of the most-mentioned words is "internet", and not in a positive way. Ongoing for 5 years now.

Kickbacks were definitely involved. Knowing this company, they also employed kickforwards and roundhouse kicks, delivered directly to residents' chests.

So, while no one else is able to stop the authoritarian takeover, Big Tech will make a bold stand, sacrificing their cash and Most Favored Industry status for their altruistic principles.

If that doesn't sound absurd on its face, you've internalized some of your employer's propaganda. It's not just aimed at customers; it's aimed at you, and your coworkers. They let you and your friends have your little culture, beliefs, and morals. But when the dictator's call comes, you and your friends won't be the ones making the decision.

Your employer's contributions to the fascist project will be hidden from you to the greatest extent possible. At the point they can no longer be hidden, any serious dissenters will be fired. Keep in mind the economy will be tanked by then. Your friends will fall in line, or fall homeless in the street, which by that point will be a ticket to one of the concentration camps.

Hmm, that was supposed to be ejected, but you know, fucking Google. Autocorrect always picks the dumbest option.

They can, mining equipment can do that. And it's big enough too

I guess that's why Trump's approval rating is down by 15%, with only 40% approving vs 55% disapproving: https://www.economist.com/inte... . Oh, wait...

Closing down the government, causing the cost of living to rise sharply, impoverishing people who rely on government assistance, and forcing ICE and National Guard on cities that neither want them nor need them - those strategies are clearly bringing the country together. /sarc

Umm... Trump is ALREADY in his SECOND term. If he manages a third one in '28, then it will be just one more in a long list of examples where he has broken the law, pissed on the Constitution, and confirmed that he is a Fascist and a criminal. If you have no clue about these simple, basic facts, why should we consider anything you say to be serious and rational?

You mean we will be left in mass graves? They are absolutely not planning to give us any basic income.

Given the requirements to be featured on such a coin, I certainly hope so.

FTFY, see subject. EOM.