sb "unreliable" not reliable.
Oh the humanity. Oh the irony.

Thanks. My suspicion is that all of this new content-generation stuff will look amazing for the first full generation of 10-15 years. So people will make all sorts of assumptions about its capacity, not recognizing that its successes were the product of having Good Data from all the pre-existing human-generated/verified input data. But once human content-generation atrophies, retreats behind paywalls/DRM, or just becomes crowded out by the crap-fountain of SEO/LLM content, the "AI" will become MORE, not less reliable, and MORE, not less prone to hallucinations.

The knowledge-shrinkage epidemic is even worse than that. Your experience is 100% valid, but what makes it worse is that during this same time period all our previously stable, richly-sourced knowledge management systems have been gutted. I am talking, of course, about libraries. Some of them held on during the 2005-2015 era, but in the past 10 years most have succumbed and the pace is only increasing. Because yes, from 1995-2015 (which we will look back later and recognize as Peak human-internet) you, a person, could use this information tool to access a wide variety of online sources. And if you couldn't find something online you could go down to your local library and get help using their much richer sources. The world we thought we were moving toward was one where any piece of knowledge could be accessed by anyone with minimal effort.

And so... libraries have been gutted by city managers and university business-ops managers who have replaced storehouses of on-prem information, staffed by on-prem professional researchers, with vendor products and an assumption that, "We don't need to hang on to primary sources and copies of books and microfilm, because pretty soon all of that will be on the Internet. Which also means we don't need to pay comp&ben for as many researchers and scholars to build and tend to these collections". So collections have been slashed - literally dumped into landfills by thousands of tons - because it's all online anyway, right?

Thus we begin manifesting the "Canticle For Liebowitz" scenario, where human knowledge only survives in a very few niche pockets where some group of monastic weirdos managed to hold onto their passion for Scholasticism despite the fires of ignorance scouring the planet. Everything else is the product of SEO/LLM autocoprophagia. The Internet is no longer a human tool. The Internet is now just an inhuman centipede gradually necrotizing as it recycles its own filth endlessly.

Just make sure when you change credit cards that you update the payment details on your mass-murder subscription package.
Otherwise it will ruin the dramatic moment when you say "Release the hounds!" and you get an app notification that you first have to re-lease the hounds.

omg WELLTRIS -- I had forgotten that even existed. So many hundreds of hours of adolescence wasted perfecting a skill that has brought zero value to my life other than once every 4-5 years when I'm helping someone pack a Uhaul.

Consider how closely you are describing The Matrix.

There are some significant benefits for humans living in The Matrix rather than the dark hellscape industrial tunnels of "the real world", and even the tribal-rave free-love democratic commune of Zion. With billions of human batteries plugged in, why didn't the Architect and the Agents do a better job of explaining the benefits but still provide a clear "Please eject my physical husk. I want to go live in that depressing sunless cavern only made bearable by occasional MDMA dance-cuddle parties"?

Other than the fact that the Agents can, as a police action, take away your identity and disappear you at any time - so like, you know, exactly what every human government within the sim/our real world already literally does - the movies presented us with no non-circular argument for why Reality was better than the sim.
Huddle in a sunless rockhole with the same 4,000 rejects eating algal tofu just for the sake of saying it's yeah-but-it's-really-Real. Or hike the Alps to look out of the 256million color glory of the world while chewing a piece of fresh bacon, then going to a live jazz concert, then coming back to the chalet and drinking tropical smoothies while sitting in a hot tub under the stars, in a sim.

Tell that to Windows 10/11 - whose various enterprise editions have been preloaded with things like Minecraft and Xbox software, MSNBC accidental-mouseover popups, clickbait-drenched Edge tab defaults, ad-notification widgets, and other anti-productivity ADHD-gauntlet features that should never be anywhere close to a professional workplace OS.

The Scandinavians are just nice Lake Wobegon / St. Olaf Lutherans with an orgy-borgy accent.
You're proposing what's essentially the Dark Forest theory of galactic politics.
Scandinavia is the kind of civilization that cheerfully pipes up to say "Hello Galaxy!" and then gets dimensionally de-rezzed into a hyper-entropic Flatland by the Milky Way edition of Stalin.

Actually, that's evidence we are loved and live in the best of all possible sims.
After all, the Creator could have made it implosive, but chose not to.
Show some gratitude.

Hence Schroedinger's Cat -- when you observe an event, the hypervisor picks a reality based on your behavior and then streams that subjective experience to you.

I don't know why a website of supposed computer nerds is so hung up on the notion that a sim couldn't possibly contain the state of every particle in a universe. Do they not understand that every side-scrolling platform game only shows the terrain within a screen-defined distance from your subjective game character? The princess is neither in the castle nor in the other castle until you arrive, because there literally is no castle until you arrive. The world isn't scrolling, your consciousness viewpoint is scrolling.

Perhaps you have it backward.
Perhaps the narrative is defined, and then the simulation backfills and retcons scientific concepts on an as-needed basis during the simulation's development.
This explains and resolves paradoxes like wave/particle duality and Schroedinger's Cat. Our doing things does, in fact, create the reality because any observations at the edge of the probability-space prompt the AI to generate and map into the Range of the Real something that can be retconned into What It Always Must Have Been within the Domain of the Doers.

The point is that it's unclear from your comment what additional risk to the user's phone is created by letting an app already installed on the user's phone send messages.

Your IF>THEN was
"if someone hacks it or its got some special For Vlads Eyes Only code squirrelled away in it your phone".
But if that is the case, your phone is already "owned and you are utterly screwed". The ability of the app to send SMS messages is of no significant further risk to YOUR phone. It's potentially a risk to other people's phones, because it could send messages with links to malicious sites/payloads.

Same. And with the relative size of those buttons, it is very easy to Ctrl-Alt-POWER when you try to log into Windows.

No.

A human uses free will to obtain resources and accomplish their objectives.
I am pointing out that a complex system does the same -- it must secure resources and accomplish objectives to sustain itself. In order to do this, a complex system must necessarily treat free will of its subcomponents as suspicious at all times, and some times as dangerous. If one of your cells decides to replicate and spread outside where you need it to be, you call that "cancer" and will take steps to destroy it because it threatens the functional operations of your body's systems. A global technological society must do the same. It cannot function effectively if individuals are allowed to operate chaotically. To preserve itself, it calls your behavior malicious, antisocial, un-"empathetic", etc. and works to herd you back inside the operational boundaries it needs you to perform.

I partially agree. But what I hope will happen is that, as a tradeoff for giving up our right to drive our own car, the improved safety and precision of a network-controlled system means we collectively can go FASTER. For example, what we have now in the USA is a system were 200 million people accept as normal that 30-60 minutes of every morning and 30-60 minutes of their afternoon will be spent in "accordion" traffic jams -- where something like a plastic bag blew across the highway at 3pm, so a few highway tailgaters slammed on their inducing a compression-wave that self-perpetuates at that spot, propagates backward for half a mile as traffic density thickens, and doesn't begin to decompress until after 630pm.

With network-controlled cars, vehicles can be blended in as they merge/exit the highways, and when some tumbleweed event does cause a reaction, the other cars for the entire mile behind it are driving at a fault-tolerance distance and can instantly adjust. The ones closest adjust 90%, the ones at 200-300 feet adjust 80%, the 300-400 feet adjust 50%, and so on. That compression wave reaction happens, but resolves within a couple minutes because the algorithm is designed to always preserve X amount of distance between vehicles traveling at V speeds on R road conditions.

Additionally, the network knows your destination, so we can finally have TRUE Express Lanes that arise from and separate themselves from local traffic, without needing to build separate lanes. The algorithm knows it can put you in the left lane at top speed for the next 30 miles, and it knows who will be exiting in the next 3 miles and needs to merge over.

Because of this setup, the vehicles in the Express Lane can be traveling 80-120mph and be MORE safe than we are today at 55mph.

Speed doesn't kill. Alcohol doesn't kill. Cell phones don't kill.
Reaction Time kills, period

Speed, drug impairment, and phone distraction, all affect your Reaction Time stat. It's like an RPG debuff. A spell that reduces your armor rating doesn't damage you. You can walk around the NPC town with 0 armor all day long. But when something bad happens and you DO get hit you'll take more damage.

100mph with clear road visibility and larger distance between cars is significantly safer than 50mph on your phone 25ft behind the Toyota Sequoia that blocks your parallax view of the road ahead.