Until a few years ago, when an ice storm pulled the entire bundle of POTS lines off the pole, we still had a copper pair attached to our house. It was nearly $80 month for a dialtone. When I called verizon (not the cell provider, but the entity formerly known as "New England Telephone") and told them they'd need a construction crew, they sent a tech to our house who said "I'll have to see about sending a construction crew." He said it in a tone that made me think that no crew would be forthcoming; there are only 4 houses past us on that line of poles. About a month later I called and cancelled, and was cheerfully given a refund for the time without service. The POTS bundle is still sitting on the ground next to the pole.

Since the DSL available to us was 768k at best, we already had *grumble* comcast *grumble* internet and a voip phone as well (we are *still* in a cell dead zone most of the time from the other verizon & t-mobile, but at&t mostly works) but the pots line gave some (very expensive) redundancy. Good riddance and fuck you very much Verizon, though it still makes me a little nervous that we have only one wire-line provider and that cell phones only sort of work on our property. If I go outside I can usually get a 4G connection, but that lasts for only about 30 minutes in an extended power outage (apparently they only have a small UPS on the cell tower's internet access?) which we have once a year or so. We're in a rural area, but c'mon, that's the best we can do? Comcast at least seems to keep their lines alive during an extended electric outage, and we have a generator, but still, this is the 21st century? Fuck flying cars and jetpacks, I want reliable telecommunications!

We have neighbors across town that still have twisted-pair phone lines, and verizon is clearly not maintaining them since there is often static and echo when talking to them from their landlines, and any attempts to get them to address the issues are rebuffed. I know for a fact that the switch in our CO was installed in 1991 (that's when we got touch-tone and 10-number dialing) and received upgrades for ADSL, way-back-when, but will probably never be replaced. It's sitting on top of the ancient giant mechanical switch that it replaced.

I would expect this to start happening even in the burbs soon, if it hasn't already, where the remnants of the incumbent copper provider(s) just let their infrastructure crumble and die, though at least there, they're replacing them with fiber. Our small town will probably never get fiber, unless we do it ourselves. I'd bet there are places in the USA right now that have no internet access at all except from a cell tower or satellite, even though they used to at least have dial-up. I wonder if the FCC will let them consider starlink a "functional alternative service"...

Yes, the concept of "the singularity" usually hinges on exponentially-increasing FLOPS or transfer speed or metrics like that in people's minds, but what good (other than as entertainment) are blazing-fast calculations moving massive amounts of data around if we're not actually generating new information and advancing general knowledge and understanding? GPT-n is unlikely to spontaneously develop creativity, at least in the sense of being able to develop truly original ideas.

I think it's useful to look at creativity as a thing somewhat separate from intelligence, and we do seem to have that in abundance, even though the best of it is often squashed.

While I totally agree that most of us are (slowly) growing in wisdom, it seems that the majority of people doing so aren't the ones making the short-sighted decisions that are affecting us the most. However, like you, I remain optimistic, even in the face of what look like nearly impossible problems. For me, it's that I still have faith in humanity. I think we'll make it, because of our *social* intelligence.

Totally. We don't currently have a workable theory of mind, maybe we never will, which goes to a point: there is (most likely) a vast amount of knowledge that we currently do not have. Perhaps there is knowledge that will forever elude us.

However, it's possible that whatever intelligence is, even if we (or our machines) never gain substantially "more" of it from where we are now, the amount of knowledge that we possess will increase, perhaps, at some point, exponentially, which could be interpreted as "the singularity" that could "save" us, or annihilate us, depending on what we do with all that knowledge.

So it may not be "intelligence" that is the limiting factor in human (and machine) evolution, but sufficient wisdom to avoid falling victim to the "great filter".

Looking at current human activity, especially "AI" (such as it is) it would seem that as limited as our current knowledge of the universe (and ourselves) is, our ability to apply that knowledge (particularly at scale) is sorely lacking in understanding and wisdom.

Saddened to hear of his passing. His Zones of Thought series is some of the best science fiction ever written, and all of his works are worth reading. He will be missed.

Corporate profits vs. wages are at an all-time high, with no end in sight. If that's what they mean by "focused on costs" then that's nothing new, since things have been basically the same since ~2003:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/gr...

Unless what they really mean is that they're tightening the screws even harder? That I can believe.

The top is taking more and more from the bottom and putting less and less back in. in other words: end-stage trickle-down (neoliberal) economics. Torches and pitchforks in 5..4..3...

So they're fine to target journalists with spyware if they use tools developed in-house, so business as usual.

I never used NOS, but NOS/VE was my first experience with having internet access: crec telnet... Local uni had dial in to the Cyber 8600(?) for a couple years, till they scrapped that behemoth, and replaced it with a vax 8800 I think.

Don't forget CDC. What beasts those were!

Whoops. I Fnorded the last line of your post, sorry about that.

Antibiotic over-use by doctors is a problem, but it's dwarfed by the staggering amount of antibiotics fed to animals raised for meat. I'm not saying don't eat meat, since I do so myself, but I try (it's not always easy) to buy meat that is (ideally) locally-raised and at minimum "raised without antibiotics".

Wow, I... Uh, how long has that been there? If that turns out to be as useful as I think might be, I might have to eat some crow and go back to using google search instead of DDG. (I just posted a comment on this this story 5 minutes ago about how I'll never go back to google) Google's tracking me and everyone else anyway, but if their search is actually better again, I'm all over that.

But I don't want to circle shit and send it to google so that they can OCR it and spit it back to me as a search result, I want to be able to SELECT THE TEXT!

I get that this *is* a workaround for unselectable actual text (as well as text in an image) but why is such a stupid workaround necessary? Why isn't text, well, TEXT? Is that not completely stupid? I don't think I'm being unreasonable to call it stupid.

If you folks think that shit being broken (selecting text!) is "solved" by workarounds like this that are considered desirable or even acceptable, I fear for the future.

I'll go back to google when they stop tracking everybody all the time and when their search engine becomes as useful as it was circa 2003, which will probably be never, unless a viable challenger to their dominance is able to break through. I'm not saying google search is bad, it's just no better than anyone else's anymore. Nowadays they're dominant (literally) by default, whereas back then, they became dominant because they were better.

What?! Who wants this? What *I* want is for stupid apps and even WEB PAGES to stop making it impossible to select TEXT (not embedded into an image, mind you, but actual text rendered in an actual font) and then search for it, just because I'm looking at the TEXT on my phone. I guess they think they're "protecting their content" or some such nonsense, like, um, No, they're not. I rarely (but sometimes!) have that issue on an actual computer, but (of course) there, there's always workaround (DOM inspector), but on a smartphone I hit that wall OFTEN and it's infuriating to have to memorize the spelling of what I want to search for and then peck the letters into the search.

I guess if this stupid circle thing makes it possible to get around that... oh wait, I don't use google anything on my phone anymore, so forget it.

Ok... then let's ban highway advertising billboards too (please?), and pretty landscapes, flowers, beaches, trees, birds, deer, the Sun, the Moon... You get my drift.

When I'm driving it's *my* responsibility to not be distracted by things to a degree that would make my driving unsafe, that includes whatever is going on inside my head, inside the vehicle, or outside.

I'd probably agree that messages funded by taxpayer money should mostly stick to "just the facts", e.g. "Slippery Road Ahead!" but c'mon, if someone wants to add a little levity (provided it's done with brevity: "Moose are pretty but dangerous!") I don't have a problem with that, since there's a million other potential distractions out there already.

... burma shave.

The lack of a sense of humor is one of the warning signs of an authoritarian regime. Just saying.