I'm gen-X and I don't do phone payments either. Not that I don't want to, it's just not part of my groove.

I have many implants to do many things. Paying for stuff is just one of them. But I also open doors, share my contact information, log into my computers, do 2FA...

It's hard to explain to those who don't wear implants, but once you get used to never needing keys, access cards or payment cards, it's hard to get back. I seriously couldn't live without them. Like popping into any store to do the groceries and simply waving my hand to pay instead of fumbling in my pocket, only to realize I left my wallet at home or something. It really does grow on you.

As for nudity, you jest, but my local swimming pool has NFC lockers and I can enroll one of my implants when I close my locker, so I don't have to wear a bracelet while I swim. It's little things like that...

It's not "the Western world" so much as the US. I'm pretty sure Spain or Germany have no problem with hentai.

Case in point: I have a payment implant in my hand. What that is essentially is a contactless Mastercard payment chip from a keychain wearable that's been extracted from the wearable and embedded in bio-compatible goop.

Well, if the payment processor or Mastercard ever learn that my wearable is in fact under your skin, Mastercard will strike it off their network. It's happened to others who didn't keep their mouth shut and got checked out by the payment processor: they were asked to produce a selfie of them holding the wearable, and of course they couldn't.

Why you ask? Because after all, what does Mastercard care where people put their wearables provided they're valid, right?

Because of the religious right in the US spewing off nonsense about the "mark of the beast". Mastercard wants nothing to do with implants to appease the religious nutters and avoid bad publicity. It's the ONLY F*ING REASON. And that forces implantees in all the other reasonable countries in the world that don't have ridiculous religious groups to play hide-and-seek with Mastercard.

...will be translated into "The suspect was resisting arrest and the officer had no choice".

Each. And. Every. Time.

This is just going to be automated whitewashing. Because why would Axon antagonize their customers by making an impartial AI bot that transcribes the truth eh? They clearly have a conflict of interest here.

So, another "bridge to nowhere" then?

No problem with this whatsoever. It's just the flip side of at-will employment, which I also have no problem with.

Since Reddit announced it was going to sell "its" data (i.e. the data it was given for free by all the redditors), I've been busy deleting most of my posting history, and pumping old posts I left there full of technical idiocies and fake facts,

Why you ask?

Because 1/ it hurts Reddit and 2/ it trains AI on bad data.

I have no intention of helping business models based on mooching off people's contributions.

I agree. Some of it, I suspect, is that I've just read so many books now that I'm in 50s that when I read a trope-driven genre novel (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, whatever), I rapidly feel like I've read this story before. I've gotten to the same place with TV and movies. Both mediums really suffer from a lack of any kind of originality, or even attempts at quirkiness. It all just feels like Thomas Kinked-esque cookie cutter.

I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history. Ironically, there's a lot more originality there than in most of the modern fiction I read.

I read the first Three Body Problem novel, and I thought it was crap. Some of that might have been the translation, although I've read other translations from Chinese without that much of an issue. The plotting was terrible, the characters flat. I finished it more because I kept expecting it to eventually turn around, breaking my rule that if I don't like a book in the first three chapters, I won't finish it. In the end, I couldn't imagine why I would want to read any more of it.

Does it have the intro "Imagine Bash, but object oriented and with function call names so long they would drive a Java developer to madness. Brought to you by the author of Microsoft Bob and Clippy, psychopaths that infect your computer with their dead-eyed smiles comes Powershell."

As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.

This. That would be awesome.

lol!

"Keyboards, pssh. Kids today ... why we all set our bits by hand!"

Government... productivity?

It's funny watching the reactions to things like this. It really reveals the religious nature of it all.

"Say what?? We can't actually mitigate things with technology ... that would be blasphemous! Where's the pain? Where's the punishment? Where's the reviling of unbelievers????"

My silly delusion that LLMs are a useful tool, that I, a working programmer, actually do use productively? Okay ...