I forget which town but one of them immediately removed all the cameras when somebody did a foi request.

You're not going to find out where the billionaires are going because like Steve Jobs used to do they hide their license plates.

But your shitty little Republican mayor who frequents the local gay bar doesn't have the resources to do that. A

What they achieved might be the equivalent of a car that had the engine start but nobody has touched the throttle yet to get it above idle or put the transmission in gear to get the car to move. Or rather the car isn't built yet but this is like the 1890s and someone just proved that a diesel engine can run. The next step for the diesel engine is to put some kind of load on it and turn up the throttle, which for the nuclear reactor might be something like putting a heat sink of some sort on it and seeing if it can boil water without bursting some pipes or something. After that the reactor would be ready for producing power, at least as a prototype or demonstrator.

Getting to zero power criticality proves the physics are sound, that all the pieces are in place to have a sustained chain reaction without going into a meltdown or something. The part where this is a "dawn of a new era" is that this is a company that hasn't done nuclear power before. This is like seeing spacecraft built by companies that weren't making parts for Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo.

I believe this is noteworthy. No doubt there's a way to go on making this into a profitable power plant but it shows they have a high probability of turning this technology into that profitable power plant. Before criticality is reached its all theory. Cold criticality made the theory real, or at least halfway real as they would still need to turn up the throttle and see if it breaks.

Microsoft desperately wants to sell us a vision of the PC being an "agentic" device. You speak, it responds. Except, they're creating the equivalent of a blind and deaf person being peddled as an expert in all things. It can't read the files on the computer? It can't respond with answers clearly spelled out in the content currently pulled up on the screen? And apparently it can't understand simple questions well enough to even fully grok the scope or domain of the query itself.

Maybe one of the AI pushing tech companies could try to work through the shit-show of pre-alpha state software in their own labs before attempting to foist it off on developers or "insiders" or, more often, the end users? Maybe, just maybe, we'd have a better perspective on AI if we didn't have so much of it shoved in our faces while it's half baked and nowhere near ready to fulfill even the most basic tasks it's being sold as the perfect solution for? But it seems more and more likely that we'll just let the entirety of humanity drown in the refuse pile that half baked AI is creating. Nobody seems at all interested in saying, "How about we get it functional before we shove it out the door?"

So we have had multiple decades of Court packing so you're headed by the heritage foundation, a right-wing think tank that made that their primary goal.

If you look into Amazon for example and wonder how they got so big you will find that they were just going around buying up all there competitors using investment capital. Most tech companies that's how they got big they just bought up competitors.

Facebook is in a unique situation. Nobody under the age of 18 wants to be on the same social media platform has their parents so every few years a new social media platform develops as a separate platform for the kids.

Every time that happens Facebook just buys that platform.

Tick tock was a problem because they couldn't just buy the platform since it was owned by the Chinese government. So they just pressured the government here to shut it all down and give them control.

Refusing to enforce antitrust law makes your life noticeably worse even if you don't use the services involved.

The problem is it's government regulation and its bureaucrats that enforce the law there.

We have been taught our whole lives that there is nothing worse than the bureaucrat. It doesn't help that as an American most of your interactions with the government are negative. Means testing for assistance programs is brutal and difficult so if you fall on hard times and need help fuck you. Most of us did never do need help still have to go to the DMV sometimes and wait in line frustratingly or we get pulled over by cops and that's our interaction with the government.

It is very easy to translate those frustrated emotions with a sabotaged government into a desired cut regulations that control corporate abuses that hurt you.

And that is way too complicated a concept for probably 80% of the population to understand...

These "experts" are going to do, upon seeing all the warning lights that are starting to light up, what every goddamned moron that has a car, and doesn't understand cars will do when faced with a lit Christmas tree, some of it blinking:

Derrrrrr... look, a blinking red light on the dash.. should I stop? Eh, it's probably nothing important.

  -- some time later --

*BANG* Motherfucker, I just lost the engine... why? WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?!

Because the Experts are as stupid as the average "motorist." They will ignore the signs and run the bitch ragged, then sell it and move on.

Now.. if this time the investors *listen* and dont' fall for the AI hype, maybe the trouble will be averted. But, there is rare evidence of there being prior acts of common sense, so.. I expect this too will be a huge bubble that pops and takes down many with it.

I, for one, am too old to welcome our new AI overlords and their attendant economic crash, now with added social upheaval. This one will likely take me down. The others (2008, etc etc) have nearly always indirectly or directly wiped me out, and i'm getting tired of it.

One can start from near zero only so many times.

How does Microsoft get by with Windows 11 in Europe? The entire OS is infested with data aggregation by default, and even if you try to escape the defaults, it will continually nag you to allow them to gather your data and sells it as a "security feature." I'd think some regulators would be getting mighty pissy about that nonsense if they understood what it was actually doing.

How long before they remove the option to disable it?

Microsoft logic: Not enough people are using this feature we want used. Remove the ability to disable it.

That tech is not even remotely ready for use outside of a carefully isolated lab setting.

Fortunately, I will likely not even have to turn it off. The data-collection makes this illegal without informed consent in Europe. And they will not want to tell the world what they are collecting and what they are doing with it.

It's not a product in the traditional sense. It's a tool that the upper elite are hoping to use to replace you so that they are no longer dependent on your labor or your consumer dollars.

It always strikes me odd that people ask the question if there are no consumers who will buy their products?

You think somebody with a billion dollars hasn't asked that question?

What if they come up with a different answer than the old one we're told Henry Ford did. (Fun fact Ford paid better not because he wanted consumers but because the work was extremely tough and he had a hard time getting employees)

What if the solution they come up with is to automate everything and anything so that they can limit their dependency to a handful of engineers and a handful of bugs that keep those engineers in line?

What if there's no place for you in tomorrow?

I don't think most people can face that kind of existential dread. It borders on cosmic horror

The "achievement" is creating IPO bait. Pretty sure that's all this announcement is about.

Somebody took a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG toke on the bong before writing that up.

Holy shit, man. Pick a dystopia. Don't go mixing them up. The last thing we need is Skynet watching the Hunger Games to get ideas on how to handle us.

The end goal may not be to gain human listeners. It's more likely that they want to flood the zone so that other AI / LLM systems are parsing their podcasts and summarizing them as reality for end-users. It'll be bots feeding bots. And pretty soon, we'll need another layer of bots hovering over the current level of bots to parse out the gobbledygook nonsense being created by and summarized by the underbots. We're going to turn the entire internet into a giant cauldron of LLM spew, LLM summaries feeding other LLMs who continue to spew, and still more LLMs summarizing that spew into more spew. And the expectation of the big tech companies is that they can provide us with an "agentic" OS that can filter all that spew into simple to understand human relatable . . . uhm, something something whatever.

The promise of the future is turning out just as shit as everything else we do. We really are the worst.

It's just an acceleration of what we were already doing to ourselves. Propaganda used to take effort. Now it can be automated and spewed out at such a prodigious rate that it'll be impossible to find anything of value in between all the chaff. And apparently we're too stupid as a species to stop and ask the valid questions now, so expect, if we're still around, in twenty years or so someone will go, "duh, uh, maybe we shouldn't a ought notta let dem machine dingies do all da tinkin' fer us?"

The real solution is for parents to actually parent. I understand the lure of the digital babysitter, but handing children an unlocked device with no web filter *AND* spending zero time helping them navigate what they may find is just plain shit parenting. I'm sorry if that hurts someone's feelings, but it's true. I totally understand that life moves fast, and it's hard when both parents work real jobs and still need to take care of the home to actually be a parent, but when you have children, you have to find ways to be a parent anyway. Stop eroding everyone's rights just because you refuse to spend time being a parent.