Or they'll sell the "anonymized data", including calculated bra sizes.

This is a pretty invasive move on Comcast's part. Only the lawyers will win this one.

the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate,

So one in every five thousand people who walk into your stores is going to be falsely accused of a crime? Wow, thanks for making abundantly clear that people should NOT shop there...

and ruling somehow only applied to some carriers. So now the supreme court official says different rules applies to different carriers.

Even if they don't pollute all the time, consider when a "power emergency" will be most likely. One common situation is when there is a stagnant heat dome sitting on the area forcing everyone to crank up their A/C.

Then the data centers will fire up their gas and diesel generators with short exhaust stacks, and with no wind all those fumes will just linger in the general vicinity.

There are no barriers to how humans get "replaced" by AI. Are we here to benefit humanity or benefit tech bro stock prices?

The whole marketing campaign behind AI was targeted at CEOs to cut their labor costs. This makes them salivate like Pavlov's dogs.

Did the marketing appeal in a "work smarter, not harder" way? No. It was aimed at laying off huge swaths of workers. Not just worker bees, but the creatives in coding, systems management, development, but also other worker bees.

Not everyone needs creativity in their work, although it helps.

People now pump their own fuel in most states. You now walk up to a checkout and scan your own stuff. You order at a screen at McDonalds. Heaven forbid walking into a Starbucks and buying a coffee at the counter.

All of these are small cuts, and ultimately, fealty to the stock price on any given day. Job creation through AI isn't quite the goal. Lowered cost-of-goods is the goal, and the goal of capitalism in general. Do the profits filter down to worker bees? Unlikely.

Take Internet search as an example. AI engines seek to trap the thousand results and deliver you a neat package of "an answer" even if it's wrong. Any stupid AI engine can deliver believable results, subverting the thousand others that have the same answers-- perhaps authoritative, even trustable result.

Yep. Trust is built.

1. Rapidly iterative and successive models, all of them looking like dot-zero problem children do not imbue trust.

2. Rapid inter-cross dealing tech companies, all fighting with each other for dominance using the dot-zero madness does not imbue trust.

3. Models that fight each other, jump barriers and hack into companies at will, does not engender trust.

4. Digesting rivers, streams, farmland, for data centers whose parts can't even be purchased, does not build trust.

5. Creating turf wars between the models of different countries does not earn trust.

6. Creating incredible parts shortages and pumping component profits does not become trustworthy for supply chain users.

7. Bozos like Sam Altman and his merry-go-round of allies makes many people very queasy.

8. Jamming Co-Pilot down the throats of users, changing ToS to fit more mad infiltration goals to the desktop does not make people want to trust Microsoft, specifically.

9. Inability to show that AI helps, rather than lays off workers does not build trust.

The man is a fool, and so are those that become hypnotized by early success, ignoring pretty frightening failures in AI and the chains of monopoly grabs that are going with it, not to mention data center densities that are clearly unsupportable, financed by pump-and-dump Wall Street fans.

Humanity? Did you say humanity? War, even tech turf wars, leave many suffering humans in their wake. That didn't used to be true; computers were enablers, not *disablers*.

Gee, if a counterfeit lithium ion battery peddled by Amazon burns your house down, you get to sort it out in small claims court.

Or else let some guy whose salary ultimately comes from Amazon decide whether they're liable.

I'm not sure how well that would work on this. I don't know the specific algo they're using, but an early, primitive one was even-odd. You divide all tokens into two groups, A and B. When generating, on even tokens you somewhat boost the odds of tokens from A, while on odd tokens, you somewhat boost the odds from B. If a high-probability word is coming up it won't meaningfully alter it, but if there's different ways something can be phrased, it can cause changes in the phrasing choice to match the A/B boosts.

Now, it's easy to see how one could defeat that algo, but I'm sure that what they're using now is a lot more sophisticated than just alternating even-odd.

Yeah, I'm extremely dubious that the open source version will "sync" with the operational version. I expect the general codebase to be truly represented, but not the "levers" that can be pushed on an operational system.

. You can't just decide you don't like the algo and that you'll modify it and use a different one;

I mean, on any decent social media platform you should be able to? Bluesky has had this feature for years. Not just algo choice, but the ability to outright create your own algos and share them with other people.

It's IMHO a red flag when a for-profit company wants to force everyone to use the same algo.

And if someone at the bar thinks you're an asshole, they'll do the RL equivalent of "blocking" you.

Once again: nobody has an obligation to listen to you, and if you think you have a right to force other people to listen to your views, you're the asshole.

I'll take "Things I've Never Once Seen On Bluesky" for $1000, Ken.

To be clear: anyone can join Bluesky, regardless of their views. But if your posts are mainly, say, calling black people monkeys, calling trans people groomers, things of that nature, yeah, a lot of people are going to block you on sight. That's not "censorship", that's just people finding you to be an arse and having better things to do with their time online than be forced to listen to you. Everyone has a right to show anyone else the door; nobody has an obligation to face harassment.

If you feel the need to force other people to listen to your views regardless of whether they want to hear from you or not, you're the asshole.

Meanwhile, here's the reality of Bluesky user numbers (drag the range to the full range). Funny how everyone always wants to truncate the timeperiod for the "user base" to have a start date of that last big spike.

The simple fact is that with any site, most people who visit don't end up sticking around, and there's a dropoff rate. The persistance rate at Bluesky is actually unusually high**. The reason for the spikes is that Bluesky's users joined in waves; you can track each wave to specific events. Those two big spikes in new users were the US election date and the US inauguration date, respectively. You can find various other spikes related to for example various things that happened with Twitter.

** The typical retention rate for a new "consumer-social" app is 40-50% for 1 day, 20-30% for 1 week, and 10-15% for 1 month. Compare that to the Bluesky data. Again: persistence has been very high; the new-user join pattern has just been extremely "spiky".