It's the same Rich assholes as always, not all of them are white. I mean technically they are all white because white isn't a skin color it's a way that we have traditionally decided whether or not you are in the in-group or not here in America and other places but that's a whole nother can of worms...

I think this is more about buying into who gets to be a member of the ruling elite in the coming automation apocalypse than anything else though.

AI can't be profitable as a business or a service without fundamental changes to how computing works that are nowhere is near on the horizon.

But the prospect of freeing up the billionaires from their dependency on us filthy filthy peasants is worth any amount of money and so AI doesn't have to be profitable.

People keep asking, if there aren't any jobs who is going to buy the billionaires products?

They asked themselves that question and they answered it in a completely different and unintuitive way. They realized they were dependent on you and me and they are taking steps to break that dependency and free themselves completely.

Now if you're paying attention this means that all of us are about to become completely redundant. Or at least that's the plan.

Now here's where it gets complicated. They don't have to eliminate all of our jobs to completely fuck all of us over. If they even take 20% of us out then we are going to have to follow over backwards to fight like dogs for the remaining jobs.

But of course you, dear reader, do not need to do that because as a highly skilled and brilliant reader of slashdot you are completely irreplaceable and under no circumstances will the collapse of the current order and human civilization even slightly inconvenience you.

Possibly but they're going to take tons of good studios with them if they go.

Thanks to a complete lack of antitrust law enforcement Microsoft was allowed to buy about a dozen pretty major studios. They have basically done fuck all with the studios and it is now painfully clear that the only reason they bought them was to stop Sony from getting games made by those studios for the PlayStation platform.

In other words exactly the kind of anti-competitive behavior that is ridiculously illegal for extremely good reasons.

I'm guessing that they want to take the Activision games exclusive but they aren't quite ready to do that yet because they're afraid of public outcry. A few more years of corporate power consolidation thanks to voters choosing culture War over economics should put Microsoft in the position to do that.

One of the things that slightly worries me is that one of the few things angry young men have left his video games and between AI spiking the price of video game hardware and this kind of anti-competitive bullshit we are on track to take away their video games.

Meanwhile a bunch of asshat demagogues like Steve Bannon and Steven Miller are salivating at the prospect of weaponizing those angry young men against the rest of us. If you're paying attention that's what that Trump weaponization fund is about it's there to fund the proud boys and a little private army for their Gestapo.

The problem is when you say stuff like this it's so fucking insane people don't want to believe it. I called that the Dick Cheney effect. If you do something insane and horrific enough people will refuse to believe it's happening because certainly somebody would stop them from doing that right?

It's the old problem of, it can't happen here. Nobody believes their country is becoming a fascist hellscape until after it's a fascist hellscape and by then it's too late to do anything about it.

A calculator can do arithmetic much faster than a human can.

A google search can find web pages way faster than any human can.

LLM is another class of traditionally human-like but not human things happening, in some contexts "good enough" or "better than a human" in others not really applicable, but it's not directly comparable to human thinking.

Machines don't unionize or boycott. They're tired of you having power over them.

My father has been locked out of his email account since last month. Multiple calls to support and now a second ticket for support have gone nowhere. They're a bunch of script kiddies repeating the same things over and over and never listening to what is being said.

The issue is on AOL's end, but they refuse to acknowledge it, let alone do anything.

Based on this experience, no way I'd buy company stock. With that kind of bad service, people will be leaving.

Well, it lets some people have long cooldowns make the rest of their ecosystem suckers.

Of course, this *also* means the people with high cooldowns get to be vulnerable to security problems longer because they will be applying cooldown to security fixes...

But yes, some sort of actual curation would be the best mitigation, particularly to allow trustworthy critical security updates through quickly instead of those getting caught in the cooldown.

I think this is the thing people are getting confused about.

AI isn't a business. For a brief period of time it will be integrated into the economy as capital. That's not the same thing as a business. It's something you own to produce things. It's not a business in and of itself it's a cost center that is part of a business.

That's not going to last very long. Because that's not the purpose of ai..

The goal of AI is to completely replace wages. Or at least replace enough of them that the bargaining position of working people become so bad that the trillionaires ascend to godhood. You know how Japan had an emperor that was considered a deity? Sam altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want that.

The problem is right now they are dependent on you buying their products and working for them. So they want to automate you away so that that dependency goes away and they can have the power to control whether you eat or drink or have shelter but you can't withhold your labor to counteract that.

It's debatable to what extent they will achieve that goal and people will cope with the horror of it by telling you that it's just impossible. However if you do a little googling you will find that 70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by robots not outsourcing. And that is have a huge impact on your ability to bargain for higher wages and therefore a better quality of life. They want to expand that.

Altman wants some public ownership, but not 50% which, presuming it would be a voting stake, would actually potentially matter for decision making. It's not a majority but if enough private market shareholders side with the public ownership, then it matters.

Instead, he wants enough for the public to have a stake specifically in the "approved" AI companies so that the companies are unambiguously "too big to fail". A chance to hold hostage a big enough chunk of wealth so that the government is stuck doing whatever it can to protect and ensure the selected companies, whether it be in the face of a souring market or upstart companies that didn't have the good fortune of being selected by the company. Meanwhile, the actual governance and decision making remain firmly status quo. Including decisions about how much to send back to "investors" and how much to "reinvest" (including setting their own compensation). They may even structure it so they can classify public ownership differently from private market, and reward investors in each class differently.

Just another ambition to privatize the gains and socialize the losses.

Dude robots and computers aren't going to fix the shit. We already have computers and robots are too expensive. Also they don't work.

The problem here is like everything we've let private equity devour in the world. They have cut staffing levels to dangerous levels. Meanwhile we cut all the government funding to higher education so there are fewer nurses and doctors. Remember if you're over 50 when you were growing up the government paid 70% of your tuition. Now they paid 20%. The thing is they didn't cut you a check they paid that money to the university and the university passed it on to you in the form of cheap tuition.

I am fully aware that rich assholes are going to enter markets and they are at a huge advantage because we refuse to do away with Rich assholes by taxing the fuck out of them.

But just having a little bit of competition and a little less power at the top would be a good place to start.

And yeah I need to proofread my shit. Then again I mean for fucks sakes I'm posting on a dead forum mostly to scream into the void. I don't actually type any of this crap I'm using text to speech on my phone.

Every few years Facebook faces a mass Exodus because no teenager wants to be on the same platform as their parents. The way they got around that was they just bought all their competitors or they ran them out of business or in the case of tick tock they lobbied the government to shut them down.

Removing teenagers from the pool is great for Facebook because it means they don't have to deal with them going to their competitors and then buying those competitors or worse risking a serious antitrust enforcement action that prevents them from doing that and leads to a real competitor.

Meanwhile when the kiddies become adults they're not going to be as uptight about being on the same platform as their parents anymore so they can be easily funneled into Facebook's ecosystem for cheap.

Facebook could collapse almost overnight if people just stopped going to the website. They are painfully aware of that and they take measures to make sure it doesn't happen.

Timing *chains* are not universal, but they do help. Timing belts are quite common. Headgaskets still go and are still a massive labor cost. Within the last couple of years I've had to pay for timing belt change, a new radiator, new hoses due to leaks, a new evap canister, a new alternator. This is on a 2015. I'm told I'm "lucky" the turbo hasn't keeled over on me as this model is notorious for turbo issues. My colleague has had to pay for *two* headgaskets on a 2017 in the last few years. These aren't "solved" problems because it's pretty fundamental physics. Some things are more solved, e.g. I would have had to pay money probably for power steering problems, but the switch to electric power steering pumps greatly helps.

Because it's preventative maintenance and if you have one, you are expected to change it every 100,000 miles. Since we have interference engines, you don't want to push your luck since a failed timing belt will ruin the engine.

If the boobs on my character aren't sufficiently pointy the cut glass then there's too many polygons.

From things other than cigarette smoking.

We have been consistently making cars cleaner to the point where vast swaths of them are zero emissions. I've mentioned this before but if you are in a city or even a decent sized town you're breathing in little bits of tire particulate and there is no way around that. People really really really really hate it when I point that out because people grew up loving cars so the idea that there is a problem with cars that is basically impossible to solve doesn't go over well....

My point is like it or not you are going to get along full of contaminants unless you can live out in the country or some shit. And fact of the matter is most people can't. You still need jobs and unless you own a shitload of land you're not making it as a farmer. Modern farmers are actually pretty fucking wealthy. The small family farm is long long gone.

So yeah somebody who has all the genes that make me prone to lung cancer I'd like to see you some more research on it for sure.

There is exactly one scenario where nuclear power makes sense now and that's if you have extreme space constraints and can't just put a wind or solar form up. For everything else you were taking a huge amount of risk, specifically the risk is that billionaire finance bro wanna be tech bro asshats are going to stop paying for the maintenance on those reactors and you're going to have a meltdown. And because these reactors are being proposed to power AI slop data centers they're going to be close to where people live because that's where the water is and those data centers are thirsty. Don't have to be but they are.

I do not know why old nerds are so obsessed with nuclear power. I know that we are I just don't understand the obsession. I'm assuming it's some weird techno future that never happened that we were all dreaming of and that we are upset we didn't get.

It's frustrating because that future is right there waiting for us if we just force the switch to wind and solar. But we can't have that because the oil companies want to control the transition that is inevitably going to happen so that they can continue to control your access to electricity.