They gave up their privacy when they stepped out of their front door.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

I remember a story on Slashdot from around the turn of the century, an audit of servers at the Pentagon found that the most common Admin password was Password, the second-most common was P@ssw0rd.

At my first real IT job in 1996 if you knew the birthdate of of the children of 4/5 of the users you knew their password. I wasn't allowed to insist on a change in the user training.

It's called "pathetic fallacy"-- ascribing feelings (pathos, in Greek) to inanimate objects.

I'm afraid that we do this all the time. I don't even think twice before saying something like "the toaster doesn't like you to run the blender while it's toasting" or "this program wants two special characters in the password, not just one."

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Businesses only need to hide it if they are the data controller or the data processor engaged in confidence. YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE IS NOT THIS. *YOU* chose not to hide it. It is clearly mentioned that your profile is available and shared with others. It's your choice not to include a photo or your name in it.

Whether it's personal or not is irrelevant. It is published, by you. When you setup WhatsApp you're explicitly told it'll be available for other's to see. You've explicitly authorised people to view it.

Your name is considered personal information when you enter an agreement to share it in confidence. That's not what happens in public profiles. In other news Phonebooks used to exist, vast databases printed out and delivered to everyone in the city containing the PII of everyone else.

There will always be a few crazies, but the reality is the overwhelming supermajority of details in the phonebook were 100% accurate and available.

The number isn't Gemini users, it's AI Overviews. They are *ONLY* counting the search.

There is one thing that CoPilot is good at, and that is searching your files. Windows Explorer search has always blown goats, but Outlook search used to be good and sucks now, and OneNote search is merely passable. I suppose it isn't surprising a tool made via data scraping is good at scraping data but if you can't find something due to lack of functional search on your work PC give it a go and it does a pretty decent job.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

Ha. I can't access the article to be sure, but I think they mean making the user feel like the computer is incompetent, not making the computer feel bad about its performance like Marvin the Paranoid Android.

If it was critical to charge your car overnight from solar derived electricity, then I'd suppose you'd get a powerbank for your house that can charge during the day.

I was a bit surprised when they started popping up so much with the family being famously litigious and unwilling to license much of anything,

My understanding is that the exports are going out under the Belt & Road Initiative, so as much as possible is done with local labor (so the opposite of IMF/World Bank programs), and local people are trained to manage it as well. This is one of several reasons why Belt & Road is replacing IMF infrastructure funding throughout the Third World, rather than having KBR come in and build facilities to support the foreign extraction industries and then abandoning the project to decay they're creating both the technical and financial underpinnings of sustainable public infrastructure. (This is not coincidentally the way Gate Foundations projects work.)