We live in a capitalistic society that builds wealth.

Historically, hand-loom weavers complained when automatic looms were first introduced in the late 1700's, and ultimately they all lost their jobs.

...but at the same time, the cost of clothing and cloth in general came way down, making high quality clothing affordable to many, many more people. And the relative low cost of cloth gave rise to new uses, such as tarps and tents.

That's what building wealth is about: putting something in place that can reduce the cost and/or effort for future generations.

The fact that some people were put out of a job isn't a flaw, it's a feature. Making things more affordable and available raises the standard of living for everyone.

If you want to help the poor, if you want to solve some of society's problems, then that's a fine conversation to have. And I'm on board with it, I'll happily support your efforts... so long as your proposed solution doesn't involve changing capitalism.

If you want to help society, it has to come from a different place. UBI might work, government assistance is well intentioned but inefficient, communism is a complete disaster. An indexed wealth fund of $2 million would give out a dividend of $50,000 each year in perpetuity by gaining more value than inflation plus the disbursements, so maybe we should start setting up individual wealth funds for selected people, single mothers and doctorate students, perhaps. Start small and start taking people out of the workforce, and salaries should rise.

Other ideas are also welcome.

The idea that "workers and communities become afterthoughts" was well explored and described by Karl Marx himself in the middle of the 1800s, we don't need a Harvard Professor to remind us. Marx's mistake was to blame capitalism for the problem, we know that doesn't work.

We need new ideas and new institutions, but don't change capitalism.

Capitalism didn't cause any of it.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

2001: Windows XP ran on as little as 64mb with 128mb being the recommended.

2021: Windows 11 minum is 4gb is listed as the minimum. I've never even touched Windows 11, so I don't know if that is realistic.

The minimum specs for each system is a 64x multiple, as you said. That's a good observation. I'm pretty sure in the late 90s I was running Windows95 with 96mb and my motherboard was capped at 128mb. Negligible ram on the graphics card. It also could have only been 64mb. I don't have a clear memory of what I was running when I first got XP.

Today my PC is a partially upgraded (old) i7-4790k with 32gb ram and 10gb of ram on the video card, so approximately 448x increase in memory in ~25 years.

My Mac is 256gb unified, so ~2,730x multiple.

Still not to the Moore's Law rate!

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

This is probably the best sentence (and post) that I have read on Slashdot in some time. Amen.

I dunno...

You have a point about parental control, but the reality is that most of a child's waking time is away from the parents in state-mandated schooling. And I strongly suspect that the supervision schools use on their students is much less strict than the direct supervision that parents would use on their own kids.

For example, should we keep guns, alcohol, and tobacco out of the hands of children, or should we rely on the parents to impose rules?

We teach children to swim, but we also make people put fences around their swimming pools.

It makes sense to put restrictions on some of the obvious dangers kids might find in their environment.

D'oh. Mod me down; I deserve it for my fuckup.

the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

No it isn't. Your phone is a supercomputer by 1980s standards, and seeded generation (whether from a PRNG or hashing coordinates or whatever) goes back to at least then (and probably '60s/'70s). I'm not slamming the game, and seeded generation is often a good idea, but the idea that you can do it on handheld supercomputers is not remarkable, even the tiniest little bit.

You wanna see something super-fucking-impressive on an iPhone? Go back to the very first model and behold that it runs a truly-remarkably decent web browser. That was way more futuristic than this.

Another thing that I have found Claude is really good at doing is taking an error from a log and doing a deep dive analysis of what happened. I give it read-only database access, access to www logs, access to application logs, access to a checked out source tree, etc. I paste in the error message (or in some cases paste in a tech support email from a user) and have it write up an analysis, a proposed response to the customer, and any recommendations (if there is a bug or actual problem).

Of course people should beware. Anyone who has a problem with Flock is surely aware that they are only a fraction of "the problem," though among the more visible.

I'm concerned that some Flock haters might take us down a slippery slope to where you can't have a camera in your house if it looks out onto the street, or that you shouldn't be allowed to record cops, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera attachment on my Manhattan apartment balcony telescope that I normally just use to furiously goon to the good people of NYC who don't close their curtains. (Oops, forget that third example.)

I can't say I'm a fan of Flock but if their rights are infringed in a way that might possibly expand to everyone else, then they will need to be defended.

That said, I have a modest proposal for the law-enforcement-related problems of surveillance vendors. Require non-warrant sharing with LE to be unreliable. For every geo search, remove a random half of the applicable results and replace them with deliberate, randomized false positives, so that LE will know the data shouldn't be taken too seriously on its own. If cops act without confirmation while KNOWING it's _at least_ 50% likely to be wrong, that'll help with the civil suits for false arrests.

I suppose your question is rhetorical, but the answer is...

Congress tells the White House what to do, but almost never says *how* to do it. For example, congress told the White House to start protecting food safety, under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FDC) Act of 1938, with a mandate to "protect and promote public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, the nation's food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation".

Thus, the FDA has a specified mandate, but the White House has considerable leeway in how to implement that mandate. There have been amendments to the instructions over the years, but it's basically "keep the people safe" from perceived risks.

The FDA mandate applies when an AI is acting in anything related to a medical capacity, and the FTC can step in when "unfair or deceptive acts or practices" happen in the AI sphere, and the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act" covers various misuse of the computers of other people.

That last bit, CFAA, sounds like it might apply in this case.

The executive branch also has sweeping "emergency" powers if it believes something is or might be an immediate threat. It can also create new powers "by default" when they believe there is sufficient danger - such as when the EPA was created by Richard Nixon because Congress did not pass a resolution of disapproval within 60 days. (It was later given funding by congress, which effectively validated its existence.)

Congress is notoriously slow to act, and hesitant to act until a real threat is demonstrated. In the meantime, the executive branch can respond quickly to individual events with individual actions (which is what this sounds like), giving Congress time to consider the issue.

All of this is as it should be.

You may not like the current administration, but responding to potential threats is one of its functions.

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

Quick question: Is she wrong?

The previous post made a point, which you totally sidestepped.

I have no opinion on Sabing Hossenfelder either way, but I get the impression that physics has largely stalled over the last few decades.

So... I'm just wondering, Is she wrong?