if people consistently functioned in a predictable way computers would be a lot simpler.

gotta design for the humans you have, and not the humans you want

Starting to feel like the middle of the Venn diagram. We are charging through ethical dilemmas presented in older sci-fi, many of which I assumed I would never see in my lifetime, with a boilerplate "as long as it makes money for the shareholders" attitude.

We just hit "autonomous agent decides, of its own volition, that starting a harassment campaign against maintainers who reject its code submissions is the most effective way to achieve the coding goals set for it by its alleged operator." For a long time, I even viewed the way the press et al frame these AI missteps as more advertising on AI's behalf, anthropomorphizing the agents to make their mistakes seem more like human error and less like a sputtering random number generator getting it wrong many times in quick succession. Even that experiment with the "cheating" chess playing agent seemed set up to suggest that solution at a structural level, in the absence of explicitly prompting the agent that altering the game state via external means may be possible.

The thing still doesn't know what it's doing, per se, but it's unsettling to watch it probe the value of jealousy, rage, and harassment as tools for accomplishing goals. They won't ever be human, but they're going to learn as many of our worst behaviors as it's possible for us to teach them, all the same.

The thing he accidentally did that I agreed with the first time 'round was pulling us out of the TPP (which I'm sure he just did because it was a trade deal he didn't negotiate, and not because it had baked-in copyright extensions, but w/e).

The thing he's accidentally doing this time is, uh... dismantling US global hegemony and the neoliberal world order (gotta think positive).

My pay would be great if I weren't isolating at home with Covid that I got at my banquet job where no one is required by the state to wear masks any more.

Instead I'm missing the start of my working season, and most social safety nets designed to help people in my position cope with the loss of hours have been kneecapped or removed totally because, dontcha know, Covid is over now!

I'm gonna die mad that America's rulers took one look at the invisible disease which may be spread by the asymptomatic and, rather than organizing a societal reaction, painted it as an issue of personal responsibility; your responsibility to wear a mask or not, your responsibility to stop going out for groceries or not, your responsibility to get vaccinated or not, your responsibility to call work and explain that your scratchy throat could be allergies but could also be Covid and you need to wait for test results before getting scheduled, etc. The whole while, the Fed abdicated quarantine duties to the states, but then turned around and threatened to sue them if they interfered with interstate commerce (which, to be fair, is the exclusive domain of the Fed, as per the Constitution, but which they chose not to act on).

These individualized solutions wouldn't be enough for most people even if they did err on the side of caution; more often, they create situations like the one I had at my last event, where the venue organizer was coughing and maskless and going "oh don't worry it's just allergies." I'm not especially mad at her— besides wearing a mask, what's she supposed to do? Take 5 days off after every event to wait for symptoms? Call in sick and get tested every time she wakes up with a stuffy nose? If I did that, I doubt I'd still be employed, and my first day of symptoms was indistinguishable from my usual allergy symptoms for this time of year, and taking my allergy pill seemed to deal with it, so I can understand a blasé attitude towards congestion (mask-wearing notwithstanding).

When I called my state's health department to report my positive test, and to get a pin which allows me to anonymously share my test results with others I've come into contact with (via the state-provided contact tracing app, which I voluntarily installed on my phone back in 2020), I had to leave a message; I got called back the next day and told that the number I had called was not responsible for providing those pins (despite being listed as the number to call in the app) and also that I was the first person to contact them regarding the app, full stop.

And this is the response from people who largely agree that Covid is a real problem which exists, a group I'm not even sure is in the majority in my state (and certainly my country).

America has been such a goddamn waste of other people's land.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with my tips, too.

While I don't doubt that surveillance applications are important to our government, I think the reason surveillance was brought up in this discussion is that it provides an ample dataset for the training of computer vision, and not that it's necessarily the most valued application thereof: "they have more data to work with, given that they have surveillance data" implies that we don't have surveillance data, or at least have far less than China.

I can't take "we have adversaries around the world using AI to surveil people, to suppress human rights" as anything other than a criticism of such behavior, as well.

What officials say and what officials do are often two different things, and much of this may just be lip service. Be that as it may, I don't dislike anything that I've read here, and this administration has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to divulge its true stances on issues regardless of—or, indeed, because of—their controversial natures.

Resisting the establishment "isn't useful" and means young people are "lazy", says person who could afford to move away from their place of birth. More at 11:00.

Facebook has been funding service providers in developing countries for some time now.

One example is MPT, a mobile network in Myanmar. MPT provides zero-rated Facebook access, ensuring that Myanmar's populace will choose Facebook over any less-scummy competitors—and Facebook provides so many services at this point that there's little reason to ever leave the site, especially when doing so will cost you. Facebook is the primary—if not only—source for messaging, digital marketplaces, news, and more; in conversation, "Facebook" is used synonymously with "the internet".

Facebook corners emerging markets like this and ensures that they continue to add to their user counts and become the go-to marketing avenue for each—and it'll continue this way until they run out of markets.

Presumably they've just decided that referencing Notch any more than they are legally-obligated to will bring them more problems than benefits.

So, yeah, CYA mode.

There are going to be a lot of people saying that Microsoft are "pandering to snowflakes" (or whatever the current jargon is) but any time a company "takes a step for more inclusivity" or the like it's only ever been about optics.
They've never really cared about anyone's cause—save their own.

You've misread the article. Nintendo may have published this game, but CyberAgent Inc. are the whining developers here:

(emphasis mine)

This is honestly quite refreshing to see.

I'm not expecting it to actually be cost-effective for consumers, I'm saying that their best advertising angle is CLAIMING that it is.

In order for it to look good next to buying a $1k+ Alienware monstrosity, it just needs to cost less than $500 per year, and they can say "Over 2 years of our service is cheaper than this PC! Plus, you'll never have to mess with hardware!"

It's not as good as having the hardware, no. But it's better than suffering through abysmal performance at bottomed-out settings on something that was never meant for gaming.

Lag from streaming gameplay is much better than the midpoint of "can't run it at all on my hardware" and "running it maxed out at 144fps", by virtue of being playable and running at higher settings, so they can sell it to those who already have capable rigs as "Cheaper than the equivalent gaming laptop! (for the first however-many months)", and they can potentially ALSO sell it to the netbook/prebuilt-home-office-computer crowd as "Cheaper than buying a prebuilt and easier than building your own!"

They can compare the cost of 13 months ("Over a YEAR!") of service with the cost of a PC build (and they're free to make that build as exorbitant as they want). You could argue that, by comparing the service favorably to buying your own PC, they might be competing with their own hardware sales. However, I'd imagine the profit margin will be better for them on this service than it is on prebuilts with Nvidia cards, and I find it likely that anyone who's in the market for buying a GPU on its own either 1.) isn't going to care about this service at all, because they're happy with their rig, or 2.) will react favourably to the "cheaper than a gaming laptop" bullet point. If Nvidia see that potential competition as an issue, they may still be able to compare favourably to the cost of a "pro" console and a year of XBL/PSN.

All they have to do is shoot for a "budget option" angle, and people will find ways to justify latency/occasional downtime because it's cheaper for them (for now).

That said, after seeing how they handled the Shield line, I'll be surprised to see ANY adverts for this.

https://xkcd.com/792/

As much as I like to complain about micro$oft, I'm hard-pressed to fault them for this event, and certainly can't fault their response to it.

I'd say most of the blame lies on the staff and, more so, the policies at the institutions where the event occurred. Government and healthcare orgs are notoriously slow to update mission-critical systems, and while some of this blame can be placed on their reliance on custom software built for old environments or a lack of funds for upgrades, at the end of the day all institutions had been given the same end-of-service deadline, and a majority of them cleared it.

Hospitals are far from the only organisation to rely on frequently-antiquated specialty software and embedded devices, but they are perhaps the most critical example.