Dammit, I meant free to download and install, not free to play.

Then they should have made it free to play with a monthly fee.

Amazing it happened on April 1st, too.

Good luck unpicking all this special AI source code when the data centres all shut down due to lack of power or money.

I have the same issue on a couple of folders. There are some large exe files in there (downloaded installers) and the explorer window doesn't even show the directory contents for about 2-3 minutes. I'm only running Windows Defender, no 3rd party AV, so something in Windows is taking an absolute age to analyse those files *every time I view that folder*

They'll call it the XBAI

I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.

Of course, this is all from memory, not logs or anything. I'm sure the timeframes are off. But the general trend is right ... slow, then much faster, then slow asking for decryption keys.

I've been writing novels for almost all my adult life. Bashing out 80,000-100,000 words is the easy part, and humans or AI can both do that.

People who don't know anything about writing a novel think - great, I'll get AI to 'write' it and then I'll publish it.

But editing, re-plotting, rewriting and polishing is where 90% of the work is. Re-reading the 100k words 10-15 times, cutting chunks out, adding or deleting a character, etc, etc ... and that's what you'd have to do with AI-written slop anyway.

There's no labour saving, and in fact it's worse because writing that 80k first draft means you're at least familiar with every sentence. Reading 80k words of garbage someone else wrote so you can polish it up - that's torture.

One way to avoid AI slop: only buy books published before 2020.

More taxes. of course. Or they could rely on SpaceX, but that contradicts their insistence on autarkey.

Technically impressive, but other than a few early adopters, the public saw no need for it. 8K might do better, but few people can tell the difference with 4K, so they'll need a better hook than just imperceptible resolution.

I wonder if AI game players could benefit. Their fake vision is as good as they want.

I'm on 24h2 and it's been doing this 'I will not shut down' thing for about a week.

But has it been your job to do this every minute *all day long*? I doubt it. News shows waste so much time repeating themselves and showing nice visuals that few people actually concentrate on what they say, treating it more as a background noise generator with occasional cute pet videos or hurricanes pounding a marina. If you're reading a book, say on the financials of the Nazi economy, you are skeptical on the broad overall level, not every single detail reported; you don't worry that it's made up a complete production category from scratch, including the government ministry and minister responsible. Even if you're reading reports on the financials of a corporate division, the skepticism is nowhere near as pervasive as necessary with AI, which can hallucinate in the most unexpected places, and when you extend that to code, where literally every character can be hallucinated, that is the true full time skepticism at issue.

The last thing bureaucrats want is to solve the problems that created and sustain their jobs. Independent thinking workers scare the daylights out of them. And since the only measure of their success is counting subordinates, measuring budgets, and issuing new regulations, memos must continue to pour forth lest the outside world think they have solved their problems and are no longer necessary.

And dealing with bureaucratic paperwork is always a decent distraction. The more nonsensical paperwork lets you vent some of your frustration too. Taking that away doesn't help.