They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

If the publisher of a single-player or small-group multiplayer game can't make a useful subset of the server software available to licensees, they should go out of business.

That's advertised up front as the equivalent of a rental. I draw a sharp contrast with buttons labeled "buy" that do not grant equivalent rights to those of the owner of a lawfully made copy.

Per the copyright statute of Slashdot's home country, Title 17, United States Code:
- A copy is a physical object in which a work is fixed. (Section 101)
- It is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to resell that copy. (Section 109)
- And it is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to make another copy of a computer program in RAM as an essential step of running it. (Section 117)

If the publisher of a movie or video game refuses to make it available in physical copies, am I justified in pretending that the work was never released?

If it becomes a crime or tort for the server middleware publisher to provide middleware that is "licensed and not redistributable", server middleware publishers will have to either change their standard license terms going forward or close.

Until you realize that to keep up with what your friends are playing, you need the equivalent of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a bunch of other services. Netflix streaming began as the online extension of Starz, and now Starz is its own separate subscription service.

I use DuckDuckGo Privacy Tools. I see every single advertisement on John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball and on Read the Docs. DuckDuckGo does not block them because these sites serve ads in a way that respects viewers' privacy. They are contextual, not behavioral.

However, larger sites with a more general audience can't rely on contextual ad placement. Instead, they feel a need to tailor each ad impression to each viewer's interests inferred from observing the viewer's interests across several websites. A 2014 article by Beales and Eisenach reported that behavioral advertising produces triple the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to contextual advertising.[1]

Before Forbes, Wired, and The Atlantic went behind a paywall, they went through a phase of treating privacy tools as ad blockers.[2] The Atlantic's help page insistently mentioned "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath.

A lot of times, I can get past misclassification of privacy tools as ad blockers by using an extension to turn off all script-in-the-browser for a particular domain.[3] Other times, I find that the website was deliberately made script-dependent. Articles on Reuters didn't load for me last I checked a couple days ago. Instead, I got a notice to reenable JS and turn off ad blockers.

[1] JavaScript Switcher by meetDeveloper on Mozilla Add-ons
[2] Doc Searls. "An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers" (April 15, 2016).
[3] Beales, Howard and Eisenach, Jeffrey A., "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" (January 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2421... or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...