Where I live the retirement savings system is quite different, so maybe I'm not understanding the US system well (or, at all). But I'm sure many people with retirement savings are not financially savvy and will delegate all decisions on how to invest their savings to some financial management companies, brokers, banks or however it works in the US. So doesn't that now allow those companies to invest people's savings into cryptocurrency, obviously with potentially very unfortunate results for said savings? Can they at least be potentially sued for financial mismanagement if they invest people's savings into some crypto and it loses all its value?

This right here is one of the biggest problems with modern identity politics, and current-day politics in general. And it's absolutely a product of binary American politics. There's an assumption here that "the right-wing" wants to "conquer" the minorities. Any minorities? For example Jewish descent people are a minority in US, albeit a significant one, I see no attempt to conquer them. Very rich people are also a minority. People with red hair are a minority. I mean forchrissakes, feminists would have all women be a part of the alphabet minority big tent, even though there are slightly more of them then there are men.

Also, I don't want to stereotype but a lot of people from certain minorities are not so keen on other minorities. For example, muslims I believe would now be considered a potentially oppressed minority? Many of them are not so keen on homosexuality. Neither would be recent migrants from some African countries where any practice of it is illegal. There are of course tensions between some feminists and transvestites. That's a pretty diverse (in the traditional sense of the word) range of viewpoints. Yet all of these people are supposed to join the LGBT hivemind or 'community' for fear of the right wing oppressive bogeyman.

In this community, who decides the common alphabet policy? There is no official committee of any kind. As far as I can see it sort of organically emerges from social media commentators and the results as far as I'm concerned don't make a lot of sense, and yet everyone is supposed to rationalize away any doubts and objections lest the right wing oppressors get them.

'The right wing' as far as I can see is not a hivemind either, not even in just US. For example your traditional evangelicals and big city economic libertarians would not agree on a lot of things. I'm seeing a similar tendency there of demanding everyone rally behind Trump lest 'the communists' take over, but it doesn't seem as cultish as on the what is currently considered to be the left in US. There is at least a little bit of disagreement permitted.

So perhaps there isn't really the side of good and the side of evil, but a bunch of people who want different things and/or have different ideas on how best to get these things. I've said it before, US desperately, desperately needs a third party. And a fourth, fifth, sixth etc. This trying to force everyone into one of two teams is producing very unhealthy results.

What "age-appropriate" resources are we talking about that are supposedly needed? Porn? That is avaliable in large quantities catering to every sexual orientation and fetish. Something to reassure young people of non-traditional sexual orientations that what they're feeling is not unusual? That is needed, but that it looks to me that now this has been achieved, and then some. You do not want others to push young people to be something they're not, but that goes both ways. Children should be left to figure out who they are by themselves, when they're ready. With the totally rampant virtue-seeking on the internet what I'm seeing is people trying to push their agendas on children ('children' being the key word here) too young to understand social dynamics at play here. And of course there's the straightforward grooming.

That sounds like a pretty powerful argument against such resources. Many kids will not "have enough sense not to do anything stupid". It's naive to think that "age appropriate" resources will make anything different - see for example the reported number of paedophiles using Roadblox. Any 'community' will always end up full of adults pursuing their own goals, of various degrees of unsavouriness and criminality. Who will end up enforcing that age appropriateness? Businesses that run such resources that directly financially benefit from as many people using them as possible, whatever their intentions?

As far as I'm concerned, adults' role in children's sexual development is to stay the fuck out and let them figure it out on their own (answering questions when they're asked). Once young people have done that (again, when they're ready to do so) the role of adults becomes not to stigmatize their choices. That is all that is needed.

The poster below me also makes an excellent point. The whole LGBTQWhateverElse++ mixes up simple homosexuality, various fetishes and straight up mental illness. Those are not the same things and should not be treated as such.

It's not really the same. With the photoshop filter the artist can choose which filter they want to use, apply it, check whether they like the end result, go back to the original if they don't, apply a different filter on top of that if it's not quite right, tweak the results of the filter by hand, etc etc and only after all that if they're completely satisfied with the end result it will go into the actual game binaries. Certain textures may benefit from one type of filters while others need another type or nothing at all.

With nvidia filter, as I understand it, the decision is just whether to use the one filter for everything, or not. Apparently you can set the intensity of the filter (i.e. how much you want to AI-ify your texture) per object, but that's about all the fine control you get with it. And that decision may well be out of artists' hands - if management mandates dlss 5, not much you can do.

The results of generative AI, from what I've seen, are attractive but kind of bland, and once you've seen enough they all look pretty similar. That seems no less true for the examples they gave for dlss 5. So for shovelware that uses all the standard assets it may improve the look, but for something where the artists were going for a specific atmosphere and specific character look, it certainly won't.

No, as far as AAA is concerned it just means you can hire fewer and/or cheaper artists. Possibly redistributing the savings into hiring more middle managers. It certainly does not mean the game is cheaper - AAA games have not gone down in price in a long time.

It's not an unusual judgement call to make. Let's say you're deciding whether an essay plagiarizes another work. If it basically copies the whole thing verbatim, maybe changing a couple of words to disguise the fact it's been copy-pasted, it's clearly plagiarism. If it lays out some ideas expressed in that other work (clearly attributing those ideas) and then makes own commentary and analysis of those ideas, it is not plagiarism.

That is very definitely AI.

That depends. I think I would be fine with things like AI-powered cleanup of lines, changing tone or colour composition of the image, denoising, stuff like that. The kind of tools that already exist in something like Photoshop, but better. As soon as you have objects in the artwork actually drawn by AI, it's an AI artwork.

Gambling caused an arguably bigger problem in sports where athletes would deliberately underperform in exchange for a share of the gambling money. Football (or soccer) and a number of other sports have match-fixing scandals on a fairly regular basis in spite of all the efforts to stamp it out. Now this Polymarket brings the same problem to basically any other part of society. Imagine there being a bet on some sensitive information being leaked, or a high profile legal case being decided a certain way. Or some celebrity being involved in a car accident.

I'm not sure about the cost. I believe the main reason why nuclear fission reactors are so expensive is the risk of catastrophic meltdown and costs of building all the safety features needed to mitigate that risk, as well as costs of dealing with legal challenges etc. Fusion would not have that problem. For comparison, the cost of construction of UK's Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor is projected to reach £33 billon - see here. £2.5 billion is relative peanuts by comparison.

As far as I'm able to tell the engineering involved is indeed massively complex, but the prototype of anything is always expensive. If the technology can be made to work, then down the line people will find many ways to reduce the cost and simplify the construction.

Whether it can be made to work is a big question, I do have my doubts as well. If they can pull it off though, the payoff would be huge. Fusion would provide power 24 hours a day, regardless of the weather, and be easily scaleable, like nuclear, but without the danger of meltdown, the need for exotic fuel - deuterium and tritium are far easier to obtain then uranium, and without the need to dispose of toxic reactor waste. All the benefits of nuclear fission, with almost none of the drawbacks.

And the benefits go far beyond providing reliable power and creating jobs. If commercial fusion power can be achieved, I imagine most developed countries will want to build their own reactors. And UK at that point would be the only place with the expertise on building functional fusion reactors. There would be an absolute shitton of money to be made on selling that expertise. But again, that's all dependent on whether it can be made to work. Still, of all the ways to spend 2.5 billion, not the worst by a long shot.

In the meantime though, we should continue building up renewable power.

So this customer interaction:

" ... And can you please go die in a fire you complete and total [unclear audio] ... !!!. Thank you!! Next!"

would be scored as very polite by the chatbot.

Here when you buy something you typically pay by putting your bank card into a card reader, or nowadays by tapping the card or your phone for a contactless payment. The card reading terminal of the shopkeeper has has an lcd screen that will show if the payment has been accepted or declined. Does it work differently in India? Do the shoppers have to enter the store's bank account into their phone to pay? In that case the shopkeeper would need some confirmation that the payment has been received.

As much as I dislike defence spending, weapons could at least be useful if Ireland invades, or the Martians, which has similar likelyhood. Or they could sell them to Saudis or somebody similar. Datacenters otoh have zero value, all they do is raise electricity prices. I wouldn't be super surprised if they cause brownouts or water supply problems in this town, UK's ancient utility grid may well struggle to cope with a sudden peak in demand.

Why can't they designate housing "critical national infrastructure"? That's what they should be building in these "gray belt" areas, if they build anything there. This would have an additional benefit of being actually true. Or actual infrastructure, as in roads and railways.

And the usual tortured wording they use

What the fuck does that even mean? How do areas of land "underperform"?

There were some good songs in the 2000's although the decline was already well underway at that point.

Or perhaps "baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more"

That's a pretty contentious claim. You can safely say that new technology has never taken away employment permanently. Or at least long term. The people made unemployed by new technology eventually found new employment, or at least their children or grandchildren did, but short-term automation would often absolutely lead to overall increase in unemployment. And just because permenent reduction in employment has never happened in the past doesn't mean it can't happen in future. There's always a first time for everything.

Besides, the binary employed/unemployed distinction isn't the only important one, the type of job you do is just as, if not more, important. Working some kind of job almost always beats being unemployed, but there is a huge difference between a comfortable respectable middle-class job that can pay for a house, a car and support your whole family and a minimum-wage or below McJob.

The 'increasing productivity' bit is also more complicated than that. How easily you can manufacture a good or provide a service (and usually consequently how cheap that good or service becomes) is only one variable. Another one is the quality of that good or service - and that can obviously be subjective, but often it's pretty objective. Hand-produced nails are no more valuable than machine produced ones (less valuable normally, because human will make mistakes and won't be able to reproduce the required shape perfectly every single time). But with food for example, as you start to add more and more automation and chemicals at some point quality and effect on health can start to go down. Then food produced with less automation can become a premium product.

As far as art is concerned, the desirability difference between human art and mass-produced AI slop is pretty obvious. Besides, even before AI we were already getting way more art than we could possibly consume, and so human art was never that expensive (unless it was collector high art). The phrase 'starving artist' exists for a reason. So increase in productivity doesn't produce that much benefit here, whereas decrease in quality is certainly a huge drawback.

Having said that, 70% of middle class jobs being replaced in last 45 years due to automation does seem like a very dubious claim. It probably depends on how you define a 'middle class job'. Also, if automation replaced one middle class job with another comparable middle class job, would that also count?

I'm pretty sure that wasn't the plan, as far as there has ever been any plan beyond hype the tech and keep getting investor money. I'm guessing they wanted to keep the basic service free to get as many people taking AI for granted as they could, and make their money off premium subscriptions sold to industry. After trying AI though industry quickly figured out that they wouldn't be able to fire all their workers and replace them all with AI agents, as promised, so industry uptake of AI has not been high at all. So now OpenAI and co are probably starting to panic about how they're ever going to repay all the money invested in datacenters, and 'just put some ads in' is a tried and trusted solution to getting some revenue. Even if they planned to start enshittifying eventually, I imagine they didn't want to start so soon.