Use ad-blockers, and then "engagement" becomes just another unwanted expense, like it should be. Make 'em say "I sure wish ISPs would cache my site's pages so that not every user has to hit my little server." Party like it's 1995, dudes!

The nice thing about Europeans finally doing this, is that they might create and use standards!

And if they do that, then not just France, but everyone can dump their proprietary meeting software.

^ This is the way. The way to fix ads was to cut ads out of our lives. It worked spectacularly well, IMHO. The only catch is that when you do it, it just works for you. So you've got to advocate it to others, if you're worried about what other people might do while under the influence of ads (i.e. what if they vote?).

In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" (scifi written in the '00s but takes place approximately around now) there is a thing called "Friends of Privacy" which makes it hard to find relevant information about a person, by overwhelming the truth with a sea of spam/misinformation. If you google your ex-wife and get 200 different possible addresses (all of them credible), then you don't have her address.

I thought that was unrealistic and wouldn't really happen, of course it's starting to happen.

But it's happening (on a mid scale) with all topics, not just personal information, thanks to AI slop. We just need more AI slop targeting the stuff we want to target, not knowledge in general. But nevertheless, despite the mis-focus, it's kind of interesting to search youtube and see some of the garbage that you end up landing on. If only we could make that happen to our adversaries...

GW lets you include the air conditioners, making the resulting number much more impressive!

William Shatner is a classically trained Shakespearean actor who appeared in festivals and on Broadway prior to switching from stage to television. His TOS enunciation and emphasis is due mostly to his experience with radio performances (which were over the top verbally) combined with directors on TOS constantly telling him to increase the astonishment. And in reality, wasn't anywhere near as pervasive or dramatic as the pop culture version that pokes fun at Kirk.

On the bright side, every single person should be thinking about the computer they're going to build, when the fire sale begins on slightly-used graphics cards and RAM. That computer is going to be awesome!

Careful. If you make hardware too inaccessible, then I won't be able to load ads.

I understood everything you wrote until the end: the super rich caused aging? It sounds like I would be 35, instead of in my 50s, if it weren't for assholes like Bezos.

If you're right, I really do have something to be extremely angry about, but could you maybe show your work here? I wanna look at everywhere you use the t variable in your equations, just in case you might have made a mistake.

My understanding is that the entirety of Wikipedia is only about 60 GB and is conveniently downloadable. Anyone ought to be able to download a local mirror to use, instead of hammering wikipedia's servers, and doing so might be faster for the consumer, anyway.

And in a world where hundreds of millions of mainstream users stream video, I'm not sure bandwidth really is expensive anymore. To us old-timers, the numbers today are just astonishing. I almost can't believe I used to worry so much about efficiency .. of .. anything.

Why waste taxpayer money on manual fabrication, when a machine can do it much more cheaply? Your crooked cops belong on the dustbin of history, alongside all the buggy whips.

BTW, wait until you see the next Robocop movie! People liked his use of firepower in the first 3 movies, but his real talent will be in filling out dozens of plausible-sounding arrest reports per second.

Copilot hallucinated the game

No, Copilot correctly figured out a reasonably-believable completion of its auto-completion prompt. This is a success story.

That some people thought Copilot was stating a fact, is evidence in favor of Copilot having done exactly the right thing -- but also shows that those people don't know what LLMs do and what they are for.

The big question is: why are the police putting the output of these super-cool toys into intelligence reports? Intelligence reports should be based on real things, not interpolations of whatever random internet text some LLM happened to be trained on.

In other words: cops, you're holding it wrong. You shouldn't be having Copilot write or modify your reports, unless you're writing those reports for the novel, video game, etc that you're releasing once you retire from the police force. That is how to use this tech.

The year is YYYY and some dork has invented the antimagnetophasing encabulator, causing all those clunky old turboencabulators to become obsolete. At hundreds of companies across America, turboencabulator operators are being layed off, as the new antimagnetophasing ones can already project their protoneutrinos into Yuzna space with a tighter focus than any human operator can ever hope to achieve. And it's all automatic!

I worked at Company A, as turboencabulator operator. Yeah, I lost my job. Fortunately, Bill Gates' lets-tax-robot-workers idea has been enacted, so upon my layoff; no wait, actually, upon Company A's deployment of antimagnetophasing encabulators, they had to pay an extra $n tax every year, for replacing my job with a machine.

The fact that they're having to pay some extra tax is gratifying to me, but it's not putting food on my family. Well, I mean, I'm sure the $n goes into the social safety net somehow, so maybe I'll see a little piece of my $n if I go on foodstamps or something like that. But I don't want that. I want money.

Ya know, thanks to my old job, I happen to know a lot about encabulators. Even the new antimagnetophasing encabulator, which took my job, is no technical mystery to me. I understand them and I understand why they didn't need me anymore. I get why the company did that. I would do the same thing, if I were in their posi-- hey. What if I were in their position? What if I started my own encabulating company?

I'll just fucking copy the company I worked at! We'll have the same number of CEOs, the same number of salespeople, the same number of miscellaneous office workers supporting everything, but no turboencabulator operators, of course, because my company will use antimagnetophasing encabulators from its very genesis.

I form Company B.

Company B is just as productive as Company A in every way. We're vicious competitors, cutting margins down to the line, as low as we can go. Our customers are ecstatic as encabulation service prices plummet. But here at Company B, we have an edge.

We don't pay Bill Gates' tax because we never had turboencabulator operators. But company A is still paying $n every year for laying me off! HA! HA HA!! Thank you, Bill Gates, for throwing an arbitrary, unfair money-wrench into my competitor's business!

Thanks for the link. This does make it clear that it's about the OS, not the hardware as Politico implied. So it's Debian, not Dell, needs to be worrying about this.

Why is "everyone gets a free pony" such a terrible idea? Doesn't everyone like ponies? And these ponies are even better: they're free!

Now quit your leftist whining and tell me what address to write on this pony box. We spent a fuckton of tax money (double the market value) on this and I want to get your pony shipped out ASAP because feeding these things is costing a fortune.