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Comment Re:Fix the ADs!!! (Score 1) 54

^ 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?).

Comment The one good possibility with AI slop (Score 1) 54

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...

Comment Re:If you're under 40 there's no reason to change (Score 1) 145

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.

Comment Re:Sellouts (Score 2) 51

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.

Comment Re:good old days (Score 3, Funny) 60

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.

Comment That wasn't a halucination (Score 5, Insightful) 60

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.

Comment Gates' silly tax idea (Score 3, Insightful) 80

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!

Comment Re:I wonder what the real impacts would be. (Score 1, Funny) 309

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.

Comment Are we sure this guy is "far right?" (Score 2) 309

I haven't yet seen any activities by President Trump, which are to the right of LBJ. Another example, right here. Every fucking news item, if it isn't about his personal dishonesty and corruption, then it's about his far-left politics, which for some reason, are called far-right. WTF.

I am starting to disapprove of the Soviet Union's Communist Party renaming themselves as America's Republican Party. Why didn't the existing trademark holders object?! They should have fought back against the hostile takeover.

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