It is definitely a good sign that you need to go with professed 'socialists' just to get some honest price signals in your market economy. Failure to enforce those is among the most fundamental failings one could imagine; yet here we are.

If you are going to anthropomorphize a tool enough to call it "AI" I suppose that it isn't entirely unreasonable to suspect that it might "reflect CCP ideology and values"; but fretting along that line seems to either be ignoring or deliberately obfuscating the difference between running a model and suckling on someone's black-box API.

A local bot can hurt you to the degree that you trust it to actually work; but a remote vendor can(and, given the competitive scramble for training data, almost certainly wants to and will try to to the degree they can get away with it) hurt you both to the degree that you trust it to actually work and to the degree that it can exploit the data and process information you are exfiltrating to them. This aspect is outright advertised as a virtue to some extent(when facebook is going on about how the 'AI' that 'knows you better' will be more useful; or one of the 'foundation model' vendors is promising your boss that, for real this time, improvements will allow next year's digital transformation to still work after it gets rid of you); but there's no reason to believe that it stops there: if the potential of 'AI' is half as interesting as they claim it is why would you expect that your vendor will just sit there obligingly renting you synthetic programmers or virtual back-office functions forever when they could just eat you whole?

For about 2 American money pits racing toward IPOs the chinese models are the scary pirate version that makes their value proposition look even worse than it does by itself; but for literally everyone else it's using the fancy, respectable, foundation model guys that is the glorious future of short-sighted outsourcing; and there's not much reason to expect any of them to like it for reasons beyond stupidity or desperation.

I realize that it's all about keeping the corporate sponsors happy; but I'm perpetually a bit puzzled by how the 'culture war' stuff never seems to result in any related action on things like food contamination (outside of a few 'crunchy'/'natural' influencers who make some social media noise but are essentially irrelevant from a regulatory perspective).

If one were looking for something remotely resembling intellectual coherence wouldn't the legality of persistent compounds that sure do seem to make endocrinologists nervous in food really get the people who are loudly concerned about biological gender or white birth rates motivated? However much you overestimate the ability of liberal propagandists surely you would take good, old-fashioned, chemical effects on the endocrine system even more seriously?

It certainly is good that any of the properties of an LED that you can measure cheaply and reliably enough to get away with using in consumer electronics are 100% distinct from those of other components or precisely the same LED covered with opaque epoxy.

Just detecting that there's now an open circuit where a diode should be would be fairly trivial and cover the cruder drilling cases; but this will be cosmetic at best against any moderately motivated tampering.

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

I would have loved to hear "tests are pretty useless" 40 years ago -- I was terrified of tests, and scraped through university.

I got 10% on one mid-term, which earned me an interview with the VP Academic of the university, who was also the prof. He grilled me on the material (thermodynamics), and I did just fine. He said, "You seem to know the material -- do you just not do well on tests?", and I said, Nope, never have. His answer: "Huh."

I had to continue to write exams, and continued to do poorly. I would have been thrilled to have a one-on-one session instead of an exam.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.

This seems like a situation where it's very hard to get excited about the idea that it's the regulator's problem. Did some Canadian fed technically have the authority to inspect? Quite possibly. Is there some sort of justification for even the cost of performing the inspection, much less any undesired knock-on effects of the notion that literally all vessels must be inspected no matter what, in a case like this? Seems harder to make that case.

There are a lot of situations where large portions of the public have no choice but to use products and services that they have no reasonable ability to be "informed" about. Either it's simply not possible if you aren't in a position to legally compel honesty from the vendor or it's a case where "informed" is PhD-level work in the area, or a combination of the two; but some rando's aggressively contrarian submarine that loudly and proudly skips all industry certifications and is available on boutique scale for very wealthy customers doesn't seem like one of those cases.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

When it's codified into the highest law of the land and doesn't work, and suggestions to do so voluntarily can't work to the point of being laughable, what options do we have left?

There's always Nancy Reagan's catchphrase: Just Say No.

Any particular game is expendable. You won't miss out on anything. Games don't even have the network effects and lockin that you get with other types of software; it's a part of the economy where Just Saying No is easiest of all.

Don't like the quality? Don't spend your money. They have no power over us except what we give them. Stop being so selflessly altruistic when it comes to actively supporting your own abuse.

It's so damn easy, and there's already hundreds of years worth of hassle-free game-playing available to spend the few remaining seconds of your life on.

Can we use these glasses, or are they just as worthless as Google's and Meta's, where they choose everything for you, and you'll likely get a DMCA complaint if you try to use them for your own purposes?

If not, then $21.95 is about as much as these people should be charging for the product, which is obviously intended to get its revenue through proprietary software/services sales.