I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

It's almost like elections have consequences, and America has elected that it and its businesses are going to be treated like the plague. Well, even more than that, even visiting the US is dropping, and now with US Marines on city streets in a major US city, well, fuck that banana republic. I will never enter the US again.

I've had rendering nightmares in Word, including docx files. There are most certainly version and rendering issues in Word just like any other word processor. It gets really horrendous with tables and frames, particularly when they are used as some sort of typesetting system, at which point try to open up on a different version of Word than the documented was created on, and it can turn into a mess.

I can get native Zoom apps on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and Linux. It isn't perfect, and they've added a lot of cruft, but all in all, I've had less problems than I've had with Teams.

Instant apps created a lot of complexity and awkwardness in the Android platform. It has consistently been painful to deal with and work around, and been especially challenging for the security team, for a feature with very little user or developer interest. Killing it is definitely the right call.

It's not like the writing in the original Star Wars film was all that great. Guiness's dialogue was cheesy enough that he begged Lucas to kill his character off (and Lucas, to his credit, found a way to get Guiness into two more films).

But if I were making fun of the third trilogy at this point, it wouldn't be so much about the bad writing (though in general it's bloody awful), but the almost complete lack of any kind of plotting.

The Producers? Young Frankenstein? Blazing Saddles? High Anxiety?

I'm not sure there's a funnier scene in any movie ever made in history than Springtime For Hitler (the reaction shots in that scene are the best I've ever seen in a movie), with the possible exception of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster doing a song and dance number to Putting On The Ritz.

For me, at least, Mel Brooks is probably the pinnacle of comedy filmmaking.

The only one I can think of is John Candy (which is a big hole), but Rick Moranis has been retired for many years now, and he's rebuffed most attempts to get him in front of a camera again.

So the Meta AI app is bad, but this shit will appear everywhere and in places where it serves no purpose. I have an uncle-in-law living in South Africa who came over to Ireland and had a problem with Whatsapp on his phone. The problem was it had a frigging AI chatbot stuck in the middle of the UI. He's hard of seeing so his phone had font zoom on everything and this thing was eating 20% of the screen. As far as I could tell there was no way to turn it off or hide it from the UI either and I tried.

Why did he have it but my Whatsapp didn't? No idea, but presumably they forced it on some regions with lesser privacy regs with the intent of rolling it out everywhere in due course. So enjoy AI dogshit everywhere, even in apps where it makes no sense.

Seems like not-enough-people is a relatively straightforward problem to solve, if your country isn't completely awful. You just invite some immigrants in, and presto, you've got more people. There are plenty of people around the world looking for stable, decent places to live, so sourcing shouldn't be a problem.

Too-many-people is a much trickier problem, since nobody wants to be voted off the island.

Soon it will be just like over-the-air TV, except you're paying Amazon $180/year for the privilege of watching their ads.

So the system responded that it was an already claimed serial number and not an invalid serial number? Who the fuck would do that?

Let's say someone put in a claim.

Well what is to stop them from trying consecutive serial numbers to see if they can get even more?

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

People are ascribing the wrong motives to the manufacturers. What they want is money. What Barbie will be subtly trying to work into conversations is suggestions that she try to get her parents to buy her playhouse, car, friends, fashion accessories, etc etc.

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"