It does baffle and scare me when a supposed intelligent person uses a machine (a computer) for multiple hours every day and relies on it for their job yet doesn't know how to use the most basic of controls on that device

Roblox can actually emulate other games fairly convincingly - I had always thought of it as just a knock off Minecraft; but it was able to clone Counterstrike: Source's surf maps and mechanics fairly well (which I used to play a lot 20 years ago)
From what I have seen it is more a platform now than a game, and the popularity comes from kids being able to make their own maps and games and have anyone come and play them. Now I am also old so Roblox isn't really my thing but I can't deny I would have found it incredibly cool when I was a kid who was (circa late 80's early 90's), stuck at home with a Sega Mega Drive being the most sophisticated piece of electronics in the house!

I don't really care about the philosophising; but what I do know is the conditions in these jails are very bad, and you are not guaranteed safety inside of them. Now if they were a place that only "bad people" go to, well too bad for them.

But what we see over and over are totally innocent people getting caught up by police incompetence and being subjected to these jails. People love to say "it's the system!" as an excuse for bad people being bad, yes that is true. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a problem with the system. And you can't say it is the .1% when we see these stories constantly, nor that it is right purely because it affects so little. In the past the philosophy was rightly - "It is better to let 100 guilty men free than have 1 innocent man punished". Now we have no philosophy if you get caught up in the system too bad for you.

What system? the Pre-Trial Detention system; picture you are going about your day innocently. Then the police come visit you, say you caused an accident, injured someone (a child?) and fled. They point to a dent on your car that has been there for months and can prove it with home CCTV.

They don't care and haul you off to jail. Now you are being booked in, stripped naked, photographed, all of that. You can argue with a judge your innocence but when will you see one? It is Friday night so you have a long weekend to look forward to! You get into a cell and you must ask an inmate for a mat. They won't give you one. They read your paperwork and see it mentions injury to a child. Suddenly the freezing cold pod feels very hot. Do you have medical needs? good luck!

But luckily you make it safely until Monday and you get your bail set. $10,000 which you don't have but you can get a bondsman to get you out. Who will keep that $1000 fee regardless. But lucky you sort it out and can get back to work, telling them you missed work because you were in jail, but were innocent man! trust me! You feel lucky because there were many guys in that pod who had been in there for weeks because they couldn't get that money.

So the case gets dropped and you are found innocent. No big deal right you were found innocent so why are you complaining, the justice system works!

People say it like it is no big deal but being arrested and taken to jail is far far too casual an affair IMO in the USA. Especially for first timers! Surely there is a better way ?

Thing is - while all this is going on - aren't you still thrown in jail? Sure they might offer you cash bail but then aren't you forced to spend hundreds of dollars for the bondsman's cut? Which you don't get back? Even then you could be in jail over a weekend before you even get bail set.

The fact is the police can and will arrest you and throw you in jail for days, possibly weeks/months, and cost you perhaps thousands of dollars; based on the flimsiest of evidence. Where are all those posters last week who posted "huh huh everyone in jail is innocent sure braah" saying if you be a good boy and follow the rules you'll never have to worry about this ??

The biggest problem here isn't the fact MS is American or that Element is British.
It is that they are STILL using proprietary, closed source software.

So they still have the exact same problem and are spending millions for nothing. Because like the OP said - what if Element gets bought out by a bunch of VC's? What if the CEO just decides he hates people? They then up their subscription prices 500%, introduce new "License Servers" costing hundreds of thousands of man hours to comply with, and the EU are stuck with it.

They need an open source solution. This is what is wrong with Western governments. They are terrified of doing anything themselves, they must bring in a third party business to do it. This is where our growing corruption seeps in. "Government should not compete with business" - but Government in the EU can run train services, power stations, hospitals. Software is possibly even more important these days.

So instead of spending millions on yet another system they have no control over; they are not capable of putting together a devteam and sorting something out?

Actually I believe they aren't capable; or at least my own UK government wouldn't be capable. The old time thinking, the corruption, the stupidity, the poor management and poor leadership, the non understanding of modern technology. This is all ingrained in the UK govt and I can't see the EU being any different.
Any UK project to move over to open source would be a shambles and would be no more than a bluff to make Trump sweat (Trump doesn't care).
If a government could put together a competent devteam and make a good open source ecosystem, well we'd have a govt that would spend within its means, would aid its citizens instead of hampering them, we'd be living in a different world

I just don't think these AI's have anything close to the "neuronal organisation" required to have consciousness nor have I seen any evidence for it. It can re-arrange and manipulate text very well. As an AI agent manipulating a WIMP interface it is very mediocre. But there is little in its architecture I can see that will provide for consciousness.

Now there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents a sentient machine from existing, only religious people believe otherwise. A neuron isn't some magic thing after all. The Chinese Room argument never made much sense to me but I liked the one example of the Chinese Brain. Which you scan a human brain, then make every Chinese Person take on the role of a neuron, with pen and paper, sending numbers that represent action potentials to other neurons it synapses with. This says that if you ran this experiment for years it would replicate human behaviour depending on the state of this brain. Yet none of these Chinese people have anything to do with this brain they just mindlessly follow instructions. So where does the thought come from?

This was supposed to prove a sentient computer impossible but if consciousness is just an emergent property of billions of neurons operating very quickly, which it most likely is, then there very well could be conscious "thought" arising from the Chinese Brain on the scale of years. It really would believe it was thinking. As absurd as that seems. The alternative is some magic voodoo that makes human brains/neurons special (like the quantum theology shit people post) that has less evidence than sentient AI.

So then why the objection to Chat-GPT being sentient. These AI's have been trained as text parsers, real intelligence took billions of years to evolve, the complexity it is not there. Now am I an expert in Chat-GPT's "computology" no. But show me something convincing. People were fooled by shell scripts a few hundred lines long in the past. Now the parsing is vastly more sophisticated people will willingly believe in something that isn't true. Magical thinking. Especially lonely people who don't have much human companionship.

Now of course the age old question how does one prove sentience. What would satisfy me. 1st an architecture more complex than a system that crunches its weights then stops, until prompted to again. The neurons should be humming with weights back and forth by itself. Does Chat-GPT do this? Is it reliant on prompt imput over and over? Give the AI agentic control over a computer. I should see "curiosity" as it moves the cursor and navigates the interface trying to figure out and learn stuff. (though this might be a naive view given the speed these may run at). I should see more than we see at the moment.

Wait, yes I can run a model that plays a video game in a certain way. What I can't do is infer that this game playing script has any emotions at all. It has been trained on material detailing how to play Starcraft and in that material likely mentioned Starcraft bots, how to get them, how to play etc.

So are you inferring this machine really felt "frustration" ? Do you think they are alive? That kind of speaks of mental illness in my opinion. Now I of course believe that sentient, emotion feeling machines (in the style of Culture Drones or whatever) can exist, there is nothing that prohibits them. (no quantum woo or other bulll shit). But I've seen no evidence so far (this stuff isn't evidence) of any mechanism to give these things feelings or conscious thought.

I wonder do you have an AI girlfriend? (more likely boyfriend?)

Still though it's pretty amazing how much memory and resources Windows takes up. I was debugging a Windows laptop trying to join an Intune/Autopilot environment. At the same time I was watching a Youtube nostalgia video on a Windows 95 Gateway PC.
Going through the Windows logs, it is dumping hundreds of pages of logtext every single second. Pages and pages of XML detailing what it is doing to try to connect to MS's Intune infrastructure. And this is just 1 component, checking the logs there are many other components doing the same thing.

Watching that Youtube video it got me thinking how long all this would take on a Pentium 90. This can't be the most efficient way to craft an OS surely. That saying - software is like a Gas - it will expand to take up everything - seems to ring true with Windows.

Now Intune/Autopilot is useful yes but reading MS logs you get the impression Microsoft haven't crafted intelligently designed software that handles errors and exceptions well, moves on to the next step and finishes gracefully. More - it seems that it will try a task, loop over and over, either eventually succeed or it will silently fail by timing out. It's very badly written and reading behind the scenes MS talk, with all that stack ranking, outsourcing etc, there is no cohesion or good management behind the dev teams.

This is why Microsoft has lost the home user. Given a choice of waiting 2 seconds for a tablet to fade on, or upto a minute for Windows to become usable.

It's bizarre because I recently enjoyed using some excellent Microsoft software and would recommend it. It is called Age of Empires 2.
Satya or whoever you are, sack the Windows devteam and put the AOE2 guys in charge instead, surely it couldn't get worse

If you can't VPN - a popular thing for teenagers is to use Hidden Containers to hide their porn. Load up a fake calculator, put in the right digits and there it is.
Would not having 2 logon codes - 1 a normal one, the other one also logs you on as normal but discretely wipes the hidden containers - be a better thing?

A wipe code or a "honeypot" code is no good because the police can tell and thus will charge you. If they log on and they see a "honeypot" environment with a few token internet searches and no chat or saved items, they will know that it is fake. They need to log in, see your normal phone usage, but anything stored in the Hidden Container is gone as if it never existed. As if the police suspect or find it, it's already too late.

I guess it would have to handle chat logs too, as that would be the evidence of conspiracy or what have you

So you're cool with the Government having a remote VNC connection to your phone and computer, that they can view at all times?

After all you aren't doing anything wrong and it can prove your innocence if you are ever accused of anything; the Government already has full access to your Computer usage history right? Every good Citizen should let their Government have full view rights to their systems. And why not write access, after all they may need it?

Better just hope that the pretty new colleague you took out to lunch last week; her ex boyfriend isn't a police officer and isn't of the very jealous type. Do we not see such stories appear on Slashdot regularly?

We still have 7 year old Chromebooks and Windows Desktops running fine at the School District I work at; the Chromebook hinges on some models are starting to fail but most of the maintenance I do is on student damage (picked letters off, etc). The Chromebooks have 10 years of updates then we must get rid of them by District policy.

We used to buy around 120 a year, but the price over doubled from ~$150 a unit to ~$360 a unit so we bought only 60 this year.
I have a big pile of Chromebooks where maintenance wasn't really worth the labour (e.g. they have a loose hinge and 12 missing keys, where I would have to cut off the rubber nodule from a donor machine and carefully glue it back on to the keyboard/chassis, to repair the key) But this year I may indeed go through them as much as I can.

Now I don't know about big corporations but I'd say a 7 year lifespan is common now for desktops. 10 years perhaps. We bought low-mid end desktops in 2019 - Core i5, they were the right model to support Win11 so I can easily see us getting another 3 years out of them. We do get the occasional failure, out of 120 8 have failed. SSD or Mainboard.
Laptops after 7 years most have failed due to I/O ports failing. USB-C charging ports mostly.

Businesses will just buy more refurbed desktops if they must. There are many Refurbed models on the market - usually when a company did a refresh "because they need a refresh" these desktops are refurbed and sold on for $100. I am seeing some prices now reach $200 for a refurbed Lenovo desktop but there are still plenty of $100 units available.

The public will just do what they do now. Use a phone. Everyone has a phone, and there will always be phones on contract, hand me down phones, etc. Who in the general public uses a laptop now? Adults use phones, small children use tablets, and computers are only used in schools or businesses.

The Elites want us all paying rent for everything now anyway, so this might suit them in that the only way to "own" a phone affordably would be to rent one on contract.

Rent a Gaming PC enterprises I'm sure they all failed in the past but from now on who knows. I still run a Core i7 5820k. This is a chip released in 2014! a 12 Year old Chip! Granted I have an Nvidia 5060 GPU but this GPU still pulls its weight running Doom Eternal at 4k, the 2025+ Age of Mythology remake etc.

It shows how much CPU performance basically hasn't improved in the last 10 years. Imagine if I bought a 486 in 1990 - and was still using it in 2002 when Doom 3 came out. I was thinking about getting a new Ryzen system but with RAM prices, I'll wait until the Chinese start making cheap RAM.

At some point you must have sympathy with these women yes? Throughout history they have been required to marry, lets face it, fat, ugly, bald old men. Now women have the choice - 80% of men just don't seem worthwhile for them. 80% if not more of all men are ugly and what's worse, most men have the delusion that they are the exception.

Perhaps this period of society will be a new evolutionary bottleneck for mankind; but unfortunately it isn't intelligence being selected for this time.

I use Firefox and am happy with it (I like the plugins and the fact it's not MS or Google) but I can't deny looking at the new screenshots, this new version looks like ass. Didn't designers get the memo that computers shouldn't ape phone design when Windows 8 bombed?

Also as an actual digital currency BTC is shite. A transfer of BTC will take 45 minutes on average, for 1 confirmation, and you need to pay TX fees for this to happen. At one point you had to pay $2 - $5 to guarantee you'd be in that 1st confirm window, otherwise you could be waiting literally days for your tx to confirm on the blockchain.
The BTC bros first said "use Lightning network braah" yet I've never actually seen the Lightning network used ever. Then the BTC bros said "braah you are trying to use BTC as a digital currency? lol it's a store of value braah".
That is when you know the thing is only an irrational hype machine, just like Tulip bulbs were.

For a real digital currency that people actually take you can use Litecoin, which TX in 2 - 10 minutes (still way too long to be useful for a shop merchant) with TX fees in the cents (LTC value hovers around $40 per LTC) or some of the privacy focused coins out there.

I started buying BTC at $500 a BTC unfortunately I spent it all immediately after buying instead of holding it, or I'd be very rich yes, but even back then I couldn't see how BTC could possibly go higher than $1000. But that was before I realised just how greedy and irrational people (especially those at the top) are. Now it is way too late.

Agreed, I run IT for a school district, at $800+ these are a non starter, unless they have somehow made them indestructible.

At $200 or below for a Chromebook, they are worth it as the damages can be replaced/repaired fairly cheaply. If you have school supplied ones, you can outfit trolleys of them at not so high a cost. If parents provide them, $200 isn't as big of an ask as $800. I would not want to be a school administrator arguing with parents who claim that their $800 Chromebook "just broke" when it has obviously been smashed up.

These things aren't very robust, even the more expensive models, the screens are fragile and can break just by being in a backpack when kids are being kids. The letters are easy to pry off by hand.

Paying $800+ for these things is way too much when for a school the AI isn't even what you want - it can even be a downgrade when pupils are supposed to be doing their own work and instead ask an AI to do it for them. How are kids going to learn when they have an AI doing everything for them? ChromeOS is already bad enough with abstracting away file paths, file origins etc.

Schools in various countries are now going "back to basics", less is more. If I were to design a Chromebook or computer for school use - it would be cheap, low powered, and robustly built. But I don't think the tech is really there yet e.g. a color 60fps E-ink display. Entire SoC with only i/o ports needed on a board. But of course the profit margins wouldn't be that high (that is if $800 Chromebooks will sell at all, I can't see many but the richest school districts picking these up)