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Comment Re:Leave Meta alone or face embargoes on all trade (Score 1) 83

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

Comment Re:People are sheep and can't help themselves (Score 1) 83

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Comment Re:so... (Score 1) 172

All of that is still available for you, all you need to do is stop clicking the cheapest price you see every time you fly.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

You're being offered a nice delicatessen along side a shit sandwich and *YOU* are choosing the shit sandwich and complaining about the taste.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

Either way you're getting an order of magnitude better flying experience for the same price as the days of old.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

Comment so... (Score 2) 172

gaining access to a luxurious airport experience

So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?

Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.

A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.

Comment Re:Lithography (Score 1) 28

Probably.
But the mirrors, for example, are made by Zeiss. Lots of parts are from the supply chain and ASML doesn't even HAVE their secrets.

You are right that some industrial espionage could be useful. I just say it's not as useful as most people would assume (which is basically the Hollywood plot of "steal this secret and we can copy it"). Nah. You can find on the Internet how a nuclear bomb is made. But it takes a lot more than a print-out to actually make one, and a couple of those steps are genuinely hard.

Comment Re:AI Company says their AI is the bestest boy (Score 1) 184

Fascinating answer.

It seems to me that the unablated thoughts fall into the category of "what would a human user expect that a good answer to this prompt would be?" - and out comes something that is clearly an aggregate of stream-of-consciousness writing.

But then the ablated models seem to go for a direct answer without much less interpretation and "pretend to be human". I wonder what that's about. I'd love the AI to answer more like the machine it is, and right now I'm getting that through skills.

Comment Re:Lithography (Score 1) 28

Not sure how far industrial espionage gets you here.

There's nothing fundamentally secret in lithography. We know how it works. The secret sauce is the experience, processes, know-how, highly specialised suppliers etc. The practical complexities are immense. Given the security incidents ASML already had, I'd make a bet that a large amount of the valuable data is already in China. But the supply chain and the engineering don't live on paper and are not easily duplicated.

Comment Re:Don't look! Don't look! (Score 1) 97

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?

Comment Small efficiency gain in the assembly line (Score 2) 18

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."

Comment Just another reminder of the upcoming auctions (Score 2) 128

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?

Comment Re: Bygone days. (Score 1) 64

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.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 154

Not always. If you pay money to get a ticket into a movie or a concert, cause some sort of commotion, you will be kicked out and you will not get a refund nor would you deserve a refund.

That is largely true.

But in the case of games, I'm not on your property. And we already discussed servers - I might not even be on your servers.

It might help to clearly separate these two cases: Pure online games with servers hosted exclusively by the game publisher, and the 90% of other games (single player or multiplayer with player-operated servers).

Because you are such an entitled moron, you don't realize how wrong you are about pretty much everything.

And there we have it, the usual ad hominem of people who have run out of actual arguments. Signaling the end of the discussion, because why the fuck should I bother talking to someone who says such shit?

Goodbye.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 154

The game server is in the domain of the seller. -- Irrelevant.

No, it's not. Nice of you to cut away the part that already said so. It is HIGHLY relevant if something you purchased becomes unusable due to an action of the seller or not.

Why should you be allowed to? Because you gave them money?

If you are new to this planet, this might be news to you, but otherwise: Yes, that is how commercial transactions work. You pay for something, you get to use it.

Just because you paid money doesn't give you permission to do whatever you want

No, but it absolutely DOES give me not just the permission but the RIGHT to use the thing I paid for for its intended purpose and for any other purpose I see fit. First sale doctrine and so on.

If refunds for a disabled games were to be a thing, they'd have to figure something out, because it's not the store's fault.

That is correct. But the store could either sell the same game again (in your case where the buyer personally was banned for whatever) or demand a refund from the manufacturer as is common practice when defective goods are returned. Really, there's not much to figure out, this is already a solved problem.

[the word "buy"] does not automatically mean you are now the owner of something.

Actually, that is exactly what it means.

Merriam-Webbster: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buy)

"to acquire possession, ownership, or rights to the use or services of by payment especially of money : purchase"

Seriously, why are you trying to defend an indefensible position ?

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