Each state that gets money in a judgement or settlement, should use that money to make sure their public education system teaches kids how to block ads.

By 2030, I don't think anyone should be able to graduate high school in America, unless they've learned how to be ad-free (on screens under their control; obviously they won't gain superpowers to blank out billboards or the sides of buses).

From TFS, FCS: "This technology is fundamentally different from the "rivulet (shark skin) process," which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology."

I remember walking 5-6 miles home at 2AM in college a couple times. 2-3 Miles was more common, but was staying at a friend's place. Wouldn't want to do it today, but I have almost had to walk home 5 miles from dinner at a restaurant last year when there was some odd service interruption for the busses. Fortunately an Uber eventually came, as there is no sidewalk, little light, and in some spots just a very narrow shoulder before a cliff.

That was equally true for previous generations, and all those generations had exceptions -- kids that were excited about it, despite the other kids not being interested. (I figure the majority of Slashdot may have been such exceptions.)

Do we have reason to suspect the current generation is a unique special case, the one generation where somehow all of them make an effort to never learn about computers?

I bet some of them are like some of us, a 2026 minority that we would have recognized 40 years ago.

Given the reference list, I suspect not ChatGPT, but rather https://magisterium.com/

Yours is a far more eloquent way of saying what I had intended to: why is this on Slashdot? Is there any relevance at all? I fail to see it.

If these athletes were coached by AI, well... maybe, but that's a stretch. But they're not; they are just taking more extreme measures to performance enhancement than other athletes. And while I know (and employ) some smart jocks, I had the same experience as you in secondary school, because I, too, was not a jock.

Because if POTS is a system of last resort for 1% of the population then it is going to cost >$150/month and provide essentially nothing. I'm advocating fiber (specifically PON) personally rather than POTS as it is practical to get to a similar level of reliability as long as the CPE have integrated batteries sufficient to make it work.

Cable cannot do that, and even a full cell site would struggle to match reliability.

If the Telcos are forced to maintain POTS it will be done like DSL-- fiber backhaul and an ONT serving one or more customers from a pedestal.

Personally I would stipulate fiber not just wired. The communication equipment needs at least a 24-hour backup, and that doesn't happen with cable amplifiers or microcell sites. At the home end, you need at least 500Wh backup for the customer premise equipment to do the same. Maybe the telco can demonstrate 99.999% based on actual utility data and backup provisions, but that should be the design threshold.

They recently bragged about how much they were getting done with AI vibe-coding.

Could it be related to the wave of bugs? Say it ain't so!

Exactly yes. You don't need a license to "copy" something to your mind.

You technically do need a license to copy something to a disk or to RAM. A number of cases around hacking/cracking have hinged even on the nuance that the hacker, by violating the "terms and conditions", no longer had a software license to make the "copy" of the software that was loaded from disk to RAM for example, and it was therefore copyright infringement.

In any case, yes, you are of course also correct that although you are free to remember anything, what you produce from that memory *may* be an infringing copy or infringing derivative work that requires a license.

But the difference of course, is that the LLM itself is already an infringing derivative work before it even produces anything. Your mind isn't.

And everything the LLM produces is basically just taking that collection of derivative works, and rolling dice on it to generate output. The output is a strictly a function of the input. On some level, it can't "not produce" derivative works. The best it does is slice and dice so many of them together that we can't tell.

I suppose that might be what the total sum of what human creativity is too, and some people genuinely believe that. It appears to be a surprisingly capable facsimile in some respects. But most people think there is more to the spark of human experience of creativity than *just* that, at least for now.

It is a scam, but the launch and Starlink portions aren't it. Launches can easily expand 10x, and Starlink has huge opportunities in backup service for residential and business, not to mention connected vehicles. Think of Starlink as an alternative to mobile phones.

The xAI data is prorated in for financial comparisons, but (IIRC) only 12 months prior to acquisition.

That is the sad reality of the IPO. It is solely to fund xAI for the next decade. The space business will eventually be spun off in a bailout after absorbing all the debt from the Twitter acquisition and AI burn.