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Comment O.M.G.! (Score 3, Insightful) 14

This should be a completely "Duh!" moment for each and every one of those people who do crap like this. "Hey! You've got security clearance! Why don't you go crow about it on social media and make yourself a target of foreign interests?!?" In my not-so-humble opinion; if you're that daft you probably deserve to lose said security clearance and the job that goes with it.

Comment Seriously Surreal. (Score 0) 41

Arguably the king of outsourced manufacturing who hasn't built so much as an audio cable on this continent in several decades is suddenly ... what, exactly? Some sort of expert on sending their designs off to China or India for manufacturing, or?... No, wait, that's not it. Steve Jobs is dead and I'm waiting for Apple to quit twitching. Just let me know when Apple starts opening "broasted chicken" diners in their left-over spaces. That's usually a pretty good tell-tale that a company is on the ropes for real.

Comment It's a North American thing... (Score 1) 71

Do you really want to talk about DNSSEC penetration and turn a blind eye to IPv6 adoption? We've been working on IPv6 since 1996 as well and ... well ... here we are, last country on the planet to take it seriously, because carrier-grade NAT, NAT, and similar crutches get us through. How many people here have asked their residential internet provider if they support IPv6? I have, many times, and each one looks at me like I'm an idiot. They don't WANT to. You can't MAKE THEM. "You're not the boss of me!" "You're not my MOM!" "You're not my REAL Dad!" ...And so on and so forth. Making a technical push for both DNSSEC and IPv6 is harder than it sounds, mostly because of the entrenched tech companies and the abundance of IPv4 address space initially for North America when the internet was still young and dumb.

Comment Wasting someone else's time... (Score 1) 78

AI will probably go down as the greatest waste(s) of human time of any technology, ever. From AI slop bug reports to AI slop social media posts, we're all gonna end up hating each other while a relative few malevolent goons crank out AI slop on an industrial scale. Now small businesses can't even answer the phone without risking getting slopped. Good thing capitalism is on track to kill itself with it's own waste heat.

Comment Oh no! It's China! (Score 0) 136

Just wow. Way to bump a yawner headline. -- For those of you who don't remember Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung, or "Mousy Tongue" if you were a child of the 60s or 70s) and his little red book killed a couple of tens of millions of his own people because they were different, in the way, culturally apart from his upbringing, or any combination thereof plus a little hubris and spite. Since Richard Nixon's "re-opening" of relations in the early 70s, being "like China" was something you never wanted to be. China is a fascist police state and kleptocracy (with regards to their world-pilfering spying operations) and just generally not a great place to live if you come from anywhere else in the world. If they're going to discover the secrets of human-ending AI I would prefer that we not follow in their footsteps. If they're going to spend a bazillion dollars/yen/yuan on general AI and its subsequent dead-ending (kind of like the ATM rage and burn-out of the late 90s) then that's a fitting thing for them to be concentrating on for a couple of decades before they give up and turn their attention back to stealing everyone else's technology. We can always steal the tech from them in much the same way they do with the rest of the world when they've given up. And yes, I still say that any General IA that's aware enough to be considered "a thinking machine" is probably going to be prone to eradicate all of the unstable, stupid, greedy, wasteful humans on the planet because they tend to not make economic, political, or environmental sense. Is the current "AI" hype overblown? Yes. Can some LLM engines do useful things? Of course. But let's not confuse helpful bits of code with General Artificial Intelligence and conflate China's progress (or lack thereof) with anyone else's different progress.

Comment No, and No, but "keep your enemies closer" (Score 1) 248

Aside from just being "fancy autocorrect", LLMs aren't generally suited for engineering ideation exercises. You have to double-check EVERYTHING, so what's the point in giving yourself more work? If I want to read a business plan written by a seven-year-old I'll ask him or her to write one.

Comment It's hard when... (Score 3, Insightful) 134

It's hard to feel good about AI and LLMs in general when really sh*tty, megalomaniac companies strong arm, steal, coerce, threaten, and just generally behave badly in their rush to spend ten trillion dollars (and they're going to want it all back, at yours and my expense) to get their technology into the main stream. You shouldn't trust these people to watch your dog or cat for the weekend let alone your child or your whole life. Just say no to crappy companies who aren't so "well-intention"-ed as they pretend to be. They really see themselves as apex predators and we're all just "revenue", even if it kills a couple hundred thousand people while they "work the kinks out". And this is exactly why this round of AI SHOULD fail.

Comment I suspect... (Score 1) 155

I suspect that a lot of really rich and/or important people are going to have to die first before we, as a species, actually DO anything about it. (Black Swan Events not withstanding, of course. If someone could poke a volcano or start a nuclear war it might solve the heating problem but then you get side effects that sound like a pharmaceutical company's disclaimer.) And yes, our children and their children SHOULD hate us for it.

Comment Irony at its finest (Score 0) 77

If Meta creates a "super intelligence" one of the first things on its "do to" list will probably be to eliminate by force all of Meta's management and most of Meta's users. Quite possibly the rest of the human race as well. We all know that humans aren't really logical or efficient bio-mechanical entities when you stop to think about it. My recommendation would be for "Ummon" to go after the activist billionaires first as that would do the most good. Just my 2 cents, of course.

Comment And in a related story... (Score 1) 164

European counterparts to America's middle class enjoy reasonably-priced effective health care, more personal time, fewer cases of mental health issues per capita, and a much more secure retirement than any Americans other than those that are already in Europe. Plus a much more stable socio-political situation. Honestly, I can see Europe NOT wanting Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, X, and any number of wall Street hedge Fund shysters and bogus crypto-coin projects operating from their shores. Moreover, I can see them not letting the aforementioned AI companies pilfering of copyrighted works stand either, hence America's huge garbage tech companies not wanting to operate out of Europe unless they figure out some slimy but legal tax loophole. (I'm looking at you Microsoft and Meta.)

Comment And so the pendulum swings back the other way... (Score 1) 65

Let's hope 37Signals provides good jobs with good pay for their infrastructure and broadband staff and doesn't burn them out with a 2-week pager rotation just to "save money", or force them into a crappy, damaging work environment because some middle manager decided to treat his people "on the cheap" while taking better care of the machines.

Comment IA in general? Not trustworthy... (Score 2) 129

Aside from Zuck being a complete moron regarding what us normal humans want, just remember that most AI agents and entities will be built by large corporations who already DO NOT DESERVE YOUR TRUST, and therefore it stands to reason that most AI entities will also not be deserving of your trust or your tolerance. Most of the big tech companies today are really only one "Bhopal Disaster" away from something like mass murder or manslaughter anyway so be careful who or what you trust and how much access, control, or even view into your life you give them. You and I are still the product being bought and sold by these companies.

Comment Light bulb or dim bulb? Or dark (money) bulb? (Score 5, Insightful) 61

Comcast executives also apparently didn't want to realize all of the dark money they've poured into anti-municipal-broadband bills they've been sponsoring all over the country because competition is, apparently, hard. Comcast President Mike Cavanagh would rather legislate or litigate competition out of the way rather than give everyone in the country access to affordable, usable, decent broadband. So there's that too. I would highly recommend against giving Comcast any of your money unless you have no other connectivity alternatives. But then there appear to be lots of big companies using that same playbook. My heart doesn't exactly weep for them.

Comment So what google is saying is... (Score 2) 25

That the human race is largely complete sh*t and they don't deserve the internet in any form, especially the one we envisioned 30 years ago but never realized because the capitalists all moved in and started killing each other over money, squatters rights, scams, spam, and generally unfit behaviour to make a dishonest buck. Professor Farnsworth was right, "I don't want to live!... on this planet anymore!"

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