I think they mean the licensing is "all digital." Just an entitlement associated with your account on their servers.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

I get how it could apply to randomized content like streaming radio, but the very concept seems incompatible with "choice".

I agree, that's what I initially thought as well. A backdoor is supposed to be a built-in feature, possibly covertly added, but a designed-in part of the software nevertheless. This sounds more like a particulary sneaky remote access trojan.

You have to wonder though, if it is behind a NAT and Firewall like most PCs, how does it receive the magic packet if it doesn't phone home? It must be designed to be used against a specially targeted victim.

Is 98 greater than 56? Yes? Okay then. It's still going up. So much vitriol from someone posting nothing but bare assertion - Cite please, beyond your fee-fees?

Let me 'splain it to you in simple language. The number of qubits doesn't need to scale exponentially on the short term for quantum computing to pose a very real threat; it only needs to hit the mid hundreds. As I mentioned, Grover's algorithm is O(n) - Meaning once we hit 256 qubits (plus some change for overhead), SHA256 is substantially weakened. Is that a full crack of AES, which you'll kindly notice I didn't previously claim, Mr. Goalposts? No. No it isn't - But it's arguably worse - SHA is almost ubiquitous and affects far more than encryption itself. You don't need to crack a tank's armor if you can convince its driver to piss in the fuel tank.

I also happen to think - and to be clear, what follows is my opinion, not psychic knowledge about the future - you're completely wrong on the bigger picture; and once QC hits its stride Gordon Moore will again be relevant. But critically, that's not necessary for it to cause some serious damage in the near future.

A stopped clock is right twice a day.

That's as simple as it gets. I'm no fan of the orange turd, but it's virtually impossible for him to be wrong on every issue.

Nvidia's Jetson Orin isn't subject to export controls. It's basically like Nvidia's version of the Raspberry Pi with a few tensor cores bolted on so they can call it "AI".

You'll find a considerable number of elder geeks spent years gainfully employed working on 4 bit MCUs.

The key details here are the number of qubits steadily improving, and that throwaway comment about needing millions of qubits should be disregarded as utter nonsense. Sure, it's gonna be a while before "gcc -march=quantum" is an option, but Grover's algorithm has a space complexity of O(n); Shor's is O((log n)^2). Hand-turned implementations of those will be gutting virtually all of modern cryptography long before the script kiddies start trying to fork-bomb the entire universe.

Remind us all again where "six months before ChatGPT was released" sits relative to the Covid pandemic?

To save you some Googling, that'd be March 11, 2020 (or earlier depending on how long CCP was hiding it) < November 30, 2022 < May 5, 2023.

David Deming is conveniently ignoring the middle of Covid when people were being literally paid not to work.

This is almost trivially obvious across the white-collar universe. Companies aren't hiring junior-level employees because in many cases, AI can do almost as good of a job for a tiny fraction of the price.

The reality is, of course, more nuanced. Case in point, Most fields have both back-office and front-end workers. If you're back office, you'd better be 40+ and at the peak of your career, because new juniors and (paid) interns are literally nonexistant over the past few years.

On the flip side - Someone needs to run cable, and ironically enough, the one thing robots don't seem good at replacing is the shit-work of the real world.

First, I want to say I'm staunchly anti-establishment. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck ICE, fuck Cheeto - And yes, while we're at it, fuck Biden, Clinton, and any other puppets of the pedogarchy you care to name.

All that said, the incident you describe is not a situation we should be defending (at least not until we're ready to actually declare war on our own government). The people involved drove up in a van full of weapons, dropped off a goddamned sniper right before arriving, and their sniper shot a cop when the "peaceful" plan to launch fireworks at a prison unsurprisingly went south.

Unless we've completely abandoned any pretext of rule-of-law, there's absolutely nothing defensible about that situation. FAFO, and they did.

This. I've come to the conclusion that it is immoral to respect someone who argues in bad faith.

When was the last time fascism or racism was categorized as un-American? That's what I'd like to see.

Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

I think the point is that if a math teacher can use AI to write a paper and thereby elevating their skills without any investment, then why can't a dumb student use AI to do the same? Eventually we'll all be dumb as rocks and require an AI to do basic thinking so we can get back to the important things, like masturbating and watching tv. It's kind of a moot point, really, because convenience always wins out in the end.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?