Okay, you're right that the word skilled did not need to be there. I am a fan of Wesley Willis too

Art involves manipulation on the part of a skilled musician or artist who is actively and intentionally moving you through a change of consciousness with their work. That is art. The manipulation of the perceiver performed by AI "art", however, is is not that. That is a different kind of manipulation--it is fundamentally insincere, and has no more feeling than an LLM does when it throws emojis at you.

The creator has no insight on how to move you, their only input is approving and modifying the final result. As such, to that end the creator doesn't need to know what they are doing-- they are merely working with an amalgamation of other finished prodcts that they don't understand beyond perhaps "this sounds happy" or "this sounds sad". There is no craft, only a finished product.

The transformative aspect of art and creating art is nowhere present in this picture. The whole of art and music is not a bunch of pretty colors or some nice sounds. Near-perfection delivered by a human is impressive, but delivered by a machine based on a generalization of other humans' work, it is gauche and devoid of meaning, as part of art is imperfection, both by way of natural human variation and also by artists knowing when and where there is greater significance in breaking the rules.

I don't begrudge say visual designers who need an audio component to presenting their work, but let's not pretend this is art, because art has context and intention, even if it was something gleaned from the natural world through the lens of a human. The AI could never know what is artful in music, because it is not even imitating the perspective of humans or their creative process, but rather the end result of their work.

Congratulations, you've been manipulated into emotional response by an imitation machine

"some of those signers would also claim that this story is also false and, we have nothing to fear from China."

Oh really? Name one. In reality those same people never stop fearmongering about Russia and China.

AI is fairly secondary here, in that even if AI was not there to train on the data, MS would still prefer to be the source of truth hosting for all your personal files. This kind of surveillance far predates AI.

Their moving away from gaming hardware, and moving away from allowing people to own their software towards simply selling you a monthly pass that lets you play the games, dovetails with this. The new model where your own computer is the backup, and their cloud storage is the source of truth, isn't predicated on the presence of AI to analyze your files.

Also as others have mentioned, this makes it harder for people to move to other OSes.

"Have no rights to your own property and be happy about it" is on-brand for an israel supporter like that guy

We've been bombing and in one case even double-tapping fucking fishing boats off of their shore and you're still out here saying "let's wait for the evidence which will probably be false anyway". You are easily one of the biggest bootlickers I've ever seen on here

He was a great one. Even today, Computer Chronicles is great for background listening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yes, clutching back the freedom that tech workers were offered with WFH that you, dear noble boss, don't trust the broader population with even if you do trust your own workers. But it doesn't stop at corporations fighting WFH, there's also the arrival of 9-9-6 work culture in tech and possibly other industries as well. After all, the entire disposition of these companies is replacing labor entirely. Child labor discussions are right around the corner once more desperation sets in.

As others have said, your "of coooourse profit is the only motive" take does not hit in 2025 with all conceivable private funding and institutional support thrown towards the neverending AI bubble, while China etc. walk circles around us with less than 100th of the research expenditures. This is all while western hardware and software companies pivot towards a corporate and government client-base, which has been obvious the last few months with micron and nvidia. AI companies have more GPUs than they can feasibly use. Surely, it's a profit motive!

And surely there are no greater motions in the industry than those that are palpable by your small business! And surely every technocrat must operate from the same rubric as you, and can't have other ideological motivations behind their decisions, just as you do not, dear small business owner.

There is certainly an element of rich sods flexing over their peons. For you to deny that that exists is silly--the fact that you got defensive around what you saw as a caricature of these people (whom you presumably relate to!) indicates to me that you yourself know better.

But that flexing was actually not my point at all, but rather, the motivation and expectation that is right there in TFA: that the employee will work harder to gain back these elements of their freedom. The part not in the article is the worker's ultimatum: they can otherwise join those somewhere unseen being munged by the jaws of destitution.

It's not a matter for these snobs if you are actually more effective with WFH, it's a matter of how hard they can make you dance to clutch back pieces of your own freedom that are likely already enjoyed by the same C-suite fucks who want to lay these dictates for everyone else.

Dis you read the article? Yes, the first tiktok ban predated it by three years, and then was dead in the water only to be picked up by democrats in 2024 and hastily brought acroas the finish line in response to young people's awareness of the genocide. The fact that tiktok is still operating, albeit it as a much more censored platform than before, makes the national security explanation that you provided seem even more ridiculous. Look at who they sold it to: mega zionist goblin Larry Ellison, who is also planning a MAGA pivot for his media properties.

Is ublock origin still not an option for librewolf?

That take was forgotten at the back of the fridge for nearly a year, taken out and then re-microwaved.

Thanks Larry Ellison, and great job to the dem legislators who just couldn't suffer critics of Israel, delivering us something drastically worse for everyone but their donors.

What? Sheldon Whitehouse is a democrat, and the bill has bipartisan support. That replacement doesn't make any sense even for the accusations you're throwing at me. Even the TikTok ban was dead in the water before dems picked it up again at the lobby's urging.

On top of that, you want to additionally (and without anyone asking for it) provide justifications for Trump overseeing extrajudicial executions off the coast of other countries, just so that I'd know you're a reactionary. Great. Give me a call when Russia has a babysitter for nearly every sitting legislator, the way AIPAC does.