The AI editors and AI "fact checkers" will have been coded by the same people (or, eventually, the same stupid AI programming code) and trained on the same data and will therefore not SPOT the errors, not require the retractions, and almost certainly "fact check" the errors as "true", thereby becoming the obstruction to actual humans correcting things.

AI is likely to produce a new world in which people can believe NOTHING in electronic format, and they need to return to being trustworthy and honest and getting information, and doing transactions, on a handshake with a trusted human, face-to-face.

Congrats to all you people working on stupid large language models and lying to everybody by mis-representing this form of "AI" to the general public as though it were Artificial General Intelligence. You are on the cusp of destroying modernity and forcing society to step backwards 80 years or so. Those of us who worked to bring about the computer revolution INTENDED to build a bright future where computers made everything better, faster, more-efficient, more factual, etc but you are in the process of flushing it all down the giant cosmic toilet. Oh, and before you ask: NO, no additional algorithm can fix this. Algorithms cannot fix human nature, and human nature defaults to abusing every new technology. The current generation of AI is the most-powerful yet least-understood-by-the-public tech to come along. It's already mis-leading people by the millions - just look at the MOUNTAINS of AI slop ruining the YouTube experience already. It only gets worse from here...

We need new drugs for cancer, diabetes, vascular problems, liver problems, rebuilding nerves, destroying proteins and collagens that build up in eyes and blind people, etc. and we have a bunch of drug researchers who are, instead, working to supply a bunch of new (almost certainly addictive) mind-altering drugs to keep people with addictive personalities properly numb?!?

Sheer madness. Probably driven by cash - people will ALWAYS pay for a "high", and some will pay any price to any low-life vendor to live a strung-out life. We'd be better off to create some gated communities and tell people who want to get high to go there and do all the drugs they want within the gates, as long as they never leave without being "clean". Then just legalize all the tried-and-true mind benders for use in those places. Have at it folks! cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, lsd, whatever you want... you just cannot leave and hurt innocent people.

We need drug researchers to be working on serious medications for people with actual serious medical conditions.

Sorry for the rant, but the longer you live, the more decent people you will have known who suffered (and often died) for lack of help with actual serious medical conditions. I no longer am able to muster an ounce of sympathy for anybody who just wants to destroy a few brain cells over a weekend for recreation, and little patience for anybody dedicated to helping them.

you want human beings to ever be anything more than scurrying about on Earth becoming gradually better at killing each other until they eventually succeed or the sun burns out (your choice).

Here's the thing: ANY human voyage to any other place in the universe will be vastly more difficult and dangerous and require more time away from Terra Firma. Therefore, the Moon is a perfect place to learn what we need to learn, and to practice (and get good at) the things we will need to be excellent at in order to manage ANY further exploration. If we cannot get the toilet right on a lunar mission, then any other space destination is right out. We could learn all the same lessons with a destination like Mars, BUT that would be vastly more expensive, and take a huge amount of additional time (each flight would take months vs days, and the launch windows are years apart rather than weeks apart). This is what even Elon Musk has recently surrendered to. When we have mastered the regular lunar flights with sustained time on the lunar surface, we will finally know how to learn to do Mars without going bankrupt and killing lots of crews.

Fight the good fight. Despite being early adopter of Gmail, I moved away from everything Google after they demanded I perform age verification. Thankfully I've seen it coming and they were unable to hold my data hostage.

"And we are just letting it happen because why the fuck not?"

Who is "we"? You? Are you letting it happen?

"...our love of moral panics and knee-jerk reactions."

Like your post?

I don't trust Google, therefore I suspect this is about loading ads and claiming they were displayed even if user never got to see them.

You are past having an ideologically driven opinion and now well into intentional blindness. No, what you say is not at all true. People can afford cars and alternatives to cars are often prohibitively expensive. Driving is not optional for most of the country, especially in rural places where they grow food. Also, most real jobs, like growing food, cannot be done remotely.

You'd think with the successes of the original 16-bit Apple machines, then the Mac platform, full of third party software of every kind imaginable, it should have been self-evident that third party apps would be natural and beneficial. But people like Jobs just can't help themselves: their instinct is to control their platform and exclude everyone else. So they indulge the Reality Distortion Field hard enough to convince themselves that such a scheme is viable, all evidence of history to the contrary, and capture all the money.

The jail breakers are the real heros. They're the ones that pierced the Field and corrected this dysfunction, where no amount of explaining had any impact. They left Apple with two choices: go to war with jail breakers and become a pariah, or correct the bad thinking that prevailed to that point. Fortunately they chose the latter.

Or maybe unfortunately. The residual tyranny that did survive is more than I've ever considered tolerating. Maybe it would have been better if Apple had self-immolated the iPhone with Jobs' vision.

It is somewhat correct. For one like Linux, Darwin is open-source. Many of the commands in Mac OS are also linux commands (grep, cat, etc..). It is a POSIX like OS (both take inspiration from UNIX). Also, both use the same file driven layout. (same slashes, same . notation for hidden files, etc etc etc). It is certainly more like Linux than say, Windows.

There is nothing about such a mission that mandates obsolete, 2x order of magnitude money torching. Please stop it with your commie shilling.

It doesn't really matter in the long run. Sooner or later the US with elect another (D) president and the teacher's union and/or some other pressure group will once again cut NASA's space program and take the money. After than, NASA or whomever will be forced to adopt cost effective solutions.

They can't afford any of your "solutions".

What about people in the bottom 50% of wealth/earnings?

I've been wondering for many years before the first traffic camera appeared, why the toll-roads aren't enforcing the speed limits automatically. The time you enter and exit the highway is recorded down to a second. The distance between these two points is known — your average speed could be computed on the spot even with the early 90-ies technology...

The polite police officers would be standing right behind the toll-booths issuing tickets without the drama of hiding in the bushes, then chasing you at highway speeds...

And, yeah, you could lower it by stopping at a rest area — but it'd still be a tremendous disincentive to speed.

I was and continue to hope, that such universal enforcement, affecting all voters, would cause the limits to go up to reasonable figures — or even be abolished completely...