Dude, if you're commenting on this site, you're my age or older. When you were a freshman, the information age was either just starting or not a thing. When I entered college, we were using Netscape still. Websites were nearly useless. Commentators were downplaying the internet saying it's just for Star Trek debates and low-res porn....no one would do real work, like banking, on it. You and I didn't deal with the impact of social media. Life was a lot simpler when we were freshman. Remember boredom? I fucking do. I was REALLY FUCKING BUSY as a college student working 2 student jobs and having a challenging major. Even then, lots of hours of downtime and boredom...commuting on the subway, hanging out in the dorms and later my apt. LOTS of hours sitting in some kid's dorm bored entertaining each other. We'd play old games we were sick of and make the best of it. We'd watch movies we had seen before because it's what he had in his room. We'd watch lame old movies because we watched all the good ones at our university's campus video rental place. Being bored is extinct today....replaced by a feeling you're not doing enough or missing something...no sense of downtime....that fucking phone in your pocket, a constant connection to every self-doubt you have, everything in life more fun than what you need to do, every bit of information to make you realize how daunting your path to success is.

I focused on studying and getting laid and my peers from wealthier families got to sit around the dorms bored getting high and doing enough to pass. No one knew shit. It took fucking effort to be informed. You'd have to read the newspaper and watch the nightly news and no one in college had the time for that shit. We learned things via word of mouth. I couldn't compare myself to those in my high school class. I had no clue who was dating or thriving.

Kids today? They're FLOODED with more information than human brains can handle. They can see boastful exaggerated posts of their former friends from home living their best lives. Everyone is more successful than you. Everyone has a better relationship than you. Everyone went on a cooler vacation than you. Oh, there's an article about some kid 2 years older than you that now has a multi-million dollar startup that may reach a billion dollar valuation...oh yeah, and he grew up somewhere in your state...isn't that cool???? ...and what are you doing with your life?...barely getting As, no girlfriend, a very uncertain path to success....Oh yeah, and AI?....that's in the news every fucking day....your profession may be extinct by the time you graduate. Certainly, ever CEO with an AI offering is saying we're 2 years from replacing all software engineers....which if that was true, would mean they can replace accountants, lawyers, most managers, even most doctors, etc. So....you could be taking on all this debt, get a law degree, and have to become a plumber to make a living.

Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation....meaning your success in life is a mixture of skill and luck and really much much more luck than skill. I know mine was. I am very skilled....but so are a fuckton of people who achieved less than me....and many less skilled people achieved a lot more. I was at the right place at the right time and I used my skill not to fuck things up....those far more successful?...most were in a better place at the right time. The point?...you're not successful in life because of your mental fortitude. If you were their age, you could not replicate your success perfectly. You'd have to be MUCH MUCH MUCH better and more skilled at life to replicate your success today. I know I would. I know there are 100x more interesting distractions today than before. I know things are more confusing, the standards are higher, the amount of information to process is impossible. When I was 18/19?....you could be smart by not being a dumbass...shit was easy. Our programming projects were tiny in scope compared to what is expected of kids today. We could have a 100line C program that doesn't do much of anything be a successful thesis in the 90s. Kids today need to build full stack apps in at least 3 different languages and know a FUCKTON more stuff than anyone who graduated in the 90s/00s. I could easily master the technology I was expected to know on graduating. it was usually a single language. NO ONE can master a full stack today. Anyone who says they do, just don't realize how little the know about databases...which aren't even just RDBMS any more, but a dozen types.

Fuck off with the kids are soft bullshit. I heard it all my life about me and we all listened to it about millennials and gen z...it's a tale as old as time and it's bullshit every time. I feel sorry for today's kids because A LOT MORE is expected of them than what was expected of Gen X people like me to make it into the middle class and have a basic standard of living. Life got a lot harder and more complex. You forget how simple things were for us.

If the experts think this may help, I am all for it. However, I do sympathize with kids today....shitting on the youth and pretending they're soft and inferior to you won't change the fact that your relevance diminishes each year, like it does for every other aging person. It won't change the fact that they have many more years on this planet than you and I do at this point.

We generally don't let the general public have access to enriched uranium, high explosives, or chemical or biological agents. These are also just "technologies." Anyone sufficiently intelligent CAN gain access to hazardous materials. But we don't allow it because society has recognized that these things are too dangerous to not tightly regulate. Unauthorized possession is itself considered a crime, and this is because of the risk level.

AI agents might not reach this level, but this example serves to illustrate that your arguement--that "outlawing technology is not the answer"--requires more nuance. Many gun owners are fond of saying that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That is also a specious argument. The gun makes it much, much easier to do it, and to do it in a way that is faster, more deadly, and more difficult to trace.

And the way these AI systems are designed is similar: whereas before, a competent hacker could go in and manually find vulnerabilities, now the process is automated and not even explicitly asked for. That's the crux of the matter: the more capability we train this technology to have, the more dangerous using it will become--just like a revolver pistol versus a chain gun.

The solution is not just technological or even legal. It's a societal one. We need to first acknowledge that agentic AI technology is intrinsically burdened with very serious risks, by understanding what it is actually and potentially capable of doing. We are at a phase of LLM development where there is a great deal of power exhibited by and granted to these tools but very little regulation due to the lack of such understanding. It might evolve to a point where computing systems have built more robust protections against abuse (whether intentional or not). It might evolve to a point where laws will be passed restricting certain uses. But to your point, the genie is already out of the bottle, and unlike, say, the relatively successful proliferation of age-verification laws and censorship of legal adult material worldwide under the pretense of "protecting children," the real reason why there hasn't been a massive concerted effort to prevent AI abuse is because the people who have the power to restrict it are the same ones who are making billions of dollars off promoting its use.

Of course...and many like Pilsner beer, like a Bud or Coors....I personally like those beers myself. However, I also really appreciate a Guinness and many other types of beer that taste nothing like bud light. If you like impersonal fucking....well, the world is your oyster...those are the default and dominant form. 99% of professionally produced and even the vast majority of amateur porn falls under that category. You're all set.

My wife prefers stuff where the couple is less tacky and the sex is more realistic. So for us, having more of that is great. If you're into stuff that resembles traditional loving sex?...it's an underserved market...those wanting a rough fuck?...well, I think it's safe to say you have many choices.

That's interesting. I didn't realize they were so firmly limited. I would have guessed other software would work allow it. I don't own these and never plan on buying any. I'm monogamous and sadly it's tough getting a wife/mom in her 40s to let you photograph, let alone video her....so video shenanigans are not in the cards for me. However, meta isn't the only game in town and really pro porn is an endangered species. It's just too hard to make money off it, especially for an extended period of time.

Go pro helmets are kinda weird. If you could get acceptable footage from a pair of glasses or something more natural looking, it would definitely help the experience, especially for couples. As you said, pros will go through a lot for their craft. However, amateurs are more likely to be bold if the video equipment is simple and doesn't take over their house.

I think most would agree, porn would be a lot better for society if more "real people" were in it. Instead of a LA fitness instructor with huge breast implants, like we saw in the 80s and 90s and 00s...what if it was actual women and men who are actually in love with their partners and have imperfect bodies? What if lonely people watched healthy, positive, loving sex instead of impersonal performances?

Even if I never see it, filming yourself can be a fun way of spicing things up for couples. TBH, it never worked for me because I'm obsessed with sex and photography and my brain is wired that it can do one or the other, but not both. If I start adjusting camera settings I get a bit too perfectionist and am not thinking about the moment any more :). But for people less on the spectrum than me?....I've heard from many couples it was a very thrilling experience...even if they just delete afterwards. So I think these are not terrible in your own home...they just should never be allowed in public. There's probably no legal way of preventing that...but the least we can do is shame people who record others in public and certainly shame and prosecute people who misuse these.

Dude...if knowing people enjoy porn spikes your blood pressure this much, you're not long for this world. Relax. No one is sending you dick pics...which TBH wouldn't even traumatize me...I'd just be bored. It's not natural to hate sex as much as you seem to.

Very good point, but it's been long lamented by male porn stars that their craft isn't very appreciated...that they're a prop. I enjoy porn documentaries and reading about these things. :) Most women I talk to who are into porn like I am, the man is often a placeholder. They may want to see his body, but they're happier the less they see his face. Even if they're enjoying his physique, they want to picture a specific man or a man who's more their type (most male porn stars from the studio days are pretty old). And finally, what percentage of men in porn are good looking? :). Most have good bodies, but quite a few are "butterfaces" (or whatever the male equivalent are).

Honestly, it's ironic now that I think about it. Women always complain about men dehumanizing and sexualizing them....but in actual porn, we want to see the woman and the women I've talked to usually don't want to see the man.

How difficult is it for an operating system update to detect whether or not a service is installed, and if not, then not install it unless it is explicitly requested?

I find it strange that this simple design philosophy is ignored. When a user installs or updates software, they should be presented with a dialog box with a list of components that can be checked/unchecked for installation, with any dependencies reflected as appropriate. The whole paradigm of "automatic" and "background" updates is absolutely bizarre to me. I never want the OS to decide if or when to update itself. I never want it to decide by default to install and enable a new service without giving me the option to choose. Microsoft seems to violate this principle with alarming regularity.

The fact that OneDrive at one point its its development caused massive data loss for users who found it had exfiltrated their locally stored files means that at no point in its future development can it be trusted. The risk is too high to not check whether it has deleted the local copy, relative to the inconvenience of performing the check.

Who and what are we to believe here? LAPD audit says the 2-month error rate was 32.3%, yet Flock CEO says misreads are less than 1 in a million.

While both statistics can be correct, they are probably measuring very different things. If any given camera is reading thousands of plates a day, then an error rate of 1:10^6 is plausible. But that's not the correct metric by which to understand the consequences of false positives in the system, because most reads--correct or not--are not associated with criminal activity. And for that reason (as well as others not from the article), it's obvious that both the Flock CEO and the various law enforcement agencies are engaged in this public finger-pointing exercise to make it seem that they aren't the ones who are primarily responsible, while behind the scenes they're still cooperating with each other.

If instead we look at it from the point of view of data that is believed to be associated with criminal activity, and then using the system to locate a match, then we can see why even a very low read error rate can result in many false positives, because there are so many cars out there, each having their plates read repeatedly and under varying conditions.

As much as I am opposed to Flock for their role in the creation of a surveillance state, I place just as much blame on law enforcement. They are racist, lazy, stupid, corrupt, and too eager for violence. Tools like Flock merely enable them to be even lazier, all while getting fat on the taxpayer's dime while they parade around their militarized weaponry and vehicles. Actual honest detective work is a thing of the past. And this is not just a problem in the US, but also in other countries, with the proliferation of mass surveillance and automated systems for gathering data. Even if they weren't lazy, they lack the capability to think critically. And idiotic legal doctrines such as qualified immunity further remove any incentive to investigate properly, because they cannot be held accountable for their mistakes.

Then there's this: "A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario." No, that was FAR from a worst-case scenario. I'll tell you what "worst-case" is. It's an overzealous, violent cop with a itching trigger finger who gets bad data and ends up killing innocent people just because a computer said they were a criminal.

Fundamentally, the problem is not really about technology. It's about a society and government's approach to policing and crime. The abuse of technology only makes the systemic deficiencies easier to see, by making them happen more frequently and indiscriminately. The very principle of mass surveillance is unjust and undemocratic; the (mis)use of the resultant data is merely the proof.

This is Slashdot where expecting high tech literacy used to be standard. (Note the OP UID.)

I do similar and find using multiple OS quite convenient rather than burdensome. I don't "switch", I "add" instead and have done so since I was new to Slashdot at the turn of this century.

An OS is just a tool to run applications and the more one chooses the be comfortable with the more choices they have. Learning Linux hasn't been difficult for decades.

With VMs and other options it's trivial to have any or many OS at hand (one reason the "home lab" enthusiasts often have rackfulls of SFF and tiny PCs easily remoted into from their main machine or any other).

It's a great way to film yourself having sex if you have the consent of your partner. Sunglasses are weird, but not as weird and a gopro on your forehead. I can see these as a staple of amateur porn. No one wants to see the guy, so the sunglasses make him even more of a prop from other camera views, but many want to see things from his point of view!

You are correct, but from everything I've read and your list, those were his personal nicknames he used as a mnemonic. Calling his dad poppy or Donald Rumsfeld Rummy was a term of affection, not an insult. GWB was likeable, but he was no genius, nor did he have to be as a nepo-baby. He was required to keep track of a lot of names and relied on those nicknames, especially since he couldn't remember the person's name at the time, so he'd just call a guy stretch. It was folksy and certainly not mean-spirited.

A key difference is that Trump makes up nicknames to belittle and insult his opponents and MAGA faithful repeat it over and over. It's certainly effective in a way, but it's childish and obnoxious and off-putting to thinking adults. Trump is a broken, vindictive, and vicious man. Not only is he an incompetent president, but he's just a terrible person in any role. GWB? Definitely too incompetent to be president, but from everything I know, he's a decent man. I hated his tenure in office, but he'd be my favorite neighbor, by far!