Good points, but to be fair, ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones because it is safe to use it to do so.

Plenty of trucks and other vehicles have little or any effective view directly out the back. To be blunt: If you need to look through your rear-view mirror to not kill someone, you either need better side mirrors or you need to learn to drive.

It hasn't been "autocomplete" in a long time. Sure, there's a training step based on a corpus of Human language, and the autoregressive process outputs a single token at a time, but reinforcement learning trains specific behaviors beyond merely completing a sentence.

Besides, the best way to write something indistinguishable from what a Human might write is to, well, "think" like a Human.

Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?

Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".

What do you say, and why is it also "no"?

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

The idea that software not signed by some entity in the country that they represent is installed any high-level official's phone is absurd. How did the world get this way?

I'm curious what games you think superseded it within months of release? It came out in 1981 so I'd be curious what other 1981 games you think that are in the same genre that are better.

Steamworks is the mechanism under the covers that causes these games to require installing Steam.

When we had Impulse back in the day, we knew it was Steamworks more than Steam itself that was the key competitive advantage. But people forget that back then, multiplayer connectivity and the like was a significant hurdle for most game developers. Valve, more than anyone else, brought robust PC multiplayer to the mainstream. Requiring Steam to use Steamworks was very competitive at the time but given that Valve wasn't charging for it, it is also arguably a fair play.

But now, in 2021, there are plenty of other ways to do that so I'm a little skeptical to the argument that Steamworks is anti-competitive. You can easily make games now that feature multiplayer and other features that don't require Steamworks and thus don't require Steam to run.

The biggest advantage Steam has today is that it has a catalog of tends of thousands of games that already use Steamworks and are no longer being actively developed and thus they will only ever be on Steam. But there's no "cure" for that. It is what it is and new titles have plenty of options to get the features Steamworks has.

So even if you decoupled Steam (the store app) from Steamworks now it wouldn't make any difference because people go to where the games are and that's Steam.

What competitors of Steam need is money and time. Money for a steady stream of exclusives (or at least to use their Steamworks alternative which is decoupled from the store) and time for enough games to be released that aren't effectively Steam exclusives.

In short, the problem will solve itself imo.

I've been using this site for over twenty years, and it's a been most of a decade since I've commented. This is the best thing I've seen on here since then. Whatever you do, keep drumming up the fight against ignorance and propaganda, and the people who've fallen victims of it. I don't want to get personal, but lets just say that I know from intimate experience what brainwashing does to a person, and the tremendous cost of clawing one's way out of it. Division in modern society is inevitable--and we must fight against those who seek to destroy rational thought!--but without empathy for those infected by bad ideas, shortchanged by their personal experiences, we'll end up punishing and alientating those victimized by bad actors exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities that every one of us has, we will push them out of sheer self-defense into voting in the people who will undo us.

Not the person you're responding to, but I'm pretty sure their less-than-polite phrasing meant "biological female who has ever been involved in jetpack development or *jetpack* flying".

Everyone knows Amelia Earhart was a big part of aviation history in that era, but I strongly suspect that she didn't moonlight as the Rocketeer.

Indeed, people should take in the full context here, not just platitudes. They should look at how China has interacted with Europe and the US in the context of world wars, trade wars, cultural exchange and economic interdependence. ...then they should call Xi on his tantrums and fragility. He chooses to be this way.

I like the general sentiment here, but I think there are a lot of details to iron out, and we would have to be careful regarding unintended consequences.

For instance, there's the matter of how to treat trade secrets, which are common in computer code. In many cases, the creator of a work doesn't even have a right to distribute source code that they've purchased a license to (say, a game engine) and have modified, so this is untenable unless you are willing to make entire business models completely flat.

I suspect on re-reading your comment that you mean the portion of a work that is distributed--in this case the game client. There are less issues with that, but still licensed assets are a fairly reasonable part of the copyrighted works market. Perhaps unlimited duplication after a lapse time would be allowed, but derivative works would not be?

It's an interesting thought. It's not going to happen, but something like it's now on my wishlist.