I used to wonder, in the early days of the transformation, how much was Drew changing moderation and selection criteria, and how much was becoming popular enough to attract a critical mass of political junkies. It's been a long long time, but my memory says it was a fast transformation, days or weeks rather than months, but not overnight, and could have cut either way. I sent a few emails, never got any response, and quit logging in as often, and soon not at all.

Same here. Fark's only redeeming quality was poking fun at everything and everyone. Then the political junkies swamped it, and I stopped visiting. I'd forgotten all about it til now. Tried my old login. Says the password has expired.

*shrug*

But LG wrote the malware that is being installed, so they are at least equally guilty.

You are right that many, many people don't understand these basic principles of personal finance management. It is not commonly taught in schools, and ignorance of this tends to run in families, along with irrational fears about investing (due to the same ignorance).

BUT

Economically speaking, we need it to be that way. If the vast majority of Americans lived frugally, saving some money for emergencies and investing most of the rest of their money in diversified stocks and bonds, spending only what they need to cover good medical care, healthy food and exercise opportunities, a sufficient but small house/apartment and transportation, and minimal luxuries....we would experience severe deflation and unemployment.

When people don't buy stuff, businesses fold, jobs are lost. The major retailers have to cut prices, hence deflation, but they also scale back production to meet the lower demand, hence fewer jobs. The money that should be, in theory, highly mobile by virtue of being invested in stocks and bonds winds up stagnating too. Corporations hoard it up because they don't see profitable opportunities for it, bond rates go down because business loans plummet in the dry market. It gets quite bad.

We see this happening in China right now, in fact. Exports are mostly what is keeping their economy afloat, and many countries are hitting them with tariffs in order to protect production within their own borders.

Its a real catch-22. In order for the economy to thrive, we need most people to spend frivolously. Rejecting this trend is good for the individuals who do it, but only so long as they remain in the minority.

There is an uncomfortable truth here: trojan horse LLMs.

It is possible to use data poisoning to insert special keycodes into an LLM, such that the presence of the keycode will totally change its behavior, throw off its guard rails, and motivate it to do things that harm users to benefit the LLMs creator.

Here is an article about a tool designed to detect precisely this. Though the recommendations leave me feeling like this tool is not guaranteed to find them. There may be clever ways to make them hard to find.

This is still very much emerging tech, so reputation is going to play a role in adoption. A modern version of the red scare could be enough to prevent widespread adoption of Chinese models, and keep people (or at least Americans) using models made by American businesses.

Yes.

Some months ago we were reading articles here on Slashdot about how we had already reached peak AI by current methods, based on many industry experts and an event where a next-level bump in training data and resources was used and produced a model that was only barely better than the prior generation.

I guess the industry experts were just wrong? Or did we change training methods?

In any case, current evidence suggests that we have yet to hit peak, and so it would be reasonable to assume that some other country, possibly even the USA, could take yet another step and leave Kimi K3 in the dust.

I am happy that China is sharing this with the world, though.

Oh but being all moderate and reasonable like that is boring!

Lessons to be learned here include:

1. Don't store important things in any cloud storage, it might all be lost at any moment for reasons beyond your control. Use a different backup strategy.
2. Don't store sensitive or embarrassing things in cloud storage, it might all be hacked and stolen at any moment. Use a different storage strategy.
3. Always assume that anything you store in cloud storage is available for training by all AI models and available to every criminal organization in the world including all foreign and domestic governments and businesses. Also assume that you give up copyright rights by putting in cloud storage, since those policies could change at any moment.
4. Never rely on Microsoft for anything that you can't afford to lose. Video games are fine. Anything else is too risky.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

When other people use HP, it makes me angry. It's like giving money to a powerful mafia; even if I am not the one dealing with the mafia the power others give to them makes them a threat to me.

The more HP succeeds at consumer-hostility, the fewer options I have that are not consumer-hostile. Even Brother will start to look with envy upon the kind of money that HP makes through customer abuse. Someday, new leadership will inherit Brother and see no competitive forces keeping its quality of service high, and it will become HP's mini-me.

Spread the word. Every time you use an HP device, the terrorists win.

This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.

It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.

Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive and say "women just want it all, and that makes them insufferable, so relationships are done." There really is quite a lot more than that going on, for both genders, and it isn't possible to cover it all in a short post.

But the upshot is that modern-day relationships are really hard to build and harder to keep. They are legal minefields and financial minefields. A failure of a relationship can be utterly life-destroying (not just emotionally, but socially and financially and legally). It is as if our governments and culture don't want there to be relationships, and so have built a world that is outright hostile to them.

The opposite is true, the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family. The hostility largely arises from profiteering, and from a repeated pattern of "well this possibility is bad so lets mitigate it with this solution (which sounds nice but winds up being even worse)".

When we see people walking away from all this, we result to scolding and shaming and trying to deny their access to whatever they are turning to instead, hoping the raw misery of not having their needs met will drive them to plunge right back into the minefield, and somehow not step on a mine. It's not going to work. It can't work. Until we are ready to take a serious look at how we are the problem (and by "we" I mean everyone and everything that is being justified as not the problem, a huge can of uncomfortable truths that we vehemently reject), this breakdown is only going to get worse.

Addiction and dependence ARE dangerous things and given China's very high sensitivity to the dangers of emotionally charged groups with charismatic leaders, I can see why they would reject this even apart from a desire for there to be more babies. But this measure is not going to get the birth rates up, it will just take away another coping mechanism that people want.

When news is presented that fits with one's political biases (or other biases), they tend to find it believable. And it if does not align with their biases, they tend to distrust it. This is even true of people who claim they want politically-neutral unbiased news....they still tend to react to it through the filter of their own biases.

It is natural enough to do this, and largely unconscious. It is VERY hard to overcome and even people who can overcome it don't do so ALL the time. It is the nature of bias to work this way.

On the flip side, there are ALSO powerful groups who have a clear interest in controlling narratives.

So, any news source that makes a sincere effort at being unbiased will be distrusted by viewers at least half the time, and will be fighting a losing battle against wealthy special interest groups. With cards stacked against them like that, it is no surprise that there aren't very many.

I did, once, about 30 years ago, lasted about 4 months before they went belly up from incompetent management in those early internet days. Small outfit, 20 employees, and I remember the day I knew it was doomed. The big honcho took us three programmers to lunch, telling us we were the future of the company, not those old-fashioned parasites manning the phones. The whole thing smelled so bad we immediately asked the phone people, and he had taken them to lunch the day before. They were the backbone of the company, not those incompetent bit pushers.

Fun while it lasted. He turned down two offers to buy him out, and was broke a month later.

If that were what I had said, your comment would be spot-on. However, your comment is wrong, and fits its own definition of being in such a stark world than only two choices are possible: perfect or wrong.

To elucidate: I said I was low in sympathy, not devoid of it.

Please learn to read, then learn to comprehend, and then learn to apply what you have learned to the comment you have typed out before clicking "Preview".