"Fluid" intelligence is the ability to think, reason, solve problems, and learn things. "Crystallized" intelligence is your amassed knowledge.

These are technical terms used in the literature.

Intelligence is nature's guess as to how complex your environment will be... but there's an out. People with low fluid intelligence have to work harder to understand things, but if they put in the work they can amass a body of knowledge that rivals that of people with high fluid intelligence.

And of course, lots of people with high intelligence stop learning in their mid twenties. At that point they've conquered their environment and are living successful lives (good job, married, kids &c) so there's no real reason to push themselves. Lots and lots of people, even smart people, haven't read a single book in the last year - and this observation was true in the 1970's before the internet.

(And nowadays this is probably more accurate due to the appalling quality of information found on the internet.)

It's a question of training. We're evolved to believe what people say, it's a way of reducing the cognitive load of learning things (by believing what someone else has already figured out). We're not used to questioning the logic of someone else's beliefs.

As an example of this, note that Warren Buffet has built a career on identifying fallacies in business, google "Warren Buffet fallacies" for a list.

None of these fallacies is taught in school, everyone has to find them and figure them out on their own. And then you have to use them in your daily lives.

Almost no one is used to doing that, which leads to the current problems with AI.

Why does everybody think I'm a lawyer?

Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.

Only in America could you legally argue that an unnecessary profit-making middle-man was legally required and that it would somehow "reduce costs".

There's no such thing as technologically unable to comply.

If a nation state law enforcement insists, they will make you comply, and you and I will never hear about it.

A simple OS update with "If phone MAC == XXXXXXXXXX then send copy to FBI", targeted specifically at one phone, deployed only to that one phone, would go entirely unnoticed by the world.

And Official Secrets Act / equivalent, combined with a government-NDA and jail time for talking about it's very existence is literally routine. Has been since the days of black boxes in ISPs and them tapping Google's inter-datacentre links.

If someone like the FBI, NSA, MI5, GCHQ, etc. wants you to do something... you have literally zero choice in the matter. And talking about it will get you immediately jailed. And it really doesn't matter how big you are.

You think that Whatsapp end-to-end encryption is just going to make GCHQ etc. go "Oh well, nothing we can do?" No. If they need it, there'll be a guy knocking on your head office with a bunch of people, he'll only tell you why he's there in a closed meeting, you will comply, even if that means throwing everyone out of the datacentre and doing it yourself, and if anyone hears what he asked you to do, you will go to jail.

Been the same for decades. They just don't use it for ordinary crimes and petty stuff, mostly because of the resources they have to deploy to ensure that it stays quiet.

So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?

And the only alternative we can come up with is literal ID verification?

Something tells me that we skipped a step - i.e. a better CAPTCHA.

It's basically plugging the output of ChatGPT into a sudo terminal on your machine with write-access to all your data.

It's quite literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

But then, even Slashdot are running obnoxious "generate apps with AI" ads in massive bars on my screen, and I paid to disable advertising and have ad-blockers.

What could go wrong?

LLMs have no business model.

That's why OpenAI is trillions in the hole, with no profitable tier of product in sight.

It's a cute toy that costs far too much to generate and maintain, and relies on basically stealing the data of the entire Internet to keep itself up-to-date and vaguely relevant, and the lawsuits on that have barely started yet.

And if an LLM was actually "AI"... it wouldn't need customers, as such. It could be left to wander off onto the Internet, given a credit card number and it would: set up its own company supplying goods that it obtains from others, answer customer queries, set up a fivr account and respond to every job on there, sell its own unique products, design its own 3D models for sale or production, trade on the stock market, bet on sports, or whatever... it would literally... just earn money for its owners. Directly. No need for a user to ask it to do so and then to give the result back to the user. Just... do the things that would directly earn it money.

Give it $100,000, a credit card, an Internet connection and... leave it to its own devices. It's "intelligent", right? And it has capabilities and capacities far in excess of any human, so we're told? So it could literally just start up a fake company, fill in the paperwork, register for tax, import goods, have a courier handle them, put them into a warehouse, set up a website, sell the product to the public, have a courier collect them from the warehouse, sell the product direct. Nobody would ever have to know that it wasn't human, and it could join the dots and just do what humans the world over do to make money directly.

If AI was any good... then IT would be the next billionaire.

https://www.sandlawnd.com/dui-...

(I don't understand the odd wording at the start of this quoted paragraph because it sounds like it's being set up for a contradiction when it's not)

"While the United States may seem like we have high numbers for DUI accidents every year, we actually are the third worst country when it comes to drunk drivingâ"which obviously isnâ(TM)t great. In 2015, South Africa was ranked number one as the worst country when it comes to drunk driving. With 58% of their fatal accidents involving alcohol in some way, they sit high above the second and third seats. The second seat goes to Canada, at 34% and the third to the United States at 31%. Countries on the lower end of the spectrum include Germany (9%), Russia (9%), India (5%), and China (4%)."

FYI, I've been on Slashdot nearly 25 years (maybe more? I can't remember).

You can read my FULL post history. Hell, I was a "paying subscriber". I used to run Slackware as a desktop for 10 years. Then I went to XP, then 7, then 10, and now... I'm back to Linux. Precisely because of... Windows 11, Microsoft's shovelling of shite into my OS, and increased frustration with it.

I manage Windows professionally, thousands of clients, and... at home... I'm now entirely Linux. Would you like an inventory (but I really gave one in the post above)? And I'm Linux BECAUSE of modern Windows. I literally went DOS, Linux, Windows, Linux, Windows, Linux over ~30 years. I did an awful lot of work on a single-floppy Linux router distro called Freesco. I ported code to the GP2X, a Linux-based handheld that sold mostly in Korea.

And now... I've gone back to Linux, the December just gone, because I've had enough of fighting with Windows 11 professionally and Copilot, Edge, taskbars and all the other nonsense necessary to make the OS do what I want to do. So I bought a Framework laptop. You can see posts from me going back a year or so talking about getting one. You can see YEARS of posts about the Steam Deck and, before it, my desire to have the Steam Machine/Box concept work better than it did going back to the original time of release of SteamOS back then.

I got my laptop for Christmas. I installed Linux on it, day one. I have then been praising it on here, and other tech sites I frequent, on my same username.

Tell me... how is that "made up"?

"You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful..."

Yeah, you and I are not on the same page.