I was thinking more about Microsoft just not bothering to ever sell Office or Windows in the country, Oracle kicking up a stupendous fuss and refusing to serve government contracts, and the like.

Not what you do or don't do with your XP CD Key.

So if you download a Windows ISO or a copy of Oracle or whatever, you can just use it in perpetuity, then, right

So why does any company or person in the entire country pay for software, books, artwork or anything else?

I don't think that's how it works at all, or you're greatly oversimplifying it.

I'm all for climate change and such, but can we eat first?

Climate change is the responsibility of the superpowers. It's things like Commonwealth Fusion and Verdox that will generate solutions that will allow us to reverse climate change.

(Even 10 years ago the best method for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere was by distillation, which was/is energy intensive. I've done a fair bit of gas chemistry in my career and was surprised when the Verdox system was announced publicly.)

Climate change will not come from reducing our standard of living... that's a zero--sum game which will never be enough, and will erode our lifespans and general well-being.

Climate change will be solved by coming up with new solutions that work directly to fix the problem, and those new solutions will come from countries that have a standard of living high enough that they don't have to worry about where their next meal comes from, so they can turn their attention to other matters.

Malaysia is building data centers? Go for it.

Get your economy in order, get your standard of living up, and join the rest of the world in coming up with solutions for climate change.

(5.6 percent of Malaysian households live in absolute poverty, up to 8.4 percent of households with children (source).)

And there's the beginnings of the "private army" section of the OCP future in Robocop.

In my country (where armed guards aren't allowed unless they're accompanying a president and an awful lot of armed police officers), this is called being a mercenary.

An hour of video is roughly 1GB, so one drive can store roughly 100,000 hours of video.

Hypothetically, a person wearing a system containing one of these drives could record roughly 4 hours a day for 60 years. Assuming that most of the (awake) time we spend in our daily lives is unremarkable and not worth recording, one could make the claim that one of these drives could record a single person's entire lifetime. All the interactions you have, everything that everyone else says (including all the school lessons you receive), everyone you meet, all the books and articles and papers you read - everything significant in your lifetime could be recorded on one drive.

Add an AI indexing system and you can have a quick index of your entire life.

(And apropos this system, you could replay traumatic events, and this would help you get over the trauma. Or play the events to a trusted medical professional and get advice, and so on.)

Secondly, one problem with app installation (on linux, I don't know how bad it is on other systems) is access to shared libraries of various revision and date. Compatibility has become a nightmare, and we now have to deal with multiple installation systems as well (apt-get, pip-install, CPAN, and so on). I've been in installation hell several times on my linux system, trying to get some bespoke configuration of library versions just to get some standard installed application to run. It's not fun.

With large amounts of storage and fast internet, we might as well build apps with statically-compiled libraries (flatpaks and such) and just not have to worry about library versioning. This would also make supply chain compromising a little harder, since when a bad library is discovered it only affects certain compiled apps (which will be recompiled), and not have been blindly downloaded by all users during system update.

I can see a lot of uses for large hard drives.

I'm surprised.

The purchase was set up by the Biden administration. The current administration has said they have no plans on fulfilling the order.

But don't take my word for it, check out the media reports that say it was Trump (not Biden) aiming to purchase the cybertrucks, because fake news saying it was Trump instead of Biden makes it seem so much like graft.

Then again, I'm on the right so maybe I'm in denial.

In the nicest possible way, no technical measure can account for a human making a very bad decision.

Which is why draining a retirement account shouldn't be just behind a technical measure but require a lot of very explicit authorisation. Not wanting her to have the financial apps is basically identical to just not wanting her to have a card or access to the account because you don't trust her. Whether that's justified or not, it's not something that anyone else can do anything about, and it's not related to the security of the app itself.

I had a friend in my former workplace, he was old and "didn't want to learn" all the new technology by his own admission. He had a very old PC, he deliberately kept a non-smartphone, he owned almost nothing beyond a TV really. He would hang out with us, the IT team, a lot for other reasons but he never really got into the IT and didn't like gadgets, so we ended up doing a lot for him and talking him through many things. I'd even do things like buy stuff on Amazon that he needed and couldn't get cheaper, then he would give me cash for the purchase. And things like top up his phone online for one when he brought me a receipt from a shop where he'd paid in cash to get a top-up code.

And one day, after a particularly long rant from him, I took him to one side and said "You know? It's never going to get LESS technological? Nobody's ever going to go BACK to pen and paper, or cash machines, or little rubber stamps, or whatever else. It's only ever going to involve more technology and more devices and more new routines." He brushed it off at first but then a few days later he came back. "I've been thinking about what you said ever since," he said, "and you're right".

With our help he bought a new smartphone (nothing fancy), a tablet, a PC and... it escalated... before long he had CCTV all over his house, was buying stuff off Amazon on his own (finally using his credit card!), and he got on-board. He's in his 70's. He had no particular aptitude for it beforehand. And it wasn't actually all that difficult. All he needed was the INCENTIVE to do so. The actual practicalities weren't a problem.

The problem you have is not insecure phone apps. It's an insecure person, who doesn't want to learn why it's important - important to be able to spot fraud, to check on her accounts regularly, to know how to deal with a scammer, to be able to remember passwords... these are all LIFE SKILLS, nothing to do with technology at all. They've been required since the days of remembering a telephone number or people knocking on your door claiming to be someone they aren't. If your wife is insulated from them, she never had a need to learn them... someone else "does that for her", she can "just check with" someone else.

My mother was the same for a while. Even managed to sign us up to an alternate electricity provider on the doorstep without realising (but it was soon discovered and rectified as we have consumer law in my country so "doorstep" contracts can be cancelled up to 60 days later and require a letter confirming the change, etc.). Because dad just did everything for her. She wouldn't use a cashcard, dad would give her cash. She wouldn't go online, because dad did that. And so on.

It's vital that you break that dependence... not just for technological or financial reasons. And the way to do that is that she must have the incentive to do so. She needs to be responsible for those accounts, and for other things now, not just able to rely on your, family, friends, etc. to do them for her. I always cringe when a family member asks me to help them log into the most personal of data they hold... no, I shouldn't need to. I'm going to teach you HOW to get in, and you're going to do it, repeatedly and over and over and you're to going to text me tomorrow and tell me that you got in on your own when you started from scratch in the morning without me there at all.

It's the only way to do it. Get her into some adult education classes. Because it's not the technology she's afraid of. It's the responsibility. And it carries over into so much of life that has no technical basis (e.g. choosing to walk down dark alleyways, etc.) that it's a critical life skill.

If your kid was that bad at technology you wouldn't just ban them from ever having their own bank account even in adulthood. You'd let them make mistakes and keep getting them to do it until they took responsibility.

I appreciate your plight, I really do, but it's time to hand over the responsibility (and with that the potential for making mistakes). And that means you stop worrying about it (in the nicest possible way, it's not going to affect you, and whatever was going to affect her was going to do so anyway), and at the same time you make it clear THEY have to pay on their card in the restaurant, no, THEY have to transfer the money from savings. No, it was YOUR responsibility to pay the gas bill, etc. You need a new phone, okay, you need to find one and a contract to go with it, and how you're going to pay that and where have you budgeted for that?

It doesn't have to be tough love, but you need to handover... same as you would leaving a job.

I bank via an app-only bank, have done for years. It took me forever to actually find a bank in my country that had any decent online offering (I can remember leaving one bank because they tried to tell me that a Java applet in an HTTP site that showed a padlock in the Java applet window was "secure", when all the other banks were just using SSL/TLS).

But then I live in a country with consumer law too.

You are missing that there are certain things that online doesn't do that an app does.

I stand in a queue. I pay for my goods. My phone beeps in my pocket. Instantly. Wherever I am. And I can single-tap on that transaction and dispute it instantly, and block my card instantly.

I've literally never had to, but everyone in my immediate family (including several tech-savvy people) have had their card cloned. And it's usually a day or so after you last used it that suddenly a transaction comes in. And another. And another as they try to empty your account but stay under the radar.

I know the instant my salary goes into my account (and it's often 24+ hours before everyone else because the bank aren't burdened by some legacy delaying nonsense that traditional banks are, while still being fully compliant and certified and my account "insured" against fraud or bank failure by the government).

And you'll soon find what the rest of the world finds... in person won't be an option. Over the last 20 years, in-person has died off to the point that I started LOOKING for an app-based account. If you're not going to staff your branches properly, then I'm not going to pay for you to have them. I said for years that it would be better with an app-only bank because... they HAVE to provide the same functions, without making you jump through "you have to do this in a branch" hoops (which maddened me when they were only ever open while I was working!).

I also seriously question the security assertions. PC and phones both have a number of multinational corporations with full access to the device, but the phone at least has application isolation and a TPM chip that it uses. You can't just steal my bank app details by running something on the same phone or trawling its storage. That's not true for phones. I'm not saying they're perfect, but PCs are certainly no better.

The thing to do is not rely on nonsense like fingerprint readers and use proper passwords but other than that... I live almost my entire financial life in my phone. I'm actually annoyed because my mortgage provider is a pen-and-paper outfit. I literally can't change my payments, talk to a human or find out my current position without jumping through hoops - no online functionality at all. When it comes time to renew (5 years or thereabouts), I'm going to look at finding an app-only mortgage or at least an online one.

The compelling need may not be there for you, but even you realise that it's inevitable. I just realised far earlier and got into what I need to before it becomes a hassle. In fact, I got pushed there earlier by terrible bank service, culling of real people to talk to, and then realised that everything worked so much better and cheaper for me (as I suspected it would to some extent).

Which is why I have never advised people to use fingerprints for security - it can be used when you're unconscious and without your consent.

I mean, good luck getting a passcode out of me, even drugged... I'm not sure I know what many of them are, I just know the finger-pattern. And it's hard to type that in when I'm perfectly fine, let alone incapacitated.

Fingerprints are NOT security, they are NOT your password. We need to make financial apps realise this and stop allowing their use, much like we need people to actually read password guidelines from 25+ years ago that say "Don't make people change passwords on a regular basis" too.

Rather than attack the man, let's discuss the position.

About 2 years ago all the AI systems were closed source, and there were three of them.

Then LLAMA was leaked online, and ten years of improvement happened in the next six months. People published paper after paper describing what they could do with the LLM, using it in innovative ways that no one had thought of.

As was pointed out, Meta (who developed LLAMA) simply didn't have the manpower to explore all the interesting aspects of the system.

So in retrospect, losing control of LLAMA was a good thing for AI development.

So it would seem that having AI be open source is a good idea.

Do you disagree?

Or is the fact that it's put forward by an evil person somehow relevant?

It means you can basically poison the sessions so people get the answer you want to give, rather than what the LLM would normally.

However, in the current generation of LLMs this is largely moot as they are so unreliable as to be useless. They are in that perfect bit of the curve where many simple things you ask appear to be creditable, but as soon as you ask anything of import, or anything to which the answer is unclear or requires inference, it collapses into a messy goo of incorrectness, denial, false confidence and outright manipulation.

Nope.

I want to read an article summary, not a link-storm, especially to things like Twitter.

It's a site for nerds, so we know what prompt injection and a large language model is (and it's one google away if we don't). We really don't need to link to GOOGLE of all places.

And it literally tells you what Gemini is in the following 7 words.

This isn't Wikipedia, and even there they discourage linking every word that happens to have an article.

Which questions would those be?

I'm not a big fan of fear and uncertainty. What ethical or moral questiont specifically should be asked in this situation?

In my career I had one big ethical rule, which was that I wouldn't work on weapons. I figured everything else was OK and advancing technology would raise the standard of living and promote wealth across the globe.

(This was before spam, hacking, and enshittification generally. Yes, this was before the first spamming of usenet by a couple of lawyers who felt it was their first amendment right to put an advert for their services across every usenet topic.)

AI seems to be the wave of the future, it might be dangerous, so I'm looking around for moral guidance.

So... apropos of your post, what questions should we be asking?

Technically the UK penny is now worth less than the 1/2p was when we scrapped that in 1984.

We're almost there with the 2p too.

Basically, it's long overdue that we start having 5p as the smallest denomination with consideration that actually making it the 10p (and calling the 5p a "half-ten" or whatever and discouraging its use) would be better in the long run.

I'm old enough to remember the 1/2p, the pre-decimalisation coins (though not old enough to actually remember decimalisation) and that all the coins used to say "New Pence" on them to distinguish between pre-decimalisation and post-decimalisation denominations.

We did introduce a GBP 2 coin in 1998 but hilariously our biggest bill is still only GBP 50 and people consider that some kind of bad omen and shops often won't take it at all because it's "so big" that they fear the risk of counterfeiting.

I think in my lifetime I'll see the scrapping of "coppers" (1p and 2p) and the introduction of a GBP 100 note. But I don't think it'll be any time soon as it's already long overdue.

This is an oft-overlooked problem with governments and their oppositions.

"You're spending money on healthcare, libraries, schools, social care, pollution control, etc. etc. etc."

Yes. That's right. Because that's what you SPEND MONEY ON. They shouldn't BE profitable. If they are, you're doing something wrong.