Criminalizing drugs completely changes us politics. We learned a long time ago that the reason drugs were criminalized was so that the right wing could go after the left wing because statistically working class people are more likely to take drugs. Nixon's people came out and just admitted it because they felt guilty. The entire purpose of the drug war was and always is political.

Because of that you are never going to see things like this used properly and legalized which is a shame because psychedelics have been shown repeatedly to be a game changer for people with post traumatic stress disorder. And there are a lot of people with PTSD beyond soldiers.

The catch is that for it to work you need to do it under Dr supervision generally. You need someone there who can carefully guide you through the process. Just dropping a tab of acid isn't usually going to work. So by criminalizing it an entire group of people whose lives could be transformed or just left out in the cold. But compared to the billions and billions of dollars that can be made using the drug war to win elections that's a small price to pay.

And of course because we have been conditioned to view talk about politics as dirty anytime you bring this up you're guaranteed to piss everybody off. It is no coincidence that you are conditioned not to talk about your salary with your coworkers or your political beliefs.

Fun fact the reason rural towns tend to be right wing is because there is usually one extremely wealthy landowner who runs the show and if you deviate slightly from orthodoxy then he's the only employer in town and he runs the church and everything else and you're basically persona non grata.

I bring it up because it's another way that the discussion and debate in our country is locked down to the benefit of people who do not have your best interests at heart

Why does it have to have one job? Your TV also had one job, play broadcasted content. Did you expect to buy a difference device to play media from a cassette? Phones had one job, make calls. Did you refuse a smartphone for the same reason?

The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.

That depends, do you often find yourself drinking in the toilet? On the flip side I do find many people who take their smart phones or tablets into the kitchen, take notes, write shopping lists, read recipes while cooking. If only there were a convenient place we could simply put a screen...

Bonus point is it's not a hygiene nightmare (yes you absolutely shouldn't put a margarita mixer on a toilet, for health reasons, not because I disagree with your desire to have a convenient cocktail while doing a poop).

Because isolated networks are largely a thing of the past? You talk about the home console as if the general consumer wouldn't prefer to use their phone. The thing is as soon as something then is on the phone you expect it to work away from you home network (assuming you're not one of those people who actually don't even bother jumping on the wifi in their house and just use 5G even when at home like many many people do).

Help me by proof reading the marketing for your product:

"Our product is just like the competitors, except more limited and less versatile, and unable to traverse outside of the home wifi."

Does this sound facetious? If it does I suggest you find some products that are local network only and read their reviews. You'll very frequently see your killer feature listed as a "Con" rather an a "Pro" in the eyes of most people.

Cool. You've just described literally ever piece of consumer electronics on the market currently. What do you propose the consumer do? I guess I shouldn't expect my car to work? My TV? Games console? My home security camera? Lightbulbs?

I should expect none of this to work for me?

What a truly absurd comment. No we should very much expect them to work the way we expect them to, and then rally together to hold vendors accountable when they don't.

Your view is defeatist and doesn't help anyone.

For a company that blows through 60 billion dollars a year like it's nothing... And this is the pilot. Meaning that a lot of people are coming in buying ads because they do not yet know how effective those ads will be.

We got a preview of how effective the advertisements are. Amazon and a couple other companies tried to use AI chatbots to do website sales. The results were basically a disaster with a 30 to 40% drop in conversion rate compared to the same product on the website. In other words people were 30 to 40% less likely to buy from a chat bot then from just going to a website.

Internet advertising does not work. The only reason it continues to survive is scams and large advertising firms convincing people to buy into it even though it's completely ineffective. It kind of sort of can work for branding exercises like letting you know that the Ford motor company exists but that doesn't sell specific products it just creates a rough vibe.

What does work is influencers. That's where the real money is to be made. And I could see AI influencers taking over from real humans to some extent but the reason influencers work is the parasocial relationships so that's going to be tough to maintain when people find out it's not a real person which is going to happen sooner or later.

If AI ever gets to the point where it can outperform human beings at finding defects then there's going to be a major issue with world powers.

That's because right now if you really want to hack somebody's data you can do it. There is a company out of Israel that will sell you software if you have enough money had enough connections and that software can break into just about any phone in existence. If they can break into the phones they can get past most encryption mechanisms.

So the question is what happens if intelligence agencies and law enforcement can no longer get data when they really want it.

I'm not so naive to think that is going to be a glorious time of freedom.

Facebook for example is facing an existential crisis from AI slop. There is so much slop and it is so hard to tell from the real content they are having a hard time getting data they can sell. Advertising rates are also at risk although it's less of an issue because as it stands advertising on Facebook is pretty useless and largely done out of habit. But the risk of slop overwhelming their data collection is a much bigger deal.

I bring it up because Facebook didn't just roll over and die. They are going around the world buying off politicians and getting laws passed requiring age verification that will in turn let them identify real users from bots so that they can continue to collect your data and sell it to their advertisers and governments and whatnot.

My point being that when a large powerful group faces a problem they solve it. And when somebody with that much money in power has a problem and they solve it it's usually to your detriment and mine.

What I would expect is that we are going to lose more freedoms. And any attempt to save those freedoms will fail because at the end of the day we would have to vote for politicians that would protect those freedoms and I think the 2024 elections proved that it's pretty easy to get people to do the opposite if you dangle cheap eggs in front of them...

Users usually don't, developers do. If a user wants to play a game what choice do they have other than be at the whim of NVIDIA's horrendous quality control for drivers, and a developer's mandate that their product ships with tool that runs a kernel level driver all in the name of making sure you're not a cheater?

Yeah Mac doesn't have that problem because developers don't offer that software for that platform.

There's a big difference between pushing a PC hard doing general stuff, and pushing a PC hard gaming. The latter is a true clusterfuck of cludges and workarounds, often with kernel level dumbfuckery in the name of beating cheaters and pirates all while using shoddy rushed out drivers that are poorly tested for one of the most complex subsystems in the OS (graphics).

It's orders of magnitude easier to crash a system with a game than it is with literally any other workload. That's not to say that Windows is reliable. It's objectively not, but the OP does have a big point. I can say with confidence that 100% of the crashes I've had on my PC have been due to gaming and the occasional really poorly written AI load (still GPU driver related).

How would you know? You didn't ask the GP what their needs are from an interface. You're taking a very typical software engineer approach of jumping to an answer while forgetting to ask the question. I have no doubt you find several Linux DEs superior to windows, but that's you in your application. You can't tell someone else something is superior for them without asking them what they expect from a UI.

I notice your UID is pretty low, so you're probably from the old guard of IT. Which is fitting, because Linux (while today offers a wide variety of UIs) was very much the greatest example of this problem in the 90s and early 00s where UIs were very much defined by the needs and wants of power users who declared them superior to all alternatives, and that is precisely one of the greatest setbacks Linux suffered.

I take it you learned everything you learned about AI from the media in the past 2 years? Facial recognition is very much AI. In fact it was one of the early widely used examples of a trained model for the purpose of similarity matching. The entire foundation of facial recognition is AI, always has been, even if you think AI is generating stupid pictures and complaining to ChatGPT that it can't do math.

The point being that we shouldn't give people the option. It should be mandatory, and when they find their unchipped pets at an animal shelter they should be fined, or required to pay to pick them up at least.

That sounds so difficult compared to simply chipping your pet like an actual responsible and caring human being.

What do you mean "or". Are you suggesting there are backwards countries that don't make it mandatory to chip your pets?

This is just an example of overcoming Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Slashdot isn't sure if you saw or didn't see the previous article so it posts dupes.

Define the "need". A screen is just a screen. It enables functionality that isn't possible without a screen. The question you need to ask is if you value that functionality or not. Dismissing it because of the device type is sort of the definition of being a luddite.

Just telling people to not buy something with a screen is not only not going to influence them, it's going to make them dismiss you as just another old man yelling at clouds.

Also you're entire point is treating the symptom not the disease. Do you gleefully accept ads for devices which do need screens? If so what is wrong with you. If not, why aren't you rallying against ads instead of against screens?