Whale oil?

Yeah really, I've been using Samsung Galaxy phones since the S8 and I've never once thought, "gee I wish this was thinner." Even the S8 at a whopping 8mm thickness, it was like holding a delicate bar of soap. I miss the sub-6" screens, never much cared about thinness.

What are people going to be doing on these missions that couldn't be automated?

I was going to say "write poetry" but that can be automated now, so...

Seems like all we're good at is stinking up the place.
https://www.vox.com/science-an...

I think the phrase is now "in the land of people affected with low vision, the one-eyed person is monarch."

The web was already enshittified well before AI came along. AI is just consuming and regurgitating that shit, so the result actually ends up being a kind of rich fertilizer.

Because it's cheaper to hire a team of a dozen HR professionals than be exposed to a single lawsuit from an employee.

I've never used Spotify much, but on Amazon Music my favorite method is is to just say random or gibberish words to Alexa. Something like "Alexa, play blah blah blah." It will try to interpret my words and usually find something that I've never heard before. It's the only way to find something out of the ordinary since it tries really hard to play the same music I've heard 1000x before. I've found some interesting music using that method.

I remember Origin, and worse I remember EA Download Manager. If you made the mistake of buying a game on there, you would have to download the base game, then download and apply every patch sequentially. It could take days to download and update a game. EA was never interested in providing a good experience, just doing the bare minimum once they take your money. Meanwhile, Valve has this solved from the beginning by distributing differential patches without even having to run an installer. It's not hard to see how they became #1.

No, it's not a monopoly, it's simply the best place to buy games. There's plenty of healthy competition, but Valve has won over the hearts and minds of players but being amazing at selling games. This includes fighting for consumers' rights with generous refund policies, something previously unheard of with software. It used to be that all you needed to know about software purchases was "no refunds," but now you can buy a game, try it out, and if it doesn't run well on your PC or if you just don't like it, you can return it. Nobody else has even tried to offer that kind of service. Does no one remember Steam's early competitors like Direct2Drive, who would charge their customers an extra "download fee" on a game you paid for if you wanted to re-download the game? Of course you don't, because they don't exist anymore... not because of any shady tactics, but because Steam was simply better.

I think the arms race is already over. At this point it's security theater. Sooner than you think, it will be ONLY bots viewing your content, and at that point the question is... who pays for the traffic?

In the future, I can see every packet being signed to identify the billable party. You'll see aggregate charges for every API request that your AI Agent-based browser makes on your behalf, with overages if you exceed the quotas allowed by your monthly fee. You'll never interact with a website directly, except maybe in a museum.

Yes, in case you haven't been paying attention or your Internet browsing is so straight-and-narrow that you've never encountered this... We've evolved beyond text-based Captchas and now have what are essentially browser minigames that try to gauge that you're human. How much of it is just security theater, we don't know, but it's all based on the vain hope that it would be too tedious or expensive to get a bot to solve these en masse. However I'm sure they will all be cracked eventually. The object rotation puzzles I've seen are probably particularly challenging, but not insurmountable.

They do? If you have decent desktop, they still idle at 70-80W, plus all the overhead for peripherals. That adds up, and even your 80 Plus Platinum power supply isn't very efficient at only 10% load.

I haven't really kept up with the research, but I thought studies have shown the uncomfortable conclusion that consciousness is an epiphenomenon... when measured in an fMRI for example, a decision and action appear to takes place milliseconds before the conscious mind is aware of it, but phenomenologically it feels like you made that decision before the event happened. I'm not sure what to do with that information, but it appears to be true.

So what is the purpose of consciousness? Most likely a kind of integrative process designed by evolution to produce a social identity and narrative in order to facilitate living with other humans. It seems unlikely that consciousness is really necessary for complex thought, however you define it. So unless AI becomes an evolved social animal (god forbid) they are essentially "zombies" and can be treated as such.

The change back in the fall is fine by me, I get an extra hour of sleep. It's the "spring forward" change that's unpopular.

Maybe we should just keep doing the "fall back one hour" every year, and cancel the "spring forward one hour," everybody wins.

Same. When I see something like that, I like to look at the comments and it saddens me to see how many people fail to recognize it as AI. I wonder how many of those commenters are also bots.

Unfortunately I think that counts as engagement and boosts the popularity of the post.