There's a reason I phrased it "appearance of working" - you're assuming that enough people will be able to tell the difference between "working right" and "not working right." As long as it looks to be working properly for the majority of use cases, that's good enough. For most of these tasks, it isn't a simple binary between "doesn't work" and "does work," there's a whole spectrum.

In fact, I would argue this ultimately makes AI more dangerous, because it does a very good job of appearing to work while failing in ways a human doesn't.

Sure, probably, assuming it fails badly enough, which it might. But you're assuming "short term" won't be years, and that it fails in ways that make it clear profit was lost. It's pretty easy to assume that if a computer made a mistake, a human would have as well, especially if you're the one who put the computer in charge.

But that's the thing: AI doesn't have to work particularly well to displace hundreds of thousands of white collar jobs. It just has to create the appearance of working, while being cheaper.

It's already there in places where, even at minimum wage, it wouldn't be cost-effective to have a person perform the task, but an AI can do it cheaply enough. Even if it doesn't do it particularly well. That it can do it at all is enough.

Jobs are going to be given to AI, even if the AI does a worse job of it, simply because it's cheaper. The assumption will be that AIs will only ever get cheaper and more productive. The same assumption isn't being made of humans.

It's not in the Slashdot blurb because it's not in the Ars Technica blurb. The only reason we know it's Benj Edwards is due to his posts on social media. So I disagree: it shouldn't be in the Slashdot blurb, because it hasn't been verified by, ironically enough, real journalists. Once it's on the record, then Slashdot can post that information, but right now, it hasn't been reported by any official source.

Discord won't be. Some random vendor they use will be.

They're outsourcing the verification process to third party vendors. In fact, they already do:

That happened with a vendor they contracted customer support to. Discord is happy to point out that none of their systems were compromised. (This is, sadly, very common: a lot of companies "don't store personal data" but instead contract with third parties to do it for them. And, you should also note, no one seems to know who this "third party vendor" is. Likely a small company that can safely shield their clients from legal liability and fold and reincorporate as a "new company" as needed.)

As these third party vendors specialize in "age verification service" via storing face scans and IDs, you can be sure that they're already a huge target for nation-state attackers. But Discord can truthfully claim that their systems were never breached. Just the third party vendors that they chose and that they'll require you to use if you want to access everything Discord offers.

My take is that Apple is finally admitting that Siri is useless as a voice UI and that they're going to let you use other voice UIs.

Of course, you're still right, because Apple's implementation won't let you replace Siri, but instead require you to launch the specific app that provides the alternative voice control. But it may be worth it to get a voice UI that is functional rather than Siri.

I didn't bother reading the article, but I did do something else: I looked up "Solid protocol" and tried to see what it is.

Originally I compared this to ATproto, but according to the Solid website itself, "Solid is a file system for the Web". And that seems to be about all it does, it provides an API for storing data. It has mechanisms for handling encryption keys, meaning that in theory whoever runs the "Solid Pod" where your data is stored can't read it. But you've basically created a standardized method of accessing OneDrive or Dropbox or any other number of cloud storage providers at that point.

This feels like a whole bunch of API specifications that simply implement a cloud storage service. Sure, all your data may be in "one place" and in theory you can then download it all and move it somewhere else, but in practice you'd still be accessing it through other services that presumably can read it. Assuming this is supposed to be able to provide social media services, these third parties would still be able to determine what you see, whether for advertising or more nefarious purposes.

Again, from the Solid website: "The Solid ecosystem is built on a simple but powerful idea: separating applications from the data they create." Why would applications agree to do that? Even if they do, how you can you be sure they don't save a copy? Even if they don't save a copy, how do you prevent them from using the data that passes through them to track you?

This seems to be a whole lot of added complexity that doesn't really solve anything.

I have to agree. I don't think we've seen a game that definitively failed due to using AI. Deciding not to release a game due to "backlash" isn't the same thing as releasing it and watching it fail. (Although maybe the linked article lists games that released and failed due to use of generative AI. I don't know: it's one of those articles that will only load the first three sentences and blocks reader mode.)

What I've noticed is that more and more games are attempting to enter the whole "continuous revenue stream" space, AKA "live service games." And these are failing because that market is effectively full. Once you've sunk hundreds of dollars into a game, you don't want to move to a "new" game that's designed to get you to do that again. People want to keep using their Fortnite skins. They don't want to move to some clone, even if it is "better" in some way.

The cancelled game in the summary was, according to people who played it, simply a bad game. The backlash against Larian and Expedition 33 doesn't appear to have affected sales at all. There's an argument to be made that Expedition 33 isn't "really" an indie game in the sense of a "small studio" in that it was a multi-million dollar budget game that was made by what's being called a "AA" studio. Taking the "game of the year" award away over "AI" appears to be a way of side-stepping that debate and giving "game of the year" to a small studio.

To the extent that there is any real backlash affecting sales, it appears to be over rising prices more than anything else. There is evidence that Nintendo increasing the price of their games did hurt sales. There's evidence gamers are sick and tired of "always online team shooters" as there have been quite a few failures in that space. There's plenty of evidence of a vocal crowd mad about generative AI in the gaming space, but no evidence - yet - that it's affected people's buying decisions.

This is a plan intended to kill ad blockers. One of the major issues advertisers have right now is that they can't guarantee that their code will be executed as intended. A lot of ad systems now have anti-blocker technology that checks to make sure an ad loaded successfully, and if it didn't or if the dimensions are wrong or if the element is messed with, throw up a page-wide dialog to block access to the site. (Or do what Slashdot does at present, throw you into an infinite alert() loop.)

But that requires JavaScript to work. Block that JavaScript, and you block the ability to block ad-blockers.

Add in things to insure "integrity" of JavaScript delivered to the client, and you break that. No more blocking scripts, no more blocking ads - or at least, no more blocking the scripts detecting if you're blocking ads.

That list shows President Trump won in 2024 with 77,302,169 - which is second, behind Biden in 2020. Which I would call a record, especially when you take into account the strange spike in turn-out in 2020 that never reoccurred in any other election.

You've never used public infrastructure, have you? These are going to be built and forgotten. They will never be upgraded. Like you point out, the connector will be broken eventually and then the station will be useless. This already happens with publicly built charging stations.

It's a waste of money, it was always a waste of money, and it should be stopped.

Due process isn't being ignored. What are you even talking about?

The President has complete control over what the executive branch does. Read the Constitution. It's Article II. Everything President Trump is doing are things that the Constitution allows the President to do.

That is literally how democracy works. The American people elected President Donald J. Trump in record numbers. They voted for him and his policies (exit polls confirm this). That's democracy.

Just because you personally don't like what the people voted for doesn't mean it isn't what the people voted for. The people want DOGE, they want Elon Musk's budget cuts, they voted for it and opinion polls continue to show that the majority of Americans support what Trump is doing.

There's a huge irony in watching the same people who spent the past two years saying President Donald J. Trump would be a "threat to democracy" now telling us we should throw out democracy because they don't like the results.

The US is heading towards a fiscal cliff. This isn't unknown. We flat-out can't be spending this kind of money on worthless projects.

And make no mistake, this EV charger program was always worthless. EV charging is currently undergoing a change from an older standard to a new one. Ever been in a building and see that they installed all sorts of USB A 2.0 style chargers? The ones that max out at 2A? It's like that - they're building old chargers as the industry moves to USB-PD. But the transition hasn't happened yet.

One of the major things that's only just being standardized is billing. Right now, in order to use a charger, you generally have to be a "member" of the charging network whose charger it is. They don't accept credit cards directly, they tend to require you to pay via a custom app. It's pretty terrible. The new system will allow the car itself to transmit account and billing information to the charger, so you won't need to download a new app, everything will be done via a standard protocol.

But currently, we're in that transition period. Chargers as they exist right now are effectively the "old" USB A charging bricks, about to be made obsolete as everything moves over to the newer USB-PD via USB C standard. And, yes, that includes the plug. Newer cars won't be able to use these chargers without an adapter.

They shouldn't be built. They're going to be useless. It was always a stupid plan intended to boost an unpopular president's popularity with the "green" crowd. It certainly wasn't intended to help EV drivers.

But all of that doesn't really matter, because of another simple truth: the US must cut spending, drastically, right now, or it will run out of money in a decade. We already know this. We're heading towards a catastrophe. Anyone accepting government contracts already knows that US government is in the process of financially collapsing. The question isn't if it will happen, the question is now how long can it be delayed.

PAX was huge about a decade ago. They used to announce attendance figures and it was nearing 100,000 over a weekend.

Then they went all DEI, released some "anti-booth-babe" thing, and suddenly stopped announcing attendance figures. That was about the same time the major publishers and console makers stopped attending.

These days it's just a sad little thing where a few indie publishers show up and you get a bunch of people waving rainbow flags and talking about pronouns.

That won't help, though. Considering the following: you have a candidate you agree with entirely, but they're new. They'd arrive in Congress with no committee assignments. They would spend their first term accomplishing next to nothing as they'd have to "earn their spot" at the table. Or, you have the incumbent. You don't agree with them on everything. However, they're on several prime committee seats, and they have the political clout to get things done.

Which are you going to rank higher? The candidate you agree with but who doesn't have the ability to do anything? Or the candidate you partially agree with and has the ability to accomplish things? Be honest.

That's the problem with our seniority-based system. Incumbents have more power because they're incumbents. Period. Throwing out an incumbent means accepting that the replacement will be less effective simply because they're new. Even if you like their policies better, their views and policies don't mean much if they can't do anything with them.