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Comment Re:the law only required (Score 3, Informative) 109

The entire world has realise that opposing Trump is just giving him what he wants: a fight. It's what he does best and does nothing but create noise behind which decisions continue to made. So now they realise that if they are nice to him and pander to his ego then they will be a chance of getting what they want. The real concern is then which celebrity billionaire / tech mogul he is the most enamoured by. That person will then get top billing when it comes to driving the actions of the POTUS. Right now they are all clamouring for his attention and they all seem to be getting it. Because what the country really needed was a presidency that is no longer driven by self-interested politicians and is instead driven by self-interested billionaires. Either way the people are getting screwed. Hooray.

Comment Re:Australia = lots of sun + lots of sheep (Score 1) 49

A 30 second google search tells me that it's already happening and it's already having positive impacts on the actual quality of the sheep themselves:
https://www.pv-magazine-austra...
https://www.theguardian.com/au...

This will genuinely change a lot of people's minds when it comes to opposing large solar farms in their local region. We're all about the sheep here, and if it's good for the sheep then it's good for everyone.

Comment Re:Protecting US manufacturers (Score 5, Insightful) 115

This guy gets it. We're so paranoid about foreign influence and maybe that's valid, but when Elon and Zuck and everyone else have their fingers in all of our lives we're not even remotely concerned? We embrace these goons into every aspect of our day to day, we celebrate them as successful billionaires and somehow that translates into trust that they are not actively screwing us over. They're now engineering themselves to have significant government influence by sucking up to the orange man who is honestly just reflecting the view of most Americans in thinking that having these guys in positions of power is actually a good thing. And yet we KNOW that they don't have our best interests at heart. It's either about money, power or ego. But I guess that's where we are at these days, embracing authority through subterfuge, masquerading as admiration and trust that is clearly not earned. /rant

Comment Re:Post truth age (Score 2) 60

"Computer. Generate artifical signitures for all future message from this account. Use recently discovered vulnerabilities to ensure they are seen as authentic. Hide all WoT paths to their signing key and short-cut anything more than 7 hops away so that appears to be less than 5. Run spam heuristics on future messages and then re-generate so that they are not identified as spam. If any are still like to appear to probably be spam, do they have any common keys attesting their identity? Re-align those keys with the account profile so that they appear authentic"

The problem as I see it is that it becomes an escalating war between the spam and the spam filters. Google search is already broken because of this very reason, such that we can use LLMs to design web sites that appear higher up in the results. Of course Google will work to fix this but where does it end? The "intelligence" is in the hands of anyone who wants to pay for it and use it, and it is already exceeding the capabilities of any human mind, effectively a black box of tools that anyone can attempt to apply in any situation. Is your LLM better than mine? We don't even know how to use them effectively yet, let alone what is truly going on inside.

I am personally terrified of this until I remember that pretty much all of it is optional. Humanity has survived for 10s of 1000s of years without this technology. If the internet was to suffer a death (and potential future re-birth) then I think we'll be OK.

Comment Re:Post truth age (Score 1) 60

We're the ones that killed journalism, believing that it was no longer important to have someone dedicated to finding truth and perspective and instead relying on social media gossip. This was the great ego trip of humanity, that we seemed to think the only barrier to stop anyone from publishing "news" was a technical one, and then once we all had the platforms at our fingertips that what we thought and what we believed was somehow worthy of the eyes of millions. It will take a deliberate shift back to valuing those investigative skills and truth-seeking principals to regain just the potential to have verifiable sources of truth. And we'll have to pay for it.

The glimmer of hope in all of this is that we have the potential to realise that the gargabe we're being fed is just that: garbage. Humanity in the information age is just an infant that needs to grow up. These platforms need to die and I actually look forward to the next few years when AI will swamp them with content and render them pointless. If we're just that bit aware enough of what is going on then all we have to do is walk away and realise that we've been asleep at the wheel for the last 20 years. Facebook, twitter and all of the other shit-piles can just wither away and die, drowning in their own waste. It could be quite glorious to watch.

Of course the alternative is that The Matrix is easier than first imagined, and all the machines have to do is feed us a steady stream of barely likeable garbage text and videos to keep us glued to our devices. Vivid and life-like simulated reality isn't required at all, just do enough to distract us and we willingly give up our autonomy in favour of being "engaged". It makes me sick just thinking about it, but is it really all that far from our current reality?

Comment Not new, just worse (Score 4, Insightful) 116

"the tools are sometimes designed to seize users' attention without regard to morals or accuracy"

He's described pretty much all of social media. AI just makes it worse. I don't see how anyone could hope to contain this. AI can create human-like accounts, post human-like content and generate images that are certainly good enough to fool 95% of the people out there. All of the nefarious shit that we've had with social media is now just getting amplified.

Comment Re:dear gawd (Score 1) 360

Nobody needs AR, but it sure does look cool in the movies. No small number of us tech nerds are still impressed with the floating displays in Minority Report, without really knowing what they would be like to use or why they would be better than anything else we have. It just "looks cool". This is also what Apple does, so it's a perfect match even if it has zero real world applications.

I do also wonder if there is a tipping point of the acceptability of wearing a VR/AR mask in public. COVID did this for surgical masks so it's probably a numbers game. That's where the price really doesn't help. Personally I'd love to be able to have something like this on my daily commute, enabling me to work or watch or play like I'm in front of a multi-monitor desktop. I just don't feel like anyone would do that on a bus or a train. Maybe a plane.

The 2 hour battery life thing is kind of a joke though, and for me it's the killer failure. If this thing is really useful, like genuinely important to wear during the day, then 2 hours isn't close to enough. We work 8+ hours a day and we certainly use our phones for more than 2 hours. What tasks are we expected to do for just 2 hours? I can't even watch Top Gun.

Comment If the machines wanted to rule us ... (Score 1) 23

what better way than to subdue us than with an endless stream of nonsensical, meaningless content? They don't have to rule with force, they only need to make us vaguely "happy", placid and stupid. This is literally the plot line of The Matrix. It's eye-opening just how primed the human race already is for this and we're willingly pushing ourselves towards it, as if it's actually worthwhile.

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