You realize Netanyahu is Jewish, right?

I can't speak for the GP, but in my case it was a sort of "constructive dismissal" that finally pushed me away from all things FB-related.

I used to enjoy outing scammers on IG. I was even so naive as to think I was in some small way doing the platform a service by sticking a red flag on its bad actors. Whoops, guess what, folks? Scammers drive engagement and that's all these platforms care about. So I started getting progressively longer mutings after every post or comment I'd make, regardless of how tame - It got to the point where I finally rage-quit after getting a three-day ban immediately (as in, the notification arrived exactly as I hit post, so there's not even a chance I was reported that fast) for commenting something like "nice sunset, wish I was there!" to a close friend.

I have to admit it's somewhat changing how I write - Not because I use AI to help me write, but rather, my own writing style pretty much meets most of the criteria listed. Case in point, there's a negative parallelism right there and I wasn't even trying for an example. It's an extremely effective rhetorical device, and AI be damned for trying to steal it from us!

Low-frequency word choices, hyphens/dashes/em-dashes (I use hyphens rather than em-dashes, but most people have no idea what the difference is), and Oxford commas? Check. And okay, that last one was intentional.

Accordingly, I now consciously try to sound at least a bit less like AI when writing, mostly through the use of more metaphor and sensory references that have no meaning to an AI.

There is no country on Earth where you're required to own works you cite from. It may be all but impossible to access some content without paying, but once you've seen it - including unlawfully* - you can reference it to your heart's content and there's not a damned thing the author or publisher can do about it.

Google is clearly trying to firewall off their own issues with mass copyright infringement during AI training by passing the buck to the end user. Not happenin', guys! If this rent-seeking scheme actually works in any form, it will just make Gemini everyone's absolute last choice for literature review.

* Yes, there are of course exceptions like classified material and trade secrets, but that's not what Google is talking about here.

The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.

AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.

How is this "news that matter"?

Bill Gates is an old man who has zero AI credentials and has long ago become irrelevant. Not to mention his previous predictions of future developments are not exactly brilliant.

Jobs was a completely non-technical stuffed shirt. The only things he brought to the table were his narcissistic self confidence and a sleazy ability to sell other people's work.

And make no mistake, those are valuable skills, if your goal is to get rich rather than to build the best toys. Even under the most charitable possible interpretations, however, it's still a fundamentally parasitic relationship. The "doers" tend to suck at selling ourselves, while the weasels are good at rooting through our scraps and claiming whatever shiny garbage they find as their own.

lol

Welcome to the 21st century, you might have to catch up on a few things. Start with Mozilla Media Engine and AVFoundation / WebKit Media Stack.

Your website sends me an H.264 stream (or whatever you decided you'll use). It doesn't need to know shit about my graphics hardware.

Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

I get how it could apply to randomized content like streaming radio, but the very concept seems incompatible with "choice".

Is 98 greater than 56? Yes? Okay then. It's still going up. So much vitriol from someone posting nothing but bare assertion - Cite please, beyond your fee-fees?

Let me 'splain it to you in simple language. The number of qubits doesn't need to scale exponentially on the short term for quantum computing to pose a very real threat; it only needs to hit the mid hundreds. As I mentioned, Grover's algorithm is O(n) - Meaning once we hit 256 qubits (plus some change for overhead), SHA256 is substantially weakened. Is that a full crack of AES, which you'll kindly notice I didn't previously claim, Mr. Goalposts? No. No it isn't - But it's arguably worse - SHA is almost ubiquitous and affects far more than encryption itself. You don't need to crack a tank's armor if you can convince its driver to piss in the fuel tank.

I also happen to think - and to be clear, what follows is my opinion, not psychic knowledge about the future - you're completely wrong on the bigger picture; and once QC hits its stride Gordon Moore will again be relevant. But critically, that's not necessary for it to cause some serious damage in the near future.

It doesn't NEED to know any of these things. My browser knows the window (not screen) size and if your CSS is well-formed, it'll manage or maybe your page looks shit if you build it shit. It needs to know my OS only if I want a download link, not on every page I ever visit. It doesn't need graphics capabilities unless it wants to bypass the browser rendering engine, in which case it should ask for permission or fuck off.

The thing is that we give up too easily and the major browser manufacturers (one of which is an ad company themselves) are complicit.

I want "fuck the ad industry" mode, where the browser generates random but plausible values for every non-essential information a website requests. Different ones every 5 minutes.

A stopped clock is right twice a day.

That's as simple as it gets. I'm no fan of the orange turd, but it's virtually impossible for him to be wrong on every issue.