Some codebases have been poorly cobbled together bits of code from stack overflow long before AI became capable of replacing the human developers who were doing it. A well trained statistical model doing a better job than some batch of cowboys that couldn't pass a Turing test themselves is hardly surprising.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

That's assuming that they're actually deleted as opposed to merely being flagged as deleted so that they aren't displayed anymore. Even if they did actually remove them from their database, your comments still exist on backup tape somewhere.

What were their alternatives? They weren't doing anything about the problem so had nothing else to point to. Their lawyers can't outright lie and claim Facebook did things to try and stop them problem when it didn't, so this was the one excuse that was presented. It's no different than a murder trial where it's clear that the defendant is guilty, but the defense presents an absurd theory that no one buys because they have to have some alternative explanation. If Facebook had done more then their lawyers would have had more to work with. It's not the attorneys' fault that their client was that fucking stupid.

There's a difference between Facebook who didn't do a good job at policing their platform and Epstein who committed the acts himself. Consider that the bits were transmitted by some ISP, but that you would think it's absurd to punish them just like it would be stupid to try to put Chevy on trial because some bank robbers used a Camaro as a getaway vehicle. If you tried to charge the ISP they'd also argue that some illegal activity is inevitable. It's impossible to prevent all crime, but the law is that Facebook has some responsibility to ensure that they're not allowing it to knowingly occur on their platform.

Even if Facebook were making actual efforts to prevent this from occurring, some would still inevitably slip through because some criminals are smart enough to work around whatever efforts are made to prevent the crime. The problem here is that Facebook wasn't doing nearly enough as they were legally required to do.

Of course the stock market isn't a perfect reflection of the actual economy. If it were, Soviet style central planning would actually be possible. It's just a (usually good) estimate of it by a large number of people. Just like guesses about how many marbles a jar contains, the individual ones may be wrong in one direction or another, but the aggregate average will turn out to be fairly close to the actual amount.

The GameStop situation wasn't a good example of a Ponzi scheme. That was an entirely separate fiasco where some greedy investors got caught in a position that created infinite liability on their end where they had more short positions than there existed shares of stock. They were obligated to purchase shares at a future date regardless of price until their shorts were covered. If the price had collapsed, they would have been able to buy the shares for less than they previously sold them. However, the flip side of this was that if the market collectively drove the price up, those investors were royally fucked and they wound up losing badly. That's entirely different than a Ponzi scheme.

GameStop's price fluctuations were the result of specific circumstances that don't typically occur naturally and are unlikely to again because no investment firm would ever allow their traders to do something like that again. It will probably be a case study in textbooks for decades to come to make sure no one does something that stupid ever again. If anything it shows that the model works because it allows bad behavior to be appropriately punished which ensures others will be less likely to repeat it in the future. More generally any investor behavior that deviates too far from the underlying reality will be similarly "punished" by other investors. Those who are less able to accurately value the economy will lose out to those who are and be replaced.

They should be done away with. The ability for unelected bureaucrats to create and enforce law is unconstitutional. We elect legislators for that purpose and they shouldn't be able to rely on unelected bureaucracies to do their job either because the effect has been that they all throw their hands up as though they can do nothing while allowing these unelected bureaucrats who do not have to ever face the voters to act as they please.

If these agencies have recommendations they can make them to Congress like everyone else and it can go through the same process as every other law.

I think his point was that a person talented enough to have built this could have built something better. I'm sure you would also agree that it would be better if the average Colombian could sell cocaine to people as opposed to being exploited by a cartel, but at the end of the day the world would be better off if no one were involved in the drug trade at all. Of course there are some that don't consider illegal narcotics to be any more or less immoral than online pornography and that both are awful or that there's nothing wrong with either.

For anyone who believes that pornography in and of itself is exploitative, then at best OnlyFans is just a cleaner version of hell, or possibly even worse if it entices more people to participate who might have otherwise stayed away. I'm sure more people would try cocaine (and possibly destroy their own life through addiction) if it were sold by well-dressed young men in a clean and tidy store who would have never bought it if it meant dealing with a shady looking character in a back alley in a bad part of town.

All that aside, my condolences to his family. Having lost relatives to cancer myself, it's not something that's easy to go through. Whether you agree that this man was immoral or not, he still had people who were close to him and loved him and I hope that can find peace after his passing.

It would cut down on it, but you'd be a fool to think that a $5 monthly fee makes it unprofitable to operate bots on a website. Unless whatever marketing or other crap they're shilling isn't worth even $60 a year then they'll go away. Unless they can detect the bots, a paywall doesn't do much and probably kills traffic as bad or worse than ID requirements.

There aren't any good solutions to this problem, just the choice of alternatives that are awful in their own different ways.

I think that some people believe that any kind of technology will help, in much the same way that tablets, laptops, and computers before them were introduced to early education in the hopes that they would improve outcomes. Even there thereby results have been dubious or generally non-existent. All of those things are merely tools, and while it would benefit someone to learn how to use a computer for a number of jobs, there's little specialized need requiring students to need to learn how to use a smartphone. They'll do that fine on their own. However thinking that they need any of those tools for every class is as absurd as thinking they should carry a screwdriver around all day in the hopes that it can improve educational outcomes.

I can give people the benefit of the doubt for being hopeful that it might work, but several decades of data has now shown that it doesn't. I'm sure the education companies will find some new woo to peddle if schools stop buying technology. I don't know what that might be, but I can hear the hype training coming down the tracks.

I'm sure some people will find this patent to be deeply upsetting, but Walmart having patented it hopefully ensures that no other stores will be able to use it. It's been years since I've shopped at a Walmart so them doing this doesn't affect me at all. Perhaps this patent could be granted in perpetuity so that other stores are unable to use it after the usual 14/28 year period.

I disagree with this sentiment and would argue that regulation is what usually ends up causing the problems you decry, which is often referred to as regulatory capture where the entrenched businesses wind up getting laws passed to their own benefit that limit competition because new or smaller competitors cannot afford the costs of complying with the regulations. Outside of narrow cases involving serious potential for bodily harm or similarly severe consequences, the regulations do more harm than good. The added costs they create are passed on to consumers, but usually not transparently in a way that would allow anyone to know their true cost. Imagine if sales tax weren't separated from the shelf price. How could you as a consumer distinguish between a store screwing you and a tax hike?

Any market will tend towards consolidation and fewer competitors over time. That just reduces redundancy. It however doesn't prevent new companies from entering the market. Existing companies can try to hamper those efforts, but their best options are either lowering prices or offering better service because in a market free of intervention their only other alternatives are either criminal or tend to make their own product worse. Most monopolies eventually get supplanted when a new and better alternative is invented because established companies that don't innovate will become incapable and less able to do things outside of their core competencies. It's why Amazon replaced WalMart, who replaced older retailers, that replaced companies that maybe only exist as a brand name at this point. At one time Sears was the leading retailer, but they were too stuck in their ways and diminished over time.

Why use the neural net at all if the artists have already made the game look the way that they want? The only possible reason is that it's an older game made for lower resolutions and it looks blocky/bad on modern displays. DLSS has been a solution in search of a problem for several generations now. I can't wait to see this applied to some games that weren't cherry picked because it will produce nightmare fuel. Imagine playing a game from the early 2000's where the faces are just good enough for the algorithm to latch onto and make look hyper-realistic while everything else is untouched around it. It'll be amusing, but nothing I'd really want to use once the initial shock has worn off.

Why would you expect a publicly traded company to pay wages any higher than they have to? Do you regularly pay more than the sticker price for something at the store? Of course not.

The only thing that can reliably create higher wages is competition. When workers have a choice of where to work, companies must naturally compete for their labor. It's no different when you go to the store and have a variety of products available for purchase. Do you think the price would still be as low if there weren't alternatives?

Employees also have an easy path to realizing the gains of their employers for themselves by buying stock in the company. Many tech companies even pay employees by granting stock or stock options. Anyone who wants can become a partial owner of a publicly traded company and reap the rewards of profitable quarters themselves. Alternatively they can leave and form their own company and as an owner be the one to keep all of that profit for themselves.

Anyone who's completely altruistic or isn't just as greedy themselves (and merely envious of others) isn't even complaining about this as they don't care. They just act according to their beliefs and don't care about the (to them) idiotic game that everyone else is playing because they find it meaningless.