I take native Hawaiian religious objections seriously. These are people who take a fatalistic "Pele will take what she wants, it's pointless to try to stop her" attitude toward lava flows running over their houses that seems utterly insane here in Iceland. We'll buy up every available water pump on the international market and walk on active-flowing lava fields to save a harbour for a couple thousand people. We'll keep running tourist sites right next to a volcano that erupts every couple months by building multi-story-high berms around it with giant bulldozers and cooling anything that tries to overtop to make the berms even higher. And it totally works . But Hawaiians will sit back and watch incredibly slow-flowing flows with easy diversion paths take out everything they hold dear. At best they'll point to some primitive failed attempts in like the 1940s as a reason to not try, but then when pressed, it often comes back to: "Pele will take what she wants to take."

Another example: geothermal drilling on the Big Island. Massive protests. Massive resistance, way beyond the token NIMBY resistance here. Meanwhile Hawaii continues to generate most of its electricity from oil, at great cost. Hawaii is the only other place (outside of Iceland) to have accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. In Hawaii they treated it as a major incident and immediately shut down the well. When we did it? Our reaction was, "WOW, we can produce REALLY hot steam from THIS well!", made it into a production well, and started planning to drill more.

I guess one major difference here is that in the early Icelandic cosmology, volcanoes weren't the product of a high-ranking creator goddess, but rather, Surtr, who was practically a demon and was fated to destroy the world. It's good to resist Surtr!

Right, lots of institutions send PDFs specifically because you can lock the text, provide specific form entry boxes, and get a reasonably secure signature. All of which are features of PDF, which is an open standard.

They don't send you a Word document which is arguably not an open standard because Word doesn't actually conform to it's own standard.

AI companies want quantity. If they wanted old, rare books they'd download the public domain copies provided by everyone from the Internet Archive to Google.

Fans don't like big camera drones flying around in front of the action they paid ridiculous prices to sort of see. Stadiums are also both big and loud.

One small book seller said that in April,

It's right there. The last story on Slashdot about this was an ad from a company trying to sell books to AI companies. It makes a good story. Ad in some credulous people who suppy their own adjectives like "exponential" and there you go.

Probably a few (as in count-on-one-hand) companies are buying bulk books, one copy of each.

Because nobody was every "first" on any land.

Are we talking Wheel of Time, Battlestar Galactica or some version of Hindu or Buddhist infinite cyclic time?

Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. Finding it is a very long shot that seems to have happened only twice. By the best evidence we have, Hawaii was first settled by Polynesians around a thousand years ago and stayed pretty isolated up until James Cook stumbled upon it in 1778. The queen of Hawaii was overthrown in 1893 by US marines and US fruit growers, and annexed by the US in 1898.

It didn't start with Trump. The US has a lot of enemies and sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between a dispute with a competing nation and individual scientists from that nation. Trump definitely made it worse though.

Except his complaint is not.

Yes, it literally was. The main public complaint of the weavers was that they spent their entire life learning their art, and then their bosses come in with a machine that they teach to replicate the patterns that they developed, churn out cheap "slop" versions of them, and fire them.

And here we're talking about profits, despite their huge scaleup expenditure. Theirs and OpenAI's margins on serving inference are ~40%.

It's almost impossible for a company undergoing a massive scaleup rate to turn a profit, let alone growing 10X annualized for 3 1/2 years running, but Anthropic pulled it off.

Not sure anyone is having to provide an incentive. While in small quantities, old models of Chromebook might cost as little as $200 on sale, chances are good that schools are spending more like $400 to $500 on average for their devices.

At just $600 for the Neo (the current educational price), the cost difference is minimal now. And if your teachers are already using Macs, that's one fewer platform to support. And if the hardware lasts longer (to be determined), then that could easily make up the remaining cost difference.

It really isn't complex. Google does it just fine. You have an account picker in the upper right corner, and you choose which account you're using to interact with that app. No big deal.

Having a mechanism to use one account for music and a different one for app stores? Now that's complex. That's adding special-casing for each app that needs to handle a separate account, instead of designing the auth system correctly to support multiple accounts to begin with. It's almost always easier to do it right than to add a bunch of special-case workarounds everywhere.

I also disagree with the claim that 99.9% of users only have one iCloud account — not because it isn't currently true, but because it is true only tautologically. If the system is designed so that no person can meaningfully use more than one account, then no one is ever going to create or attempt to use more than one account. What this means is that no businesses will ever use iCloud accounts for their internal messaging system, etc. Apple is basically shutting themselves out of the business ecosystem altogether by design.

They've designed the system in a way that makes what you're saying true, so of course it is true. But that doesn't mean that 99.9% of users would not *benefit* from it not being true. In an ideal world, iCloud would compete head-to-head with things like Office 365. They have the tech, but limiting it in ways that make it useless for business purposes means they aren't actually competing.

Woke is what happens when you go to see a movie and instead of being told a compelling story woke ideology is proselytized

Recursion (n): See "recursion"

It's hilarious how obsessed you people are over a term that you can't even define and that none of you agree on. As far as I can tell, the only thing "woke" means today is "I'm A Right Winger, And This Is Something That I Personally Hate". I've seen people describe concepts as unrelated as "the concept of a metaverse" and "removing copyrighted materials to avoid lawsuits" as "woke".

An example of woke AI slop is Everything Everywhere All at Once

Um. What?

That movie was filmed from January to March 2020. You think AI video was a "thing" then? The movie premiered in March 2022. The infamously awful "Will Smith Eating Spaghetti" AI video was what AI video looked like in 2023. AI video was not "a thing" back when that movie was being made. What you actually hate is that movie's CGI.

Secondly, since when is "Jackass"-style "bro" stuff** famously leftist? Sexual gags are stereotypically "bro culture" and stereotypically disliked by feminists in particular and leftists in general. Don't get me wrong, you'll also find some people on the left who like that stuff, but the right tends to buy into it more (men tend to vote more rightward).

As far as I can tell from this, what you actually hate is (A) CGI, and (B) bro culture. Based on this, what you should actually consider yourself is an AI-supporting leftist.

That entire video sits firmly in uncanny valley.

I've shown it to about a dozen people in person without telling them it was AI first, and not a single person noticed. It's only "uncanny valley" because you've been told in advance that it's AI.

It's like my favourite social media hobby: when I encounter anti-AI people, I post things made by humans, generally masterpiece paintings or award-winning photographs, suggest that it's AI, and then watch them tear down how awful and fake and soulless it is. It's pretty hilarious ;)

So what you actually want is more taxes on the wealthy? If so, just say that. Don't hide behind arguments about copyright or that sort of stuff when that's not your actual motivation.

but while machine looms only put people out of work,

Machine looms, along with all of the other equipment of the industrial revolution, led to a massive boom of prosperity across the population as a whole. Machine looms in specific made clothing far more affordable to the average person.

One can criticize the politics of the early industrial revolution for not doing enough to funnel the wealth down quickly enough or to regulate the robber barons, but it was overall a massive benefit to quality of life of society as a whole.

LLMs are doing that plus going into systems that abuse them in lots of other ways.

And the industrial revolution made it easier to make bombs and bullets. That doesn't mean that we should all go back to medieval Europe where the average person lived on the edge of not affording their next meal and society had to dedicate almost all of its resources to basic production rather than things like education, medicine, science, etc. Or reject even more technology and ultimately end up back as paleolithic hunter-gatherers where 40-50% of people died before age 15.

The root cause comes from these twelve words:

Authentication systems that allow only a single signed-in account are defective by design. Approximately 100% of all people have more than one account that they need to be signed in with.

I have half a dozen Google accounts for specific purposes — one for work, one for personal, one for electronic music tablets to which multiple people share physical access, a couple of old domain-specific accounts that got converted from free work profiles, and I'm probably forgetting some. Not all of these are useful, but if I could not have continuous access to work and personal, it would be a tremendous pain in the backside.

And encouraging people to merge profiles like that is nuts. It all but guarantees leaks. A confidentiality agreement typically protects things you learned in the scope of your employment, but after you are employed, if they continue to send you confidential information, there's a decent chance that you aren't under any legal obligation to keep that secret.

This is just a really bad way to do things, driven by a fundamental flaw in their architecture. And it doesn't just cause problems for Apple. It causes problems for their customers as well. I can't have a separate iCloud account for my work. I have to use a Google account. And more than that, when I hit the maximum number of AirTag devices (which I'm about to reach), I can't add additional iCloud accounts. I'm hard-capped at a single account.

While we're at it, the limitation of a single user per iPad stems from the same defective design process. All of those sorts of 1:1 mapping decisions between accounts, users, and devices need to be fundamentally rethought, because they were always a mistake. Maybe now that Apple is being bitten by it, they'll finally do the things that users have been asking them to do for the last decade. Bonus points if they lose their lawsuit because of a lack of a modicum of care on their part, because that just might be enough to wake the sleeping giant and get them to fix this mess.