You're missing the point.

Leaks of personal information like this are only possible because some company decided to collect and store it all in one place. It's never a matter of if, but only when, a database will be breached and data leaked.

The age verification laws will create even more vast databases of personal information; names, addresses, financial information, various service accounts, even deep information about each person's habits and preferences. All in the hands private businesses who were the lowest (or at least most corrupt) bid. It's never a matter of if, but only when, a database will be breached and data leaked. It will be a prize sweeter than any criminal organization or malicious state actor could possibly have dreamed of.

Let's stop putting everyone's eggs in the same basket against their will, hmm? Especially when it doesn't even solve the problem it's championed to solve.
=Smidge=

IMO buying and selling are a matter of gambling on which way you think other people gamble.

I know what .rar and .gz are. If .lz is something similar, maybe dark matter is a compression artifact.

I'm sure that hopping on the AI bandwagon will fix everything.

The fact that it makes a big cloud around a galaxy or cluster rather than collapsing puts a lot of constraints on what it can do.

For more info, you'll have to go to someone who knows more about it than what I've read on science-news websites.

Dark energy is a real puzzle. As I understand it, it's too weak by a factor of 10^30 or 10^60 in comparison from what we should expect the known vacuum energy would cause. You see this mentioned very occasionally, but most treatments of DE that a layman runs across just ignore it in favor of wringing their hands over some issue that is trivial in comparison.

Some boffin cam up with that idea, but they rule it out because DM apparently doesn't interact with itself (very much) other than by gravity, so it can't clump up tight like a star or a planet or a living thing. (Something to do with shedding energy, IIRC.)

But it's a cool idea. If I were a novelist I'd run with it.

Sure? I've had PV on my roof for the past year. 430W nominal panels. Problem is most of them point east and some of them point west, because the orientation of my house, and the ones that point west are shaded the later half of the afternoon due to trees. Despite the sub optimal orientation, they average about 2kwh daily when the sun is shining.

I'm in lower NY where we have like... weather and stuff, y;know? I'm sure they'd do a lot better in California with better orientation. Full sun for 5 hours a day on average is not unreasonable.
=Smidge=

They will not work in a power outage, because that would mean it could feed power back into a downed electrical grid which is how people get killed. It's also extremely illegal for that reason.

=Smidge=

The payback for these types of systems is like 3-6 years depending on circumstances.

A single 400W panel with microinverter should handily average 2kwh daily as pong as it's pointed in vaguely the right direction. In California that's reducing our electric bill by over 60 cents a day just for power costs, not including avoided taxes and fees. Doesn't sound like much, but at $400 "installed" it's paid for itself in well under 2 years. After that, basically free money as savings to the tune of like $20/mo.

And you can take it with you.

I'd say it's a no-brainer if you have a place to put it, but if you're actually opposed to the concept you might actually not have a brain.
=Smidge=

I get paid for my excess solar. Not a lot, mind you, and only once a year, but they still cut me a check if my net balance is negative.

=Smidge=

Like for example Bill Atkinson's famous productive -2000 lines: https://www.folklore.org/Negat...

For decades I've been suggesting on-and-off that a big problem is too many commercial programmers writing too much code and making too much work for each other with an endless proliferation adhoc interfaces, each a new "standard".

As an egregious example, years ago I read somewhere that Microsoft Office embeds like six entirely different virtual machines. Maybe it has improved since with the CLR?

Except for proprietary competitive forces, how many spreadsheets, compilers, VMs, email clients, word processors, and databases do we really need? Even in the realm of games, how many game engines do we need? Granted, game content may be a different story, but even there how many low-to-medium-quality games do we need?

The same is true to an extent with the entire internet. How many low-to-medium-quality comments do we need to wade through on various topics?

Imagine if everyone was using, say, (optionally-typed) Scheme with a great set of libraries to write everything (including with "org mode" in a Scheme-powered emacs-like multi-tool with a calendar etc), and there was just no "JSON" or "JavaScript" or "XML" or "Office-compatible adhoc file formats" or even "C" or "Rust". Not saying that an optionally-typed Scheme is the best choice, but what a different computing world to imagine. Guess my Symbolics 3600 Lisp machine experience in the 1980s spoiled me. :-) And I have to admit that TypeScript on widespread Scheme-inspired JavaScript VMs with WebAssembly has moved the computing world a lot in that direction with pros and cons.

I know an obvious objection (as with Linux's endless front-end and distributions) is about choice, but at some point there is a tyranny of excessive choice, like "twisty little passage ways all alike".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less is a book about overchoice written by American psychologist Barry Schwartz and first published in 2004 by Harper Perennial. In the book, Schwartz argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. The book analyzes the behavior of different types of people (in particular, maximizers and satisficers). This book argues that the dramatic explosion in choice--from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs--has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution and how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse."

I have no problem with people writing personal code for fun or learning or personal growth (which I highly recommend) -- the same way a person may play the piano as a hobby without expecting every time they play a tune the result needs to become a packaged commercial musical product.

The main thing I think about these days is how to have a much simpler tech ecosystem. Including for this reason outlined by Rich Hickey (author of Clojure) in "Simple Made Easy":
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
====
Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.

We should aim for simplicity because simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.

Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy. "Easy" means "to be at hand", "to be approachable".

"Simple" is the opposite of "complex" which means "being intertwined", "being tied together". Simple != easy.

What matters in software is: does the software do what is supposed to do? Is it of high quality? Can we rely on it? Can problems be fixed along the way? Can requirements change over time? The answers to these questions is what matters in writing software not the look and feel of the experience writing the code or the cultural implications of it.

The benefits of simplicity are: ease of understanding, ease of change, ease of debugging, flexibility.

Complex constructs: State, Object, Methods, Syntax, Inheritance, Switch/matching, Vars, Imperative loops, Actors, ORM, Conditionals.

Simple constructs: Values, Functions, Namespaces, Data, Polymorphism, Managed refs, Set functions, Queues, Declarative data manipulation, Rules, Consistency.

Build simple systems by:
* Abstracting - design by answering questions related to what, who, when, where, why, and how.
* Choosing constructs that generate simple artifacts.
* Simplify by encapsulation.
====

Or, as a joke:
"Weinberg's Law: If builders built buildings the way (current-AI-enhanced-HR-staffer) programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...

Interesting also how he fantasizes about needing get someone else to do it for him.

I think this is what he daydreams about when he wanks.

In case he does, I hope Bill Gates is learning to laugh at the irony my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Or in other words, as people were saying even in the 1960s:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
      "To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer."

How can we mitigate that risk? Like President John F. Kennedy quipped (echoed by Joel Goodman of the Humor Project):
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
        "There are three things which are real:
        God, human folly, and laughter.
        The first two are beyond our comprehension.
        So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)

Or, as I explain in more detail:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and economic] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Here is someone involved in AI who gets that our direction out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction and level of compassion going into it:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it. Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026."

I'm glad to see more AI and technology leaders starting to get that. Another example:
https://www.schmidtsciences.or...
        ""As AI systems advance, we face the risk that they will act in ways that contradict human values and interests--but this risk is not inevitable," said Eric Schmidt. "With efforts like the AI Safety Science program, we can help build a future in which AI benefits us all while maintaining safeguards that protect us from harm."
        The cohort of researchers--including "godfather of AI" Yoshua Bengio at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, OpenAI board member Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, and "AI Snake Oil" author Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University--will focus their work on research that addresses the critical safety challenges that AI faces."

Ultimately though, guard rails can come off or be jumped -- so we really need AI with a sense of humor -- especially for irony. :-)

--------

And we also need AI developers and funders who root their work more in compassion as a guiding force more than competition.

Something I wrote to Ray Kuzweil on that back in 2000 (put up by someone else I sent a copy to):
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt."

And also in 2001:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
          "Beware that people (usually not well versed in E&E [Ecology & Evolution]) cite ecology and evolution all the time to support a belief, but that does not make it a scientifically valid thing to do. For example, it is common to cite competition as a given in nature, but Lewis Thomas in "Lives of a Cell" points out that most successful organisms participate in effectively collaborative efforts -- like the symbiosis between mitochondria and eukaryotic cells. Likewise, the fact that something is true in most species does not mean that humans (given intelligence and culture) should behave that way -- because if E&E teaches anything, it is that there is a lot of diversity out there."

And in 2007:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "Technologies designed to amplify and extend the scope of corporate greed likely just will not have the same positive basis as ones built out of joy and humor and love. If you ever watch the British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, greed seems much more likely to design "Queeg" than "Holly". Langdon Winner writes about related issues at length in his classic _Autonomous Technology_.
      In short, I feel it likely you are clinging to outdated disprove assumptions about motivation and creativity and economics. And I speculate that the reason is in part ironically from your past success. Those assumptions may be holding you back, and holding on to them may indeed help bring about a very negative side of the singularity you want to avoid."

Also on that theme: https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...
        "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers.
        Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.
        No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."

> The numbers I saw suggested a 1% change in humanity's emissions, half the CO2 budget for the world, would solve the problem.

Where did you see that? Even the Paris Accords - which are kinda the minium effort - calls for 50% CO2 reduction by 2030.

=Smidge=