Maybe Apple will buy Paramount, Sony, and ABC?

"All restaurants are Taco Bell"

It wouldn't be news if you looked at their terms of service -- which you should. The ToS explicitly say they use a combination of automated systems, human review, and reports to identify and investigate violations of their usage terms, including violence, abuse, fraud, impersonation, disinformation, foreign influence campaigns , abusive sexual content, and academic dishonesty. This includes "anonymous" sessions that are saved for a minimum of 30 days. You have no expectation of privacy from the provider's compliance teams.

This is *absolutely* standard among the major online players. So why not use a local AI workstation with a couple of big-ass GPU cards in it to run the campaign? That's what they *should* have done. But the major online players like ChatGPT and Claude are much better at realistic content generation than the widely available local models you can run.

What they should have done is design and run the compaign on a local AI workstation, and used the local workstation to generate prompts they could feed into burner accounts on public services like ChatGPT and Claude. But they got lazy and ran the *whole* operation in ChatGPT, right in plain fiew of the OpenAI compliance teams the ToS they evidently didn't read would have told them were there. They even did *performance reviews* in the same account.

Remember folks, these "spooks" are just mid-level paper-pushers in an opaque communist bureacuracy. You can never discount inertia in such an environment. Because this was something new, they might even have had trouble getting the purchase of some high end GPUs approved.

MSI is releasing new AMD AM4 boards, that use older DDR4 RAM, supposedly to leverage lower DDR4 prices.

A quick glance across Amazon and Newegg, it may be too late.

MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis — AM4 emerges as the unexpected hero with RAM prices skyrocketing

I don't hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won't fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn't be let anywhere near power.

The ultimate billionaire plan, once a few thousand folks are able to run the world through data agents and robotics, they'll outlaw poverity with a sentance of death if found guilty?

Well, no. It's true you can't buy books for the purposes of scanning them *and then making them available online* (Hachette v. Internet Archive). Scanning them for AI training is not settled law in every Federal District, although in at least one that has been ruled transformative and therefore allowable (Bartz v Anthropic, Northern District of California).

Anthropic famously bought a lot of copyrighted books and scanned them to ingest into its model training corpus. Arguably they aren't violating copyright because what they are doing is *transformative* -- turning words into a statistical map of word associations.

But what China is doing by inferring the structure of that map doesn't touch on *any* kind of intellectual property of Anthropics. Sure, the map is a trade secret, but they've exposed that trade secret through their public interface. It's not human created so it's not copyrightable. Even if that map were patentable, which it probably isn't, it's not patented.

The worst you can say is that China is violating the service's terms of service, which may have no legal force there.

With business, there's always the fear that 'the other guy' has figured out something you have not.

Use people to power AI datacenters?

As a lifelong cyclist, I agree in principle. The problem is over the last seventy-five years we have rearchitected the very geographic fabric of society to make *solving* our transportation problems with bike and public transit impossible.

Before WW2, Dad would leave the apartment and walk or take a trolley to work (usually in the same city neighborhood) while Ma "kept house" -- managed cooking, clearning, childcare, and the family's community and social engagement. In the 1950s and 60s, instead of an apartment, it'd be a suburban house. Ma would drop Pa off at the kiss and ride.

Today Mom and Dad both have jobs they have to get to, usually in *different* suburban employment areas; they can locate to make the commute easy for one, but they keep changing jobs every couple of years while their long-term wealth is being put into a geographically fixed asset: their house. They are financially anchored to their house as their jobs move around the region.

Car-dependency is baked into the very fabric of society, in a way you can't fix with transportation policy or projects--not without decades of projects. But we have reached the limits of the car-dependency model; we can't fix traffic by adding marginal car capacity as has been repeatedly demonstrated by freeway projects that fail to fix traffic because we're in an equillibrium between commute times and job selection.

Transit and bike infrastructure won't fix this, but they *can* make marginal improvements in the traffic situation by taking cars off the road for the minority of people who can use these alternatives at this particular point in their lives. I think e-bikes are going to be key. I personally wouldn't consider a ten mile commute by bike on roads shared with cars a barrier to commuting by bike, but most people wouldn't attempt it. E-bikes on bike infrastructure can make a ten mile commute practical for *normal* people, and take a significant number of cars off congested roads. Public transit could help, but again in a marginal, opportunistic way. In Europe or the US Northeast where car-dependency was overlaid on existing dense urban fabrics, there's a lot of opportunity for major transit projects. But for American cities in the West which have *no* center of mass to build around, solving car-dependency is likely a Moon-shot level project.

Well, that's one hypothesis. However since they saw a significant difference in the population where the social media apps were removed, then if your hypothesis is true, the data would suggest that delivering the service as a native app rather than a web app must have some harmful effect in itself. An alternative hypothesis is that their application usage patterns changed when the apps were removed.

It's not altogether far fetched that web-delivered apps have a different psychological effect than native smartphone apps, because native smartphone apps have greater access to the system for tracking and notifications. Native apps also offer different features than their web versions. This is why I use Facebook via a browser, because the Facebook native app is insufferably intrusive, constantly trying to get your attention. It means, however, I can't use Facebook's chat function.

Ooh, Self-Burn.
Those are rare.

They buy up a type of business and then it become's middle management's job to justify their section or local by meeting or failing quarterly numbers. Upper management then demonstrates their employability by cutting locations and 'improving the bottom line'.

The same thing has been happening in the US, with chains of restaurants and retail stores going under.

Fuck the corporations.

One of the early internet scams (I mean ads) I saw was for audifile dynamic/brilliant pebbles that would [wave hands in mystic circles] improve sound. Somehow.

Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate