Just because the local drunkard becomes violent every evening after his drinks doesn't mean you can become used to him.

The french Rafale uses a positioning system by matching pictures of the ground using AI and pattern matching. Of course when in or above the clouds it uses something else... Auto star matching can be had as a cheap add-on for amateur telescopes nowadays.

I recently bought a dumb car: no advanced functions whatsoever. It's a stick shift. The wipers or the head beams don't change automagically. It just beeps when I reverse (no screen). You change the radio or the volume with a knob. Etc...
And yet, it has a button for vocal commands, without a peep about it in the manual. I have no idea what it's capable of, I've tried to get it to change radio and it kinda works, but can I tell it to drive to Moscow by itself ? Or warn me about cops along the road ? Or search my connected phone ? NO IDEA.
It's the same with all those 'agents'. They'll work in some cases, but in many cases you'll assume so but they won't do a thing or wail silently or spectacularly.

Yeah. The NSA's job should be to identify and secure vulnerabilities in US computer infrastructure in a general sense. Find weaknesses in proprietary software and force them to patch it. Find weaknesses in open source software and fix it. Find weaknesses in servers or general public botnets and force them to fix it of shut them down. Etc. Only in cases where the weaknesses are identified on foreign (i.e. ennemy, not allies, but who am I kidding) software or servers, should it be exploited by another spooky branch of gov.

Yes but it takes a *lot* of time to rebuilt a proper and full ecosystem, possibly millions of years. In the meanwhile you end up with a desert, or areas covered with just weeds and very few animals.

Aren't there plenty of stories of rich fucks who pay people to go take exams in place of their kids too tired from their frat parties ? Too few got caught.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I DO NOT WANT THAT ! There's not enough light pollution yet ? We can't see stars or galaxies anymore from most of the western world. Animals need the night to rest or to hunt. Plants need the night to complete their respiratory / photosynthesis cycle.

I like the way he writes, but the story itself in Hyperion is full of plot holes and 'magical' happenings. One book I really liked by him is Phases of Gravity, about an aging Apollo astronaut. It's not SF but I enjoyed it. Anyway, RIP to a good author.

Donald, is that you ? Go back to the White House.

Oh man, they read this here and then decided to implement the Torment Nexus... It's well worth reading by the way.

I tried to sell and give away some stuff (car equipment) on ebay recently (I've had an account for over 25 years but rarely use it). After a week my 15 posts had number of cumulated views of 0. ZERO. How is that possible ?!? Apparently if you put a start price of 1$ or put up stuff for free, now they simply don't want to show your postings because they won't make enough money off of it I guess. I couldn't even find them by searching the exact text of the title.
They'd rather become some disorganized and random version of Amazon...

Enshittification, yeah.

I mean, in the old days they would be looking for incriminating paper documents stored in stacks of paper. But nowadays, how does it work ? They get there and it's all logged-off computers with accounts in the cloud, or a couple local servers with encrypted hard-drives. Can they (in Japan, or the US, or Europe) force the employees to type in their passwords so they can copy the files present in their accounts ?

I find Linux great on old hardware. I'm writing this on a 13yo laptop that works wonders for anything: image processing, video editing, servers, etc... And all the family computers are second-hand systems wiped with Linux. Do things ever get removed from kernels in the sense that you just can't upgrade distro/kernel anymore ? I mean, yeah, 8-bit and 16-bit CPUs got removed a while back, but besides that ?

Well, yes, you can predict it'll turn into a circus !

My guess (and that's all it is) is that me descended from apes who use their shoulders to climb trees. Since few people climb things nowadays (except for rock climbers), shoulders are not meant to only carry a fork to your mouth to turn the wheel of the car, so potential problems are not selected against.