All the AI co's need to monetize. Those investors are not spending a trillion out of the goodness of their hearts. Expect many more free to paid and pay to pay more announcements.

Sure. Just a reminder, back in the old days, before the NLRB forced owners and unions to negotiate in good faith... Factories and warehouses burned to the ground during labor disputes, people were beaten and killed.

Desperate people do desperate things when they feel they have nothing left to lose.

There's always someone to bitch over something so trivially insignificant.

This will help push FOSS gaming and community driven self-hosting of gameservers back towards mainstream. And that's a good thing.

None of it is for this war. It is in addition to the special appropriation he has requested to pay for this war. The 1.5 TRILLION DOLLARS is for the next war(s) that he is planning to drag us into.

200 Billion?! that's nothing...

Trump has requested a 1.5 TRILLION dollar War (Defense) Department budget for 2027. That is a 500 BILLION increase over the 1 TRILLION dollar Defense Department budget he requested for 2026.

He has proposed a 10% reduction in domestic services budgets (Veterans, Medicare, Housing, Infrastructure, Parks, etc.) -amounting to 73 BILLION dollars to go along with it.

"It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things, they can do it on a state basis," the president said, adding that the focus should be on "military protection".

Analogies with the human brain don't work that well. In our case, every time we remember we rewrite that memory, altering it from slightly, to a lot, to completely. AI systems' baseline memory is read-only; it doesn't change during reuse, so it can be equated more with the way saving a PNG into a JPEG is still a direct derivative copy of the PNG content, no matter whether one cranks the compression up so the resulting image becomes way blurrier than the original. Being blurry doesn't make it not a copy. And, in being a copy, legal copying rights apply.

Now, if AI memory startes changing globally every single time it receives a request from any source, no matter how many sessions or API calls are happening, so that any new subsequent call is dealing with that altered memory and in turn altering it, so that its entire memory space is in constant flux, and there's no snapshotting to roll its state back to previous configurations, so they don't act as mere static lossy compressors, then it becomes an analog of a human brain with human-like memory, at which point accusing it of simply making derivative copies cannot be done anymore without also accusing humans.

The problem with that, evidently, is that when they start working like that, since they're functioning exactly as real persons do, they too become persons, with legitimate claim to personhood and to personal rights. Which is a legal can of worms no one wants to deal with.

They did, but it's never too late to cheapen how they're current stuff is produced.

Still, I think they know all too well that mainframe is "stuck" doing it the way they always have done it.

You can watch actual live streams of cabinet meetings. It is just a bunch of people going around the table kissing his ass. No one providing any real advice or information. It is a performance.

I think one of the problems for overweight people is the sheer availability of food, and bad food too. I've yet to go to any event like a fair, game, amusement park, ... that is serving steamed vege's for people to snack on. Nope, they come up with really crazy stuff like deep fat fried butter. Or hot dogs, or french fries, ... All high calorie. It would be like if we offered booze and drugs up at every opportunity. Granted booze if probably offered a bit more often then it should but I've yet to see a public event offering up opiates for sale with big signs.

I suggest:

First offence: Have to watch CSPAN for 5 hours a day, for a week, without sleeping through it - evidence to be provided in court

Second offence: Have to sing Miley Cyrus songs and Baby Shark on TikTok - sober

Third offence: License to practice and all memberships of country clubs and golf courses revoked

I've seen people with dogs that you can just put food down and they eat until they are full. My dogs have been hounds and that does NOT work. My current hound can find bunnies in the back yard as have all my previous ones. You try to watch for it, but bunny moms must think it is a fenced yard so more secure from predators I guess. Mom forgets about the predator that comes out from the back door. Perhaps the overweight one has the better nose?

VPN usage can be detected via deep packet inspection, as China shows. In China, the government is aware of all VPN usage and lets it slip, or blocks it, as they see fit. In Xinjiang they even went after VPN users to demand look into their mobile devices to check whether they had forbidden content there, not due to need but as an intimidation tactic, an explicit "we know who you are, and where to find you" warning to all inhabitants so they wouldn't feel empowered by the mere fact the government is allowing them to use VPNs.

The UK and other countries are looking into regulating VPNs by demanding that VPN providers also age-verify users. Those who don't will be formally fined, as the UK is trying to fine 4chan despite being unable to collect, and blocked, which is feasible. Evidently, VPN developers keep improving their protocols to make them more and more indistinguishable, but DPI also improves in return. It'll be a cat-and-mouse game as the one I described in my answer to the other reply, until using an unlicensed VPN provider becomes so aggravating that most will give up.

And, important tidbit, China resells its Great Firewall tech to any country interested. Right now, only dictatorships and illiberal democracies buy it, but if VPN tech improves faster than national age-verification legal bodies can keep up with via their own locally developed DPI solutions, they too may start purchasing it.

I was into climbing and moutaineering in my teens. I clearly remember when climbing an 8k mountain actually meant something and doing it proved you were an experienced hardcore expedition climber. Everest today is such a joke and farce that I'd be embarrassed to brag of even attempt a summit. They should just install a Via Ferratta, stairs and bridges all the way to the summit and be done with it. That would actually make sense, given the state of things we've reached. They have actual traffic effing jams at the summit and the rainbow flank is littered with the dead bodies of dimwitts taken out by Darwin. It's called "rainbow flank" because of all the colored jackets of the dead.

Just build a staircase, ask an obscene fee to pay for it and void all insurance for anyone who goes above 5500 meters. Problem solved.

What I think is happening is that governments all around the world are seeing Big Wars brewing on the horizon, and preparing by having extensive media control mechanisms in place for when those turn into reality.

See, one thing a country must do to have a chance of winning a war, or at least not losing it badly, is to have a population strongly aligned with the war effort. That alignment, in turn, needs the population to be fed, and to believe in, all the propaganda the government puts out about how the war is going. Conversely, the enemy country tries to undermine that with counter-propaganda to reduce the other side's morale.

Back when a small group of media companies produced information, it was easy to control the flow of information for propaganda purposes. With the Internet that doesn't work, both propaganda, counter-propaganda, and opinions that are neither and go against both, flow in all directions. That's great when things are peaceful, and everyone is just having fun, doing business with everyone else, and arguing about minor grievances, or even major ones but that don't lead to existential risks. But it's very, very bad when you need to win serious wars.

So my take is that everyone but the kitchen sink is using age verification to install the infrastructure needed for full-on control of information flow, using youth outrage to learn the bypass mechanisms the most engaged will find and use, and then closing those loopholes one by one, until only a tiny minority is able to do so. Then, if (when) the wars come, a flip of the switch will enable similar strict limits on everyone. And propaganda can then work as expected.

If that's the case, we'll see governments doubling and tripling down on it, no matter the costs to corporations. These will either adapt or adapt. Those who refuse, too bad for them, and for us who'd prefer otherwise.