My understanding is that individuals generally don't apply to be Delivery Service Partners, it seems more like a business-to-business arrangement. You might be thinking of Amazon Flex.

They probably can trick enough individuals into driving for Amazon Flex, even at a bad deal. These areas have plenty of people with large vehicles and little income.

China's interested in developing AI systems. They may not be as interested in constructing a financial illusion (bubble) surrounding it. It's that part which leads to gross inefficiencies like one company buying up half of global memory production.

So that's why why my Windows PIN shat itself a few days ago.

Luckily my internet was working, so Windows was at least able to send a ping out to Microsoft Authenticator to approve my sign-in. Last time Windows Hello shat itself, Xfinity was having an outage, and that left me with no way to log into my computer until the internet came back.

For those of you still grandfathered in with local accounts, this will be your future too, before long.

It's mandatory for them because there is so much AI slop now it's starting to infect their data sets. Facebook doesn't give a shit about the quality of their advertising because no matter how many bots there are people keep buying the ads. But the advertising is only about 1/3 of their revenue 2/3 of it is selling data to brokers and law enforcement.

There is so much AI slop and it is so sophisticated it's becoming difficult to keep it out of their data sets and that's gradually making the data sets useless.

So they are going to force complete tracking under the guise of think of the children so that they and they alone know who is a bot and who isn't. As an added bonus is also means that they can effectively and easily figure out who is a person and use their data to train llms.

AI slop is basically an existential threat to these companies because at the end of the day they do need to know who is and isn't a real user and they need to be able to do that quickly and effectively. So mandatory age verification is the way to go.

Your privacy is completely irrelevant. And frankly I think it's irrelevant to most people here. Everyone will talk about how important privacy and internet and anonymity is but when it comes time to vote a dozen other issues come first often pretty stupid ones.

So Mark Zuckerberg can go around buying up laws and there really isn't anything we can do about it because voters prioritize other things.

Probably humanoid robots, it's already happening in China:

https://jingdaily.com/posts/ch...

Taxes made them successful. We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This created a use it or lose it mentality among businesses because they couldn't just pocket all the money themselves because it would be taxed up the wazoo at a certain point. There were ways around taxes even back then but they weren't nearly as effective as they are now where you have billionaires paying an effective tax rate of 0%

Also stock BuyBacks used to be illegal. Stock BuyBacks mean that companies don't invest anymore they hold on to their cash so that they can do BuyBacks and pump the stock during downturn. This is exactly why stock BuyBacks were illegal for so long.

I don't think folks realize how much of a role public policy plays in their daily lives or the myriad of knock-on effects from those kind of policies. There's an idea of a chesterton's fence, which is a fence that you don't pull down unless you know damn well why it was put up. High taxes and Wall Street regulation were a classic chesterton's fence.

I worked for a company that found its roots in the original RCA labs. The boss was a stubborn guy that navigated his own course. A lot of executives came to lecture him. He relied heavily on IP and royalties which turned down a lot of customers. Evil, according to his superiors.
He made it work. 2008 economic crisis hit. Contracts halved. We ran mostly on royalties for that year. Little to do, so he encouraged us to do research. Anything. A lot of BS came out of it, but also a small gem here and there that would later be useful and one thing became a product.
Moved to a company that did not have royalty income. Most projects were fixed cost, meaning sales people had to hunt for contracts to keep the pipeline filled. Once heard the boss say: "We never have exactly the right amount of projects. I prefer too much projects instead of one too few." My god, what did they drag in when things went slow. Overpromissing our capabilities, impossible projects, unrealistic deadlines, ... The worst part? They were actually the nice guys. Other companies did far worse. It was an eye opener. Lot of crap companies out there hunting for money, predator style, little care for the product.
Anyway, no time to optimize work flows, no time to research and criticize obviously flawed procedures, just get the job done in the specified amount of days or else... The fun part? We were pretty good compared to our competitors. Only mediocre compared to the best though.
The bad part? I noticed that companies that did their due diligence, usually were unable to finish or sell their product. It usually got cancelled. The sloppy ones? They sold their junk successfully. I observed too few projects to make it significant, but the pattern was there.
Successful business? It is not a straight line, I can tell you that.

Not sure why rsilvergun is targeted here. I probably am missing context, but... if you cannot afford it, you are still allowed to voice that.
I can afford these things, but I very much enjoy giving deprecated hardware a new life. There are a ton of cheap options out there. My man cave uses an old core duo, donated to me by people who wanted me to buy them a new machine. Programming, controlling my electronics lab equipment, ... It does a great job on only 4gb of RAM. There are decades worth of old games out there that you can play for free on terrible cheap hardware. Cannot afford a playstation 5? Go for a playstation 4, or 3. When the 3 came out, we were all in awe. Look for a used options, with games!
Want state of the art? Want to be cool? Want to be part of the newest hype? Pay up. No mercy. Stop complaining. You are spoiled brats throwing a tantrum because you are detoxing from getting what you want instantly.
I come from a time when space invaders and test drive were awesome. These games run on any raspberry pi. Kids these days...
Look... I got the same lecture in the 80s. My grandfather was talking to me about how he only had a ball as a toy. He was exaggerating, but not much. He could spinn it on his finger tip, he could throw it far and accurate. Took care of it, fixed it, ... It is all a matter of creativity. Now go fetch a few branches out of the wood and do something with them. Made a bird house with my son yesterday. Save the 900$ for petrol, or take one for the team. Buy one and enjoy it with friends. I could go on for ages... Really getting old. ;-)

"I love the smell of iron oxide in the morning!"

GitHub apparently has dropped below 90% uptime and it's very likely because they are using AI slop to write important code and it doesn't work.

It's a huge problem but there isn't really a solution.

It's not a question of if it's going to be mandated it's when. And we will suck it down because we are nerds and nerds lean towards the libertarian side and it's the libertarian types that are pushing this from the top down.

Specifically Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted because AI slop is starting to infest his data sources that he sells for money.

All this age verification bullshit is just Zuckerberg and other billionaire types getting out ahead of the AI slop apocalypse so that they can continue to have access to training data that can be tracked back to real humans, so that they can slightly improve the value of their advertising products, and most importantly of all so that they can continue to monitor all of us and gather all our sweet sweet data without the data set rendered completely worthless by slop.

We will let them do it because folks are easily distracted by other issues when it comes to fighting for privacy or other consumer rights.

The 900 though is for the higher end option. Still you're looking at $600 for a PS5 with a disk drive now. If I'm comparing that to something like the Sega Genesis or super Nintendo that is more than either of them launched at adjusted for inflation let alone what they cost at this point.

It bugs me cuz it kind of feels like people who aren't well off are getting cut off from what used to be one of the few affordable hobbies. Yeah you could play Old hardware but it's hard to find players on old games... And playing newer games as part of the hobby.

And of course you have to know about those games. It's hard to be a dumb kid and we were all a dumb kid at some point and you're not necessarily going to be able to find that cool game that a bunch of people are playing...

They did it overnight. It was done across all retailers so it was coordinated. I doubt you can find a retailer that isn't selling it for the increased price now even though obviously it's the same old stock that you could have bought last week for $100 or $150 cheaper.

It's amazing how quick they can reprice things to screw us consumers over.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.

Criminalizing drugs completely changes us politics. We learned a long time ago that the reason drugs were criminalized was so that the right wing could go after the left wing because statistically working class people are more likely to take drugs. Nixon's people came out and just admitted it because they felt guilty. The entire purpose of the drug war was and always is political.

Because of that you are never going to see things like this used properly and legalized which is a shame because psychedelics have been shown repeatedly to be a game changer for people with post traumatic stress disorder. And there are a lot of people with PTSD beyond soldiers.

The catch is that for it to work you need to do it under Dr supervision generally. You need someone there who can carefully guide you through the process. Just dropping a tab of acid isn't usually going to work. So by criminalizing it an entire group of people whose lives could be transformed or just left out in the cold. But compared to the billions and billions of dollars that can be made using the drug war to win elections that's a small price to pay.

And of course because we have been conditioned to view talk about politics as dirty anytime you bring this up you're guaranteed to piss everybody off. It is no coincidence that you are conditioned not to talk about your salary with your coworkers or your political beliefs.

Fun fact the reason rural towns tend to be right wing is because there is usually one extremely wealthy landowner who runs the show and if you deviate slightly from orthodoxy then he's the only employer in town and he runs the church and everything else and you're basically persona non grata.

I bring it up because it's another way that the discussion and debate in our country is locked down to the benefit of people who do not have your best interests at heart