Is this something you do often?

No, it's pretty much one day a year (but usually several times on that day): spring cleanup (though my smizmar and I call it "truck day" (*)).

It's uncompostable/tainted yard waste, even furniture (if it's in truly horrible shape), and all sorts of other random trashy shit. When it happens, the amount of resulting trash is many times the size of our trash bin or what can even be put on on the curb for "large item pickup." The usual weekly process is overwhelmed and can't handle it; there simply isn't room. So we haul it.

* "Truck day" because I decided paying $72 to rent U-haul's big pickup truck for a few hours is preferable to paying $72k to buy a big pickup truck. And it usually gets used for more than just dumping trash; it's often a large-item shopping day too. (To be next decade's trash? Don't ask!)

Goddamn it! What's with this ticket about the CSV import being broken?!

We need to force these computers to join Psi Corps and obey their rules!

D'oh, but DarkOx, I actually do agree with you on something: the license plates are there and they're visible in public. We don't need Flock to have our privacy compromised; everyone can do it.

We haven't denied our adversaries the capability; we're just trying to regulate their good intentions. That strategy doesn't work.

Flock is the symptom not the disease. People either need to demand anonymity and insist we stop displaying things like plates at all, and actually limit public photography, or just accept we will be tracked everywhere. There is no middle ground to be had.

Indeed. We seem pretty conflicted about that, so we're getting the worst of both worlds.

A lot of people are intentionally commiting crimes of various severity and they don't actually want police to have a more effective enforcement tool

This set of people is dwarfed into insignificance be non-criminals who are also being caught on camera. And the problem with that isn't false positives, it's true positives: non-criminal John Doe's car was spotted at a certain place at a certain time, so let's make that fact available on the market. That way, we can target him with ads, increase his insurance premiums, let his wife's PI know what neighborhood he had lunch in, let assassins when he's home, and let burglars (or his wife's rapist) know when he's not home.

The sheer amount of not-quite-what-consumers-need RAM that is going to be auctioned after the AI companies' bankruptcies will be unprecedented. Remember we're literally talking about an amount equal to what the entire consumer market was using. It's going to be a few years worth of the entire RAM manufacturing industry!

The scale of not-quite-right RAM we're going to see, makes me imagine (warning: red flag for talking out my ass) consumer motherboards specifically made for the mountains of weirdly-packaged cheap-but-fast-as-fuck RAM at hyperscale data center auctions. We'd end up calling them "AI bankruptcy rigs" or something like that. Yes, they'll perform differently (more throughput than you need, more latency than you want), but it still ought to be usable. IGPs usually included, I suspect.

And they will just be a product of the times; ten years later no one would want one and bankruptcy rigs would be seen as odd late-2020s relics; the lemonade from Sam Altman's lemon industry. It would be a dead-end tech. But during those late 2020s? Could be a neat-o opportunity.

Is the person who ignored Pelosi in the room with you right now?

Back in the teens we found a couple of instances where political actors were encouraging people to install screen savers or cryptocurrency wallets that turned their phones into reverse proxies. This was thought to be specifically for the sake of giving hostile foreign operations (read: Russia) access to U.S. domestic politics.

The fact that smart TVs are facilitating this is just ... we're going to need home networks that treat IoT stuff as different than our actual systems.

Oh, wait, TP-Link had well over half the U.S. router market, but they're getting banned over national security concerns?

Maybe there's a market for a router with traffic accounting as a service so one can see what's happening?

This is why the only device in my house with internet is a Roku. I simply will not tolerate the rest of that invasive junk.

The call centers are going to be decimated ... but so will the AI replacements meant to talk to humans.

I have a number of issues this morning that require calls. First, deal with PG&E about changing the billing for my new house. The I need to talk to my bank about banning Google from ever billing me again. I absolutely HATE changing doctors, but had to do it, because getting to Antioch, then into the city, is just ridiculous from here, so it's time for first appointment.

I would love to be able to just give Claude a list of administrivia like that and let it plow through the work. I see progress on agent related billing, I see Cloudflare doing stuff for an internet dominated by agents ... everyone in the industrialized world is going to have an AI adjutant to handle this stuff. I really hope the old military term "dog robber" gets revived as a way to describe them.

There's an obvious bubble, the circular dealings among the large core players are an enormous red flag.

The frontier labs are in the same position that DEC and Sun Microsystems were in the 1990s, as consumer hardware running Linux began to displace them. There will be ups and downs, but the trend is unavoidable.

The productivity gains are not there, AI is great for coding, some customer service is working, but the "50% of all white collar workers" that the frontier labs thought was good positioning last year 1) ain't gonna work but it did 2) infuriate the managerial class.

The frontier labs got away with it, thus far, in part because of concerns over the arrival of artificial general intelligence, which occupies a similar niche to nuclear weapons in the minds of policy makers. We ARE seeing frontier models escaping and attacking others, there ARE hazards, but it's nothing like what was imagined.

And the open models plus wild talent are as much a danger as wild talent was all on its own.

The frontier labs are like the coyote in that last moment when he's windmilling wildly, but not falling yet.

Someone needs to launch a national campaign educating people on jury nullification.

The property damage laws are not really the sort of thing nullification is meant for, it's supposed to quickly put an end to the effect of bad laws, but if that's the one tool handy, and it's this much of a social issue, it should be put to work.

Because filtering the training data is so much harder than just having them swim through the internet swallowing everything, like whales eating krill.

This "AI" seems to be severely lacking in training, in that no superior/invincible force (e.g. a party simulating law enforcement) showed up and demonstrated the downside to taking certain actions.

The duress deletion function was always obviously and transparently going to get treated as obstruction of justice issue the minute it got used in a high profile case. Here we are.

If you don't want to have trouble at the border, wipe your devices before you get anywhere near, and restore them once you are across. The precursors to this event have been in the news for years - the border is a legal gray zone, act accordingly.

I have mixed feeling here - sad for this kid, whomever he may be. Once again annoyed at the activist/NGO world for not training up to the point they can dodge this *easily* avoided problem. And I'm leaning forward in anticipation of being able to point and laugh at any crypto enthusiasts who make comically implausible arguments about these simple facts.

WIPE YOUR DEVICES BEFORE CROSSING THE BORDER.

Is that clear enough?

Dammit, can't anyone make some stylish cyber-shoes? That looks like shit! Anyone who goes around upskirt-snapping with shoes like that, is going to get laughed out of the ballroom by all the snobs.