Once a brain has the opportunity to idle, it will develop further.

Happy Singularity, everyone!

That'll show all those Californians who put Trump in power! A boycott on Californian products will of course anger Trump since he loves California so much /s

In case you're not paying attention, he's illegally withholding funding to California and other blue states because they didn't support him. But hey, California is part of America, so boycott away. Just remember there are many entire states of people on your side and opposed to this horrible bullshit.

You don't have that freedom if you can be legally punished for it. That's like saying you CAN shoot a cop, I just don't recommend it but you have that choice :)

You can't lie about your identity when legally detained and ID'd.

Destroying something law enforcement believes is evidence in that moment is literally Obstruction of Justice, and destroying evidence is literally a crime specifically for that reason. There really isn't much grey area here.

Dude, this has been settled case law for centuries. If it weren't, literally all customs inspections at the border would be illegal under Federal law absent an individually-signed search warrant.

You're free to do whatever you want to your own data (subject to previous judicial order), but the moment a legitimate authority -- whether state or local law enforcement or a Federal agency like Customs and Border Control -- indicates that your data/property is subject to search or review, destroying such data is literal obstruction and will get you as much of a charge as if you flushed evidence away while a cop was asking for it.

If the LEO or agency is overstepping their bounds, once you've been put on notice that you're the subject of an investigation the proper remedy is judicial review and a lawsuit. You don't get to #resist, and you certainly don't get to blow up your phone just because someone taught you this One Weird Trick.

Have fun in jail, bro.

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

Maybe they'll pay a consultant to tell them to get rid of the smelly foot logo. But seriously, why not give money to another quasi-German DE that's actually good? You know, the more popular and intuitive KDE?

I'm in my 40s and started on nightmare because I was just showing it someone, but I made progress and kept saving and now I'm on the 4th level! You'll be fine, try it out, it's fun! It's just quake 1 ai and not cheating multiplayer zoomers lol

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?